The Revenant

by Michael Punke

  In the last moments of daylight he examined the rattles at the tip of the tail. There were ten, one added in each year of the snake’s life. Glass had never seen a snake with ten rattles. A long time, ten years. Glass thought about the snake, surviving, thriving for a decade on the strength of its brutal attributes. And then a single mistake, a moment of exposure in an environment without tolerance, dead and devoured almost before its blood ceased to pump. He cut the rattles from the remains of the snake and fingered them like a rosary. After a while he dropped them into his possibles bag. When he looked at them, he wanted to remember.

  It was dark. Glass pulled his blanket around him, hunched his back, and fell asleep.

  He awoke thirsty and hungry from a fitful sleep. Every wound ached.

  Three hundred and fifty miles to Fort Kiowa. He knew he couldn’t allow himself to think about it, not in its totality. A mile at a time. He set the Grand as his first goal. He’d been unconscious when the brigade veered off the main river up the spring creek, but from Bridger and Fitzgerald’s discussions he assumed it lay near.

  Glass pulled the Hudson Bay blanket from his shoulders. With the razor, he cut three long strips from the wool cloth. He wrapped the first around his left knee—his good knee. He would need a pad if he was going to crawl. The other two strips he wrapped around his palms, leaving the fingers free. He rolled up the rest of the blanket and looped the long strap of the possibles bag around both ends. He checked to make sure the bag was tied firmly shut, then situated the bag and blanket across his back. The strap he wore around both shoulders, leaving his hands free.

  Glass took a long drink from the creek and began to crawl. Actually, it wasn’t a crawl so much as a scooting sort of drag. He could use his right arm for balance, but it would not support his weight. His right leg he could only string along behind him. He had worked to loosen the muscles by bending and straightening the leg, but it remained as rigid as a flagpole.

  He fell into the best rhythm he could manage. With his right hand as a sort of outrigger, he kept his weight on his left side, leaning forward on his left arm, pulling up his left knee, then dragging his stiff right leg behind him. Over and over, yard after yard. He stopped several times to adjust the blanket and the possibles bag. His hurky-jerk motion kept loosening the ties of his pack. Eventually he found the right series of knots to keep the bundle in place.

  For a while the wool strips on his knee and palms worked fairly well, though they required frequent adjustment. He had failed to consider the effect of dragging his right leg. His moccasin provided protection to the lower part of his foot, but did not cover his ankle. Within a hundred yards he had developed an abrasion, and stopped to cut a strip of blanket for the area in contact with the ground.

  It took him almost two hours to crawl down the creek to the Grand.

  By the time he arrived at the river, his legs and arms ached from the awkward, unaccustomed motion. He stared down at the old tracks of the brigade and wondered by what providence the Indians had not seen them.

  Though he would never see it, the explanation lay clearly on the opposite bank. Had he crossed the river, he would have found the enormous prints of a bear spread throughout a patch of serviceberries. Just as clear were the tracks of the five Indian ponies. In an irony that Glass would never appreciate, it was a grizzly bear that saved him from the Indians. Like Fitzgerald, the bear had discovered the berry patch near the Grand. The animal was gorging itself when the five Arikara warriors rode up the river. In fact it was the scent of the bear that had made the pinto skittish. Confused by the sight and smell of five mounted Indians, the bear lumbered into the brush. The hunters charged after it, never to notice the tracks on the opposite bank.

  Once Glass emerged from the protective shelter of the pines, the horizon broadened in a landscape broken only by rolling buttes and scattered clumps of cottonwoods. Thick willows along the river impeded his ability to crawl forward, but did little to block the penetrating heat of the late morning sun. He felt the rivulets of sweat across his back and chest and the sting of salt when it seeped into his wounds. He took one last drink from the cool spring creek. He gazed upriver between swallows, giving one last consideration to the idea of direct pursuit. Not yet.

  The frustrating necessity of delay was like water on the hot iron of his determination—hardening it, making it unmalleable. He vowed to survive, if for no other reason than to visit vengeance on the men who betrayed him.

