The legend of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is well known. Billy’s death on that hot summer night in New Mexico Territory, 1881, is firmly cemented into American mythology. But now, the true story behind the legend is finally being told. A story more shocking than ever imagined. What brought Pat Garrett to Fort Sumner on the very night Billy returned from months on the run? Was it fate, or something more? Something so unseemly it was kept a secret for
over 100 years.
Director Stephen Savage and producer Galina Leinen have uncovered the strange thread that linked Billy to his own death, and brought the story of that link to the screen in the film “The Hunter’s Moon”.
Deluvina, the beautiful Navajo girl they call “Pat Garrett’s Witch”, is said to have the ability to read the future in a deck of poker cards. A rumor well perpetuated by Pat Garrett, who thrills at the idea of watching fearless outlaws and lawmen alike squirm in their seats as Deluvina reads their cards, revealing to them the exact day they will meet their demise. They come from hundreds of miles away to hear their fate. Names such as Jessie James, Buffalo Bill, even Wyatt Earp, ride into Lincoln County to have their fortunes told by the strange but haunting Indian girl.
Billy The Kid is no exception. The only difference is, Billy refuses to take Deluvina’s prediction of his own death lying down. Knowing that Garrett has left Deluvina in the care of her sometime guardian, Pete Maxwell, Billy rides to Pete’s saloon in Fort Sumner, hoping that a second reading will produce a different outcome from the one Deluvina laid out for him weeks before. Is this the night Billy will die? Or is a man’s fate his own to control, and not subject to the whim of a random deal? Are Deluvina’s predictions authentic, or just the springboard of self- fulfilling prophesy strung along by Garrett’s own sick obsession?
Parlor tricks, or the visions of a true clairvoyant? Only Deluvina knows the answers to these questions. And Billy is about to find out that some things are better left unknown. And when it comes to dealing death, there is no one faster on the draw than that dark gunslinger known as Destiny.
