The Revenant

by Michael Punke

  Fitzgerald moved spryly for someone his size, pouncing to pin his knee against the chest of the gasping, bleeding man. He put the skinning knife to Anderson’s throat. “You want to go join your brother?” Fitzgerald pressed the knife so that the blade drew a thin line of blood.

  “Fitzgerald,” Glass said in an even but authoritative tone. “That’s enough.”

  Fitzgerald looked up. He contemplated an answer to Glass’s challenge, while noting with satisfaction the ring of men that now surrounded him, witnesses to Anderson’s pathetic position. Better to claim victory, he decided. He’d see to Glass another day. Fitzgerald removed the blade from Anderson’s throat and rammed the knife into the beaded sheath on his belt. “Don’t start things you can’t finish, Anderson. Next time I’ll finish it for you.”

  Captain Andrew Henry pushed his way through the circle of spectators. He grabbed Fitzgerald from behind and ripped him backward, pushing him hard into the embankment. “One more fight and you’re out, Fitzgerald.” Henry pointed beyond the perimeter of the camp to the distant horizon. “If you’ve got an extra store of piss you can go try making it on your own.”

  The captain looked around him at the rest of the men. “We’ll cover forty miles tomorrow. You’re wasting time if you’re not asleep already. Now, who’s taking first watch?” No one stepped forward. Henry’s eyes came to rest on the boy, oblivious to the commotion. Henry took a handful of determined steps to the crumpled form. “Get up, Bridger.”

  The boy sprang up, wide-eyed as he grasped, bewildered, for his gun. The rusted trading musket had been an advance on his salary, along with a yellowed powder horn and a handful of flints.

  “I want you a hundred yards downstream. Find a high spot along the bank. Pig, the same thing upstream. Fitzgerald, Anderson—you’ll take the second watch.”

  Fitzgerald had stood watch the night before. For a moment it appeared he would protest the distribution of labor. He thought better of it, sulking instead to the edge of the camp. The boy, still disoriented, half stumbled across the rocks that spilled along the river’s edge, disappearing into the cobalt blackness that encroached on the brigade.

  The man they called “Pig” was born Phineous Gilmore on a dirt-poor farm in Kentucky. No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human. Even the trappers, who placed no particular premium on cleanliness, did their best to keep Pig downwind. After hoisting himself slowly to his feet, Pig slung his rifle over his shoulder and ambled upstream.

  Less than an hour passed before the daylight receded completely. Glass watched as Captain Henry returned from a nervous check of the sentries. He picked his way by moonlight among the sleeping men, and Glass realized that he and Henry were the only men awake. The captain chose the ground next to Glass, leaning against his rifle as he eased his large frame to the ground. Repose took the weight off his tired feet, but failed to relieve the pressure he felt most heavily.

  “I want you and Black Harris to scout tomorrow,” said Captain Henry. Glass looked up, disappointed that he could not respond to the beckoning call of sleep.

  “Find something to shoot in late afternoon. We’ll risk a fire.” Henry lowered his voice, as if making a confession. “We’re way behind, Hugh.” Henry gave every indication that he intended to talk for a while. Glass reached for his rifle. If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well tend his weapon. He had doused it in a river crossing that afternoon and wanted to apply fresh grease to the trigger works.

  “Cold’ll set in hard by early December,” continued the captain. “We’ll need two weeks to lay in a supply of meat. If we’re not on the Yellowstone before October we’ll have no fall hunt.”

  If Captain Henry was racked by internal doubt, his commanding physical presence betrayed no infirmity. The band of leather fringe on his deerskin tunic cut a swath across his broad shoulders and chest, remnants of his former profession as a lead miner in the Saint Genevieve district of Missouri. He was narrow at the waist, where a thick leather belt held a brace of pistols and a large knife. His breeches were doeskin to the knee, and from there down red wool. The captain’s pants had been specially tailored in St. Louis and were a badge of his wilderness experience. Leather provided excellent protection, but wading made it heavy and cold. Wool, by contrast, dried quickly and retained heat even when wet.