  Glass crawled for three more hours that day. He guessed he had covered two miles. The Grand’s banks varied, with alternating stretches of sand, grass, and rock. Had he been able to stand, there were frequent stretches of shallow water, and Glass could have crossed the river frequently to take advantage of the easiest terrain.

  But crossing was not an option for Glass, whose crawling relegated him to the north bank. The rocks created particular difficulty. By the time he stopped, the woolen pads were in tatters. The wool succeeded in keeping abrasions from forming, but it could not stop the bruising. His knee and his palms were black-and-blue, tender to the touch. The muscle in his left arm began to cramp, and once again he felt the quivering weakness from a lack of food. As he anticipated, no easy source of meat fell into his path. For the time being, his subsistence would have to come from plants.

  From his time with the Pawnee, Glass possessed a broad familiarity with the plants of the plains. Cattails grew in plentiful clumps wherever the terrain flattened to create marshy backwaters, their furry brown heads capping slender green stalks as high as four feet. Glass used a stave to dig up the root stalks, peeled away the outer skin, and ate the tender shoots. While cattails grew thickly in the marsh, so too did mosquitoes. They buzzed incessantly around the exposed skin on his head, neck, and arms. He ignored them for a while as he dug hungrily among the cattails. Eventually, he gnawed the edge off his hunger, or at least fed his hunger sufficiently that he worried more about the stinging bites of the mosquitoes. He crawled another hundred yards down the river. There was no escaping the mosquitoes at that hour, but their numbers diminished away from the stagnant water of the marsh.

  For three days he crawled down the Grand River. Cattails continued to be plentiful, and Glass found a variety of other plants that he knew to be edible—onions, dandelions, even willow leaves. Twice he happened upon berries, stopping each time to gorge himself, picking until his fingers were purple from the juice.

  Yet he did not find what his body craved. It had been twelve days since the attack by the grizzly. Before he was abandoned, Glass had swallowed a few sips of broth on a couple occasions. Otherwise, the rattler had been his only real food. Berries and roots might sustain him for a few days. To heal, though, to regain his feet, Glass knew he needed the rich nourishment that only meat could provide. The snake had been a bit of random luck, unlikely to be repeated.

  Still, he thought, there was no luck at all in standing still. The next morning he would crawl forward again. If luck wouldn’t find him, he would do his best to make his own.

  NINE

  September 8, 1823

  He smelled the buffalo carcass before he saw it. He heard it too. Or at least he heard the clouds of flies that swirled around the heaping mass of hide and bone. Sinews held the skeleton mostly intact, although scavengers had picked it clean of any meat. The massive, bushy head and swooping black horns lent the animal its only measure of dignity, though this too had been undermined by the birds that had picked away the eyes.

  Looking at the beast, Glass felt no revulsion, only disappointment that others had beaten him to this potential source of nourishment. A variety of tracks surrounded the area. Glass guessed that the carcass was four or five days old. He stared at the pile of bones. For an instant he imagined his own skeleton—scattered across the bleak ground on some forgotten corner of prairie, his flesh eaten away, carrion for the magpies and coyotes. He thought about a line from Scripture, “dust to dust.” Is this what it means?

  His thoughts turned quickl
y to more practical considerations. He had seen starving Indians boil hides into a gluey, edible mass. He would willingly have attempted the same, except he had no vessel to contain boiling water. He had another thought. The carcass lay next to a head-sized rock. He picked it up with his left hand and threw it clumsily against the line of smaller ribs. One of the bones snapped, and Glass reached for one of the pieces. The marrow he sought was dry. I need a thicker bone.

  One of the buffalo’s forelegs lay apart from the rest, bare bone down to the hoof. He laid it against a flat stone and began to beat on it with the other rock. Finally a crack appeared, and then the bone broke.

  He was right—the thicker bone still contained the greenish marrow. In hindsight, he should have known not to eat it by the smell, but his hunger robbed him of reason. He ignored the bitter taste, sucking the liquid from the bone, then digging for more with the piece of broken rib. Better to take the risk than to die of starvation. At least the marrow was easy to swallow. Frenzied by the idea of food, by the very mechanics of eating, he spent the better part of an hour breaking bones and scraping their contents.

