The Revenant

by Michael Punke

  As the burning in his eyes slowly subsided, Glass took a quick inventory of his wounds. He touched his neck and looked at his fingers. There was no blood, though the internal pain continued when he swallowed or inhaled deeply. He realized that he hadn’t tried to speak for several days. Tentatively, he opened his mouth and forced air over his voice box. The action produced sharp pain and a pathetic, squeaking whine. He wondered if he would ever be able to speak normally.

  By craning his neck, he could see the parallel cuts that ran from his throat to his shoulder. Bridger’s pine tar still coated the area. His entire shoulder ached, but the cuts appeared to be healing. The puncture wounds on his thigh also looked relatively healthy, although his leg still would not support the weight of his body. From touching his scalp he could imagine that it looked horrible, but it no longer bled and it caused no pain.

  Aside from his throat, the area that most concerned him was his back. He lacked the agility to inspect the wounds with his hands, and unable to see them, his mind conjured horrible images. He felt strange sensations that he assumed were the repeated breaking of scabs. He knew that Captain Henry had tied sutures, and he occasionally felt scratching from the loose ends of thread.

  More than anything he felt the corrosive void of hunger.

  He lay on the sandy bank, exhausted and utterly demoralized by this latest turn of events. A clump of yellow flowers stood atop a slender green stalk. The stalk looked like wild onion, but Glass knew better. It was Death Camas. Is it Providence? Has this been placed here for me? Glass wondered how the poison would work. Would he drift off peacefully into a never-ending sleep? Or would his body contort in an agonizing death? How different could it be from his current state? At least there would be certainty that the end was coming.

  As he lay on the riverbank in the early moments of dawn, a fat doe emerged from the willows on the opposite shore. She looked cautiously left and right before stepping forward, haltingly, to drink from the river. She was barely thirty yards away, an easy shot with his rifle. The Anstadt.

  For the first time that day, he thought about the men who abandoned him. His rage grew as he stared at the doe. Abandonment seemed too benign to describe their treachery. Abandonment was a passive act—running away or leaving something behind. If his keepers had done no more than abandon him, he would at this moment be sighting down the barrel of his gun, about to shoot the deer. He would be using his knife to butcher the animal, and sparking his flint against steel to start a fire and cook it. He looked down at himself, wet from head to toe, wounded, reeking from the skunk, the bitter taste of roots still in his mouth.

  What Fitzgerald and Bridger had done was much more than abandonment, much worse. These were not mere passersby on the road to Jericho, looking away and crossing to the other side. Glass felt no entitlement to a Samaritan’s care, but he did at least expect that his keepers do no harm.

  Fitzgerald and Bridger had acted deliberately, robbed him of the few possessions he might have used to save himself. And in stealing from him this opportunity, they had killed him. Murdered him, as surely as a knife in the heart or a bullet in the brain. Murdered him, except he would not die. Would not die, he vowed, because he would live to kill his killers.

  Hugh Glass pushed himself up and continued his crawl down the banks of the Grand.

  Glass studied the contour of the land in his immediate vicinity. Fifty yards away, a gentle swale led down on three sides to a broad, dry gully. Sage and low grasses provided moderate cover. The swale reminded him suddenly of the gently rolling hills along the Arkansas River. He remembered a trap he had once seen set by Pawnee children. For the children, it had been a game. For Glass, the exercise was now deadly serious.

  He crawled slowly to the bottom of the swale, stopping at the point that seemed like the natural hub. He found a sharp-edged rock and began to dig in the hard-packed, sandy soil.

  He dug a pit with a four-inch diameter to the depth of his bicep.

  Beginning halfway down, he widened the hole so that it was shaped like a wine bottle with the neck at the top. Glass spread the dirt from the hole to conceal the evidence of recent digging. Breathing heavily from the exertion, he stopped to rest.

  Next Glass went in search of a large, flat rock. He found one about forty feet from the hole. He also found three small rocks, which he placed in a triangular pattern around the hole. The flat rock he set on top like a roof over the hole, with a space underneath creating the illusion of a place to hide.