  If the brigade he led was motley, Henry at least drew satisfaction from the fact they called him “captain.” In truth, of course, Henry knew the title was an artifice. His band of trappers had nothing to do with the military, and scant respect for any institution. Still, Henry was the only man among them to have trod and trapped the Three Forks. If title meant little, experience was the coin of the realm.

  The captain paused, waiting for acknowledgment from Glass. Glass looked up from his rifle. It was a brief look, because he had unscrewed the elegantly scrolled guard that covered the rifle’s twin triggers. He cupped the two screws carefully in his hand, afraid of dropping them in the dark.

  The glance sufficed, enough to encourage Henry to continue. “Did I ever tell you about Drouillard?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “You know who he was?”

  “George Drouillard—Corps of Discovery?”

  Henry nodded his head. “Lewis and Clark man, one of their best—a scout and a hunter. In 1809 he signed up with a group I led—he led, really—to the Three Forks. We had a hundred men, but Drouillard and Colter was the only ones who’d ever been there.

  “We found beaver thick as mosquitoes. Barely had to trap ’em—could go out with a club. But we ran into trouble with the Blackfeet from the start. Five men killed before two weeks was up. We had to fort up, couldn’t send out trapping parties.

  “Drouillard holed up there with the rest of us for about a week before he said he was tired of sitting still. He went out the next day and came back a week later with twenty plews.”

  Glass paid the captain his full attention. Every citizen of St. Louis knew some version of Drouillard’s story, but Glass had never heard a first-person account.

  “He did that twice, went out and came back with a pack of plews. Last thing he said before he left the third time was, ‘Third time’s charmed.’ He rode off and we heard two gunshots about half an hour later—one from his rifle and one from his pistol. Second shot must have been him shooting his horse, trying to make a barrier. That’s where we found him, behind his horse. There must have been twenty arrows between him and the horse. Blackfeet left the arrows in, wanted to send us a message. They hacked him up, too—cut off his head.”

  The captain paused again, scraping at the dirt in front of him with a pointed stick. “I keep thinking about him.”

  Glass searched for words of reassurance. Before he could say anything the captain asked, “How long do you figure this river’s gonna keep running west?”

  Glass stared intently, now, searching for the captain’s eyes. “We’ll start making better time, Captain. We can follow the Grand for the time being. We know the Yellowstone’s north and west.” In truth, Glass had developed significant doubts about the captain. Misfortune seemed to hang on him like day-before smoke.

  “You’re right.” The captain said it and then he said it again, as if to convince himself. “Of course you’re right.”

  Though his knowledge was born of calamity, Captain Henry knew as much about the geography of the Rockies as almost any man alive. Glass, though an experienced plainsman, had never set foot on the Upper Missouri. Yet Henry found something steady and reassuring in Glass’s voice. Someone had told him that Glass had been a mariner in his youth. There was even a rumor that he’d been a prisoner of the pirate Jean Lafitte. Perhaps it was those years on the empty expanse of the high seas that left him comfortable on the featureless plain between St. Louis and the Rocky Mountains.

  “We’l
l be lucky if the Blackfeet haven’t wiped out the whole lot at Fort Union. The men I left there aren’t exactly the cream of the crop.” The captain continued now with his usual catalog of concerns. On and on into the night. Glass knew that it was enough just to listen. He looked up or grunted from time to time, but focused in the main on his rifle.

  Glass’s rifle was the one extravagance of his life, and when he rubbed grease into the spring mechanism of the hair trigger, he did so with the tender affection that other men might reserve for a wife or child. It was an Anstadt, a so-called Kentucky flintlock, made, like most of the great arms of the day, by German craftsmen in Pennsylvania. The octagonal barrel was inscribed at the base with the name of its maker, “Jacob Anstadt,” and the place of its manufacture, “Kutztown, Penn.” The barrel was short, only thirty-six inches. The classic Kentucky rifles were longer, some with barrels stretching fifty inches. Glass liked a shorter gun because shorter meant lighter, and lighter meant easier to carry. For those rare moments when he might be mounted, a shorter gun was easier to maneuver from the back of a horse. Besides, the expertly crafted rifling of the Anstadt made it deadly accurate, even without the longer barrel. A hair trigger enhanced its accuracy, allowing discharge with the lightest touch. With a full charge of 200 grains of black powder, the Anstadt could throw a .53 caliber ball nearly 200 yards.