  About then the first cramp hit. It began as a hollow aching deep inside his bowels. He felt suddenly incapable of supporting his own weight and rolled to his side. The pressure in his head became so intense that Glass was aware of the very fissures in his skull. He began to sweat profusely. Like sunlight through glass, the pain in his abdomen became quickly more focused, burning. Nausea rose in his stomach like a great and inevitable tide. He began to retch, the indignity of the convulsions secondary to the excruciating pain as the bile passed his wounded throat.

  For two hours he lay there. His stomach emptied quickly but did not cease to convulse. Between bouts of retching he was perfectly still, as if through lack of motion he could hide from the sickness and pain.

  When the first round of sickness was over, he crawled away from the carcass, eager now to escape the sickeningly sweet smell. The motion reignited both the pain in his head and the nausea in his stomach. Thirty yards from the buffalo he crawled into a thick stand of willows, curled onto his side, and lapsed into a state that resembled unconsciousness more than sleep.

  For a day and a night his body purged itself of the rancid marrow. The focused pain of his wounds from the grizzly now combined with a diffuse and permeating weakness. Glass came to visualize his strength as the sand in an hourglass. Minute by minute he felt his vitality ebbing away. Like an hourglass, he knew, a moment would arrive when the last grain of sand would tumble down the aperture, leaving the upper chamber void.

  He could not shake the image of the buffalo skeleton, of the mighty beast, stripped of its flesh, rotting away on the prairie.

  On the morning of the second day after the buffalo, Glass awoke hungry, ravenously hungry. He took it as a sign that the poison had passed from his system. He had tried to continue his laborious crawl downriver, in part because he still hoped to stumble across some other source of food, but more because he sensed the significance of stopping. In two days, he estimated that he had covered no more than a quarter mile. Glass knew that the sickness had cost him more than time and distance. It had sapped him of strength, eaten away at whatever tiny reservoir remained to him.

  Without meat in the next few days, Glass assumed that he would die.

  His experience with the buffalo carcass and its aftermath would keep him away from anything not freshly killed, no matter how desperate he grew. His first thought was to make a spear, or to kill a cottontail with a stone. But the pain in his right shoulder kept him from raising his arm, let alone thrusting it hard enough to generate a lethal throw. With his left hand, he lacked the accuracy to hit anything.

  So hunting was out. That left trapping. With cordage and a knife to carve triggers, Glass knew a variety of ways to trap small game with snares. Lacking even those basics, he decided to try deadfalls. A deadfall was a simple device—a large rock leaning precariously on a stick, rigged to collapse when some unwary prey tripped a trigger.

  The willows along the Grand were zigzagged with game trails. Tracks dotted the moist sand near the river. In the tall grass he saw the swirling depressions where deer had bedded down for the night. Glass considered it unlikely that he could trap a deer with a deadfall. For one thing, he doubted he could hoist a rock or tree of sufficient heft. He decided to set his sights on rabbits, which he encountered continuously along the river.

  Glass looked for trails near the thick cover preferred by rabbits. He found a cottonwood downed recently by beaver, its leaf-covered branches creating a giant web of obstacles and hiding places. The trails leading to and from the tree were littered with pea-sized scat.

  Near the river Glass found three suitable stones: flat enough to provide a broad surface for crushing when the trap was tripped; heavy enough to provide lethal force. The stones he selected were the size of a powder keg and weighed about thirty pounds each. With his crippled arm and leg, it took nearly an hour to push them, one by one, up the bank to the tree.

  Next Glass searched for the three sticks he needed to support the deadfalls. The downed cottonwood provided an array of choices. He selected three branches about an inch in diameter and broke them off at a span about the length of his arm. Next he broke the three sticks in two. Snapping the first stick sent a jarring pain through his shoulder and back, so the next two he leaned against the cottonwood and broke with one of his rocks.