  Glass used a branch to camouflage the area around the trap, then crawled slowly away from the hole. In several spots he saw tiny, telltale droppings—a good sign. Fifty yards from the hole he stopped. His knee and palms were raw from crawling. His thigh ached from the motion, and again he felt the awful cracking sensation as the scabbing on his back began to bleed. Stopping provided temporary relief to his wounds, but it also made him aware of his profound fatigue, a low-grade ache that emanated from deep within, then circulated outward. Glass fought the urge to close his eyes and succumb to the beckoning sleep. He knew he could not regain his strength unless he ate.

  Glass forced himself into a crawling position. Paying careful attention to his distance, he moved in a wide circle with the pit he had dug as the center point. It took him thirty minutes to complete a circuit. Again his body pleaded with him to stop and rest, but he knew that stopping now would undermine the effectiveness of his trap. He kept crawling, spiraling inward toward the pit in ever-smaller circles. When he encountered a thick clump of brush, he would stop to shake it. Anything inside his circles was driven slowly toward the hidden pit.

  An hour later, Glass arrived at his hole. He removed the flat rock from the top and listened. He had seen a Pawnee boy reach his hand into a similar trap and pull it out, screaming, with a rattlesnake attached. The boy’s error left a strong impression. He looked around for a suitable branch. He found a long one with a flat end and pounded it several times into the hole.

  Having assured himself that anything in his trap was dead, he reached into the hole. One by one, he pulled out four dead mice and two ground squirrels. There was no glory in this method of hunting, but Glass was elated with the results.

  The swale provided some measure of concealment, and Glass decided to risk a fire, cursing the lack of his flint and steel. He knew it was possible to create a flame by rubbing two sticks together, but he had never started a fire that way. He suspected that the method, if it worked at all, would take forever.

  What he needed was a bow and spindle—a crude machine for making fire. The machine had three parts: a flat piece of wood with a hole where a spindle stick was planted, a round spindle stick about three-quarters of an inch thick and eight inches long, and a bow—like a cellist’s—to twirl the spindle.

  Glass searched the gully to find the parts. It wasn’t hard to locate a flat piece of driftwood and two sticks for the spindle and the bow. String for the bow. He had no cord. The strap on my bag. He pulled out the razor and sliced the strap from his bag, then tied it to the ends of the stick. Next he used the razor to carve away the edges for a hole in the flat piece of driftwood, careful to make it slightly bigger than the spindle stick.

  With the bow and spindle assembled, Glass gathered tinder and fuel.

  From his possibles bag, he removed the ball patches, ripping them to fray the edges. He also had saved cattail cotton. He piled the tinder loosely in a shallow pit, then added dry grass. To the few pieces of dry wood in the area he added buffalo dung, bone dry from long weeks in the sun.

  With the makings of the fire in place, Glass grabbed the components of the bow and spindle. He filled the hole in the flat piece of wood with tinder, set the spindle stick in the hole, and looped the bowstring around it. He held the spindle stick against the palm of his right hand, still protected by the woolen pad he used to crawl. With his left hand he worked the bow. The back-and-forth motion spun the spindle in the hole on the flat driftwood, creating friction and heat.

 
The fault in his machine became immediately apparent as he spun the spindle with the bow stick. One end of the spindle rubbed in the hole on the flat driftwood—the end where he wanted to create the fire. The other end, though, spun against the flesh of his hand. Glass remembered that the Pawnee used a palm-size piece of wood to hold the top end of the spindle. He searched again to find the right piece of wood. He located an appropriate chunk and used the razor to carve away a hole for the top of the spindle stick.

  He was clumsy with his left hand, and it took several attempts to find the right rhythm, moving the bow in a steady motion without losing his grip on the spindle stick. Soon, though, he had the spindle twirling smoothly. After several minutes, smoke began to rise from the hole. Suddenly the tinder burst into flames. He grabbed cattail cotton and set it to the lick of flame, protecting it with a cupped hand. When the cotton caught fire, he transferred the flame to the tinder in the small pit. He felt the wind whip across his back, and panicked for an instant that it would extinguish the flame, but the tinder caught, then the dry grass. In a few minutes he was feeding the buffalo chips into a small blaze.

