Elgin was born in Beauty Wyoming, one of the more beautiful places one could be born in this world.  The name on his birth certificate was Elgin Campbell Chalmers IV, though there were no Elgin Campbell or for that matter Chalmers in his family history.  His father who may not have remembered his own real name, thought it was a great name and a bit of a joke. 

Elgin’s mother walked out when he was twelve, never to be heard from again.  From that time on he lived with his father in an old Airstream camper, on the Split S ranch during the summer and on the edge of Beauty the local ‘big town’ on the end of Black Sky lake, during the winter.  His father, one fourth Native American, was constantly fighting the local tribal council for ‘his’ cut of the tribes take from Beauty’s Casino and Tourist industry, spending most winters writing long rambling letters to various people, papers, officials, offices and NGO’s about his terrible plight. Never to any avail.

On Elgin’s sixteenth birthday he left his father drunk on the lean-to porch of the Airstream in the morning to catch the school bus.  He returned to find his old man dead of a massive coronary, his father had been a week less than forty.

After that Elgin was taken care of by an until then unknown network of cousins among the locals, quite a few nearly full blooded indians, among whom the blond, blue-eyed Elgin looked out-of-place.  He was never much trouble though he often hung with the local hooligans.  And though a ‘good looking boy’ and reasonably ‘common sensed’ he was never a good student or a hard worker, though neither lazy or dishonest. 

And so Elgin drifted into life.  At thirty two Elgin lived in the Airstream he’d ‘inherited’ from his father and worked at the ranch job at the Split S he’d also inherited.  He wasn’t exactly a drunk, or a pot head, but he wasn’t sober much of the time away from the ranch.  His only companion was a huge cat called Humphrey, who looked like a somewhat chunky Siamese grown to the size of a small German Shepard. Humf had an appropriate Siamese/GerShep cross bad-tempered arrogance that would have gotten him shot long ago except for Elgin.

Elgin knew he was a waste of oxygen most days and a disappointment to his family, such as it was, but didn’t let it bother him, unless he had a really bad drunk.  The November of his thirty-second year, in the grips of a particularly bad one, he rode into mountains on a Friday afternoon.  Ignoring the oncoming wall of clouds that promised an early snowstorm. 

Saturday, half-frozen and still drunk he drove his horse out of the safety of the cavern he’d camped in, out into the snow and ice.  An hour later the horse slipped and threw Elgin down a rocky precipice into a shallow stream.  Unconscious, with one arm and both legs broken Elgin drowned in six inches of ice-cold water.

It was only then that things started looking up.

Sorry…couldn’t resist, that’s the intro to one of the othe options….which is also a sci fi fantasy as I think you can tell…