  His experiences on the western plains had taught Glass that the performance of his rifle could mean the difference between life and death. Of course, most men in the troop had reliable weapons. It was the Anstadt’s elegant beauty that set his gun apart.

  It was a beauty that other men noticed, asking, as they often did, if they might hold the rifle. The iron-hard walnut of the stock took an elegant curve at the wrist, but was thick enough to absorb the recoil of a heavy powder charge. The butt featured a patchbox on one side and a carved cheek piece on the other. The stock turned gracefully at the butt, so that it fit against the shoulder like an appendage of the shooter’s own body. The stock was stained the deepest of browns, the last tone before black. From even a short distance, the grain of the wood was imperceptible, but on close examination, irregular lines seemed to swirl, animated beneath the hand-rubbed coats of varnish.

  In a final indulgence, the metal fittings of the rifle were silver instead of the usual brass, adorning the gun at the butt-plate, the patchbox, the trigger guard, the triggers themselves, and the cupped fittings on the ends of the ramstaff. Many trappers pounded brass studs into their rifle stocks for decoration. Glass could not imagine such a gaudy disfigurement of his Anstadt.

  Satisfied that his rifle’s works were clear, Glass returned the trigger guard to its routed groove and replaced the two screws that held it. He poured fresh powder in the pan beneath the flint, ensuring that the gun was primed to fire.

  He noticed suddenly that the camp had fallen still, and wondered vaguely when the captain had stopped talking. Glass looked toward the center of the camp. The captain lay sleeping, his body twitching fitfully. On the other side of Glass, closest to the camp’s perimeter, Anderson lay against a chunk of driftwood. No sound rose above the reassuring flow of the river.

  The sharp crack of a flintlock pierced the quiet. It came from downstream—from Jim Bridger, the boy. The sleeping men lurched in unison, fearful and confused as they scrambled for weapons and cover. A dark form hurtled toward the camp from downstream. Next to Glass, Anderson cocked and raised his rifle in a single motion. Glass raised the Anstadt. The hurtling form took shape, only forty yards from the camp. Anderson sighted down the barrel, hesitating an instant before pulling the trigger. At the same instant, Glass swung the Anstadt beneath Anderson’s arms. The force knocked Anderson’s barrel skyward as his powder ignited.

  The hurtling form stopped cold at the explosion of the shot, the distance now close enough to perceive the wide eyes and heaving chest. It was Bridger. “I … I … I …” A panicked stammer paralyzed him.

  “What happened, Bridger?” demanded the captain, peering beyond the boy into the darkness downstream. The trappers had fallen into a defensive semicircle with the embankment behind them. Most had assumed a firing position, perched on one knee, rifles at full cock.

  “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to fire. I heard a sound, a crash in the brush. I stood up and I guess the hammer slipped. It just went off.”

  “More likely you fell asleep.” Fitzgerald uncocked his rifle and rose from his knee. “Every buck for five miles is headed our way now.”

  Bridger started to speak, but searched in vain for the words to express the depth of his shame and regret. He stood there, open-mouthed, staring in horror at the men arrayed before him.

  Glass stepped forward, pulling Bridger’s smoothbore from his hands.

  He cocked the musket and pulled the trigger, catching the hammer with his thumb before the flint struck the frisson. He repeated the action. “This is a poor excuse for a weapon, Captain. Give him a decent rifle and we’ll have fewer problems on watch.” A few of the men nodded their heads.

  The captain looked first at Glass, then at Bridger, and he said, “Anderson, Fitzgerald—it’s your watch.” The two men took their positions, one upstream and one down.

  The sentries were redundant. No one slept in the few hours remaining before dawn.