  There wasn’t much meat left by the time he skinned the tiny rodents and removed their entrails. Still, it was fresh. If his trapping technique was time-consuming, at least it had the benefit of simplicity.

  Glass was still ravenous as he picked at the tiny rib cage of the last rodent. He resolved to stop earlier the next day. Perhaps dig pits in two locations. The thought of slower progress irritated him. How long could he avoid Arikara on the banks of the well-traveled Grand? Don’t do that. Don’t look too far ahead. The goal each day is tomorrow morning.

  With his dinner cooked, the fire no longer merited its risk. He covered it with sand and went to sleep.

  TEN

  September 15, 1823

  Twin buttes framed the valley in front of Glass, forcing the Grand River through a narrow channel between. Glass remembered the buttes from the trip upriver with Captain Henry. As he crawled farther east along the Grand, distinctive features became increasingly rare. Even the cottonwoods seemed to have been swallowed by the sea of prairie grass.

  Henry and the fur brigade had camped near the buttes, and Glass intended to stop in the same spot, hoping that something useful might have been left behind. In any event, he remembered that the high bank near the buttes made good shelter. Great stacks of black thunderheads sat ominously on the western horizon. The storm would be overhead in a couple of hours, and he wanted to dig in before it hit.

  Glass crawled along the river to the campsite. A ring of blackened stones marked a recent fire. He remembered that the fur brigade had camped with no fire, and wondered who had followed behind them. He stopped, removed the possibles bag and blanket from his back, and took a long drink from the river. Behind him, the cut bank created the shelter he remembered. He scanned up and down the river, watchful for signs of Indians, disappointed that the vegetation looked sparse. He felt the familiar rumble of hunger, and wondered if there was enough cover to dig an effective mouse pit. Is it worth the effort? He weighed the benefits of shelter against the benefits of food. Rodents had sustained him now for a week. Still, Glass knew he was treading water—not drowning, but making no progress toward a safer shore.

  A light breeze heralded the approaching clouds, cool across the sweat on his back. Glass turned from the river and crawled up the high bank to check on the storm.

  What lay beyond the rim of the bank took his breath away. Thousands of buffalo grazed in the vale below the butte, blackening the plain for a solid mile. A great bull stood sentry no more than fifty yards in front of him. The animal stood close to seven feet at the hump. The shaggy shawl of tawny fur on top of its black body accentuated the powerful head and shoulders, making the horns seem almost redundant. The bull snorted and sniffed at the air, frustrated by the swirling breeze. Behind the bull, a cow wallowed on her back, lifting a cloud of dust. A dozen other cows and calves grazed obliviously nearby.

  Glass had glimpsed his first buffalo on the Texas plains. Since then he had seen them, in herds great and herds small, on a hundred different occasions. Yet the sight of the animals never failed to fill him with awe, awe for their infinite numbers, awe for the prairie that sustained them.

  A hundred yards downstream from Glass, a pack of eight wolves also watched the great bull and the outliers he guarded. The alpha male sat on his haunches near a clump of sage. All afternoon he had waited patiently for the moment that just arrived, the moment when a gap emerged between the outliers and the rest of the herd. A gap. A fatal weakness. The big wolf raised himself suddenly to all fours.

  The alpha male stood tall but narrow. His legs seemed ungainly, knobby and somehow oddly proportioned to his coal-black body. His two pups wrestled playfully near the river. Some of the wolves lay sleeping, placid as barnyard hounds. Taken together, the animals seemed more like pets than predators, though they all perked to life at the sudden movement from the big male.

  It wasn’t until the wolves began to move that their lethal strength became obvious. The strength was not derivative of muscularity or grace. Rather it flowed from a single-minded intelligence that made their movements deliberate, relentless. The individual animals converged into a lethal unit, cohering in the collective strength of the pack.

  The alpha male trotted toward the gap between the outliers and the herd, breaking into a full run after a few yards. The pack fanned out behind him with a precision and unity of purpose that struck Glass as almost military. The pack poured into the gap. Even the pups seemed to grasp the purpose of their enterprise. Buffalo on the edge of the main herd retreated, pushing their calves in front of them before turning outward, shoulder to shoulder in a line against the wolves. The gap widened with the movement of the main herd, stranding the bull and a dozen other buffalo outside its perimeter.