  When he was finished he had a stick, broken in two, for each trap. Reassembled at the break, the broken stick would support, albeit precariously, the weight of the leaning rock. Where the two pieces of the support stick came together, Glass would wedge a baited trigger stick. When the trigger stick was bumped or tugged, the support stick would collapse like a buckling knee, dropping the lethal weight on the unsuspecting target.

  For the trigger sticks, Glass selected three slender willows, cut to a length of about sixteen inches. He had noticed dandelion leaves near the river, and he gathered a large handful to bait the traps, jabbing a number of the tender leaves on each trigger stick.

  A narrow trail covered with droppings led into the thickest part of the downed cottonwood. Glass selected this location for the first deadfall and began to assemble the components.

  The difficulty with a deadfall lay in striking a balance between stability and fragility. Stability kept the trap from collapsing on its own, though too much would prevent it from collapsing at all; fragility allowed the trap to collapse easily when tripped by its prey, though too much would cause it to collapse on its own. Striking this balance required strength and coordination, and Glass’s wounds robbed him of both. His right arm could not support the weight of the rock, so he perched it clumsily against his right leg. Meanwhile, he struggled with his left hand to hold the two pieces of the support stick with the trigger stick wedged in between. Again and again the entire structure collapsed. Twice he decided that he had set the trap too firmly, and knocked it down himself.

  After nearly an hour, he finally struck a proper balance point. He found two more suitable locations on the trails near the cottonwood and set the other deadfalls, then retreated away from the cottonwood toward the river.

  Glass found a sheltered spot against a cut bank. When he could no longer stand the pangs of hunger, he ate the bitter roots from the dandelions he had plucked for the traps. He drank from the river to wash the taste from his mouth and lay down to sleep. Rabbits were most active at night. He would check the deadfalls in the morning.

  Sharp pain in his throat awakened Glass before dawn. The first light of the new day seeped like blood into the eastern horizon. Glass shifted his position in an unsuccessful effort to relieve the pain in his shoulder. As the pain eased he became aware of the chill in the early morning air. He hunched his shoulders and pulled his shredded blanket tightly around his neck. He lay there uncomfortably for an hour, waiting for sufficient light to check the traps.

  The bitter taste still lingered in his mouth as he crawled toward
the downed cottonwood. He was vaguely aware of the rotten stench of skunk. Both of these sensations evaporated as he imagined a rabbit roasting on a spit above a crackling fire. The nourishment of flesh; he could smell it, taste it.

  From fifty yards, Glass could see all three deadfalls. One stood unmoved, but the other two had been tripped—their rocks lay flat on the ground, the support sticks collapsed. Glass could feel his pulse pounding in his throat as he crawled hurriedly forward.

  Ten feet from the first trap, he noticed the multitude of new tracks on the narrow game trail, the scattered piles of fresh scat. His breath grew short as he peered around the backside of the rock—nothing protruded. He lifted the rock, still hopeful. The trap was empty. His heart sank in disappointment. Did I set it too finely? Did it collapse on its own? He crawled rapidly to the other rock. Nothing protruded from the front. He strained to see around to the blind side of the trap.

  He saw a flash of black and white and heard a hiss, barely perceptible.

  Pain registered before his mind could grasp what had happened. The deadfall had pinned a skunk by its foreleg, but the animal’s capacity to spew forth a noxious spray was very much alive. It felt as if burning lamp oil had been poured into his eyes. He rolled backward in a futile effort to avoid more of the vapor. Completely blind, he half crawled, half rolled toward the river.

  He crashed into a deep pool by the bank, desperately seeking to wash away the searing spray. With his face under water, Glass attempted to open his eyes, but the burning was too intense. It took twenty minutes before he could see again, and then only by squinting painfully through bloodred, watery slits. Finally Glass crawled to the bank. The nauseating reek of the skunk’s scent clung to his skin and clothing like frost on a windowpane. He had once watched a dog roll in the dirt for a week, trying to rid itself of skunk. Like the dog, he knew the stink would ride him for days.