  THREE

  August 24, 1823

  Hugh Glass stared down at the cloven tracks, the deep indentions clear as newsprint in the soft mud. Two distinct sets began at the river’s edge, where the deer must have drunk, and then trailed into the heavy cover of the willows. The persistent work of a beaver had carved a trail, now trod by a variety of game. Dung lay piled next to the tracks, and Glass stooped to touch the pea-sized pellets—still warm.

  Glass looked west, where the sun still perched high above the plateau that formed the distant horizon. He guessed there were three hours before sunset. Still early, but it would take the captain and the rest of the men an hour to catch up. Besides, it was an ideal campsite. The river folded gently against a long bar and gravel bank. Beyond the willows, a stand of cottonwoods offered cover for their campfires and a supply of firewood. The willows were ideal for smoke racks. Glass noticed plum trees scattered among the willows, a lucky break. They could grind pemmican from the combined fruit and meat. He looked downriver. Where’s Black Harris?

  In the hierarchy of challenges the trappers faced each day, obtaining food was the most immediate. Like other challenges, it involved a complicated balancing of benefits and risks. They carried virtually no food with them, especially since abandoning the flatboats on the Missouri and proceeding on foot up the Grand. A few men still had tea or sugar, but most were down to a bag of salt for preserving meat. Game was plentiful on this stretch of the Grand, and they could have dined on fresh meat each night. But harvesting game meant shooting, and the sound of a rifle carried for miles, revealing their position to any foe within earshot.

  Since leaving the Missouri, the men had held closely to a pattern. Each day, two scouted ahead of the others. For the time being their path was fixed—they simply followed the Grand. The scouts’ primary responsibilities were to avoid Indians, select a campsite, and find food. They shot fresh game every few days.

  After shooting a deer or buffalo calf, the scouts prepared the camp for the evening. They bled the game, gathered wood, and set two or three small fires in narrow, rectangular pits. Smaller fires produced less smoke than a single conflagration, while also offering more surface for smoking meat and more sources of heat. If enemies did spot them at night, more fires gave the illusion of more men.

  Once flames were burning, the scouts butchered their game, pulling choice cuts for immediate consumption and cutting thin strips with the rest. They constructed crude racks with green willow branches, rubbed the meat strips with a little salt and hung them just above the flames. It wasn’t the type of jerky they would make in a permanent camp, which would keep for months. But the meat would keep for several days, enough to last until the next
fresh game.

  Glass stepped from the willows into a clearing, scanning for the deer he knew must be just ahead.

  He saw the cubs before he saw the sow. There was a pair, and they tumbled toward him, bawling like playful dogs. The cubs had been dropped in the spring, and at five months weighed a hundred pounds each. They nipped at each other as they bore down on Glass, and for the briefest of instants the scene had a near comic quality. Transfixed by the whirling motion of the cubs, Glass had not raised his glance to the far end of the clearing, fifty yards away. Nor had he yet to calculate the certain implication of their presence.

  Suddenly he knew. A hollowness seized his stomach half an instant before the first rumbling growl crossed the clearing. The cubs skidded to an immediate stop, not ten feet in front of Glass. Ignoring the cubs now, Glass peered toward the brush line across the clearing.

  He heard her size before he saw it. Not just the crack of the thick underbrush that the sow moved aside like short grass, but the growl itself, a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree, a bass that could emanate only through connection with some great mass.

  The growl crescendoed as she stepped into the clearing, black eyes staring at Glass, head low to the ground as she processed the foreign scent, a scent now mingling with that of her cubs. She faced him head-on, her body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard. Glass marveled at the animal’s utter muscularity, the thick stumps of her forelegs folding into massive shoulders, and above all the silvery hump that identified her as a grizzly.

  Glass struggled to control his reaction as he processed his options. His reflex, of course, screamed at him to flee. Back through the willows. Into the river. Perhaps he could dive low and escape downstream. But the bear was already too close for that, barely a hundred feet in front of him. His eyes searched desperately for a cottonwood to climb; perhaps he could scramble out of reach, then shoot from above. No, the trees were behind the bear. Nor did the willows provide sufficient cover. His options dwindled to one: Stand and shoot. One chance to stop the grizzly with a .53 caliber ball from the Anstadt.