  The great bull charged, catching one wolf with its horn and tossing the yelping animal twenty feet. The wolves snarled and growled, snapping with brutal fangs at exposed flanks. Most of the outliers broke for the main herd, realizing instinctively that their safety lay in numbers.

  The alpha male nipped at the tender haunch of a calf. Confused, the calf broke away from the herd, toward the steep bank by the river. Collectively aware of the deadly error, the pack fell instantly behind its prey. Bawling as it ran, the calf dashed wildly ahead. It tumbled over the bank, snapping its leg in the fall. The calf struggled to regain its feet. Its broken leg dangled in an odd direction and then collapsed completely when the calf tried to plant it. The calf fell to the ground and the pack was on it. Fangs planted themselves in every part of its body. The alpha male sunk its teeth into the tender throat and ripped.

  The calf’s last stand took place no more than seventy-five yards down the bank from Glass. He watched with a mixture of fascination and fear, glad that his vantage point lay downwind. The pack focused its complete attention on the calf. The alpha male and his mate ate first, their bloody snouts buried in the soft underbelly. They let the pups eat, but not the others. Occasionally another wolf would slink up to the fallen prey, only to be sent scrambling by a snap or snarl from the big black male.

  Glass stared at the calf and the wolves, his mind turning quickly. The calf had been dropped in the spring. After a summer of fattening on the prairie, it weighed close to a hundred and fifty pounds. A hundred and fifty pounds of fresh meat. After two weeks of catching his food by the mouthful, Glass could scarcely imagine such bounty. Initially, Glass had hoped that the pack might leave enough for him to scavenge. As he continued to watch, though, the bounty diminished at an alarming rate. Satiated, the alpha male and his mate eventually wandered casually away from the carcass with a severed hind quarter in tow for the pups. The four other wolves fell on the carcass.

  In growing desperation, Glass considered the options. If he waited too long, he doubted whether anything would be left. He weighed the prospect of continuing to live off mice and roots. Even if he could find enough to susta
in himself, the task took too much time. He doubted he had covered thirty miles since beginning his crawl. At his current pace, he would be lucky to reach Fort Kiowa before cold set in. And of course, every day of exposure on the river was another day for Indians to stumble upon him.

  He desperately needed the certain strength that the buffalo meat would give him. He did not know by what Providence the calf had been placed in his path. This is my chance. If he wanted his share of the calf, he would have to fight for it. And he needed to do it now.

  He scanned the area for the makings of some weapon. Nothing presented itself beyond rocks, driftwood, and sage. A club? He wondered for a moment if he could beat back the wolves. It seemed implausible. He couldn’t swing hard enough to inflict much of a blow. And from his knees, he forfeited any advantage of height. Sage. He remembered the brief but impressive flames created by dry sage branches. A torch?

  Seeing no other option, he scurried around him for the makings of a fire. The spring floods had tossed the trunk of a large cottonwood against the cut bank, creating a natural windbreak. Glass scooped a shallow pit in the sand next to the trunk.

  He took out his bow and spindle, grateful that he at least had the means for quickly creating a flame. From the possibles bag he removed the last of the patches and a large clump of cattail cotton. Glass looked downriver at the wolf pack, still ripping at the calf. Damn it!

  He looked around him for fuel. The river had left little of the cottonwood beyond the trunk. He found a clump of dead sage and snapped off five large branches, piling them next to the fire pit.

  Glass set the bow and spindle in the sheltered pit, carefully placing the tinder. He began to work the bow, slowly at first, then faster as he found his rhythm. In a few minutes he had a low fire burning in the pit by the cottonwood.

  He looked downriver toward the wolves. The alpha male, his mate, and their two pups huddled together about twenty yards beyond the calf. Having taken first dibs at the calf, they now were content to gnaw casually at the tasty marrow of the hindquarter. Glass hoped they would stay out of the coming battle. That left four wolves on the carcass itself.