The Revenant

by Michael Punke

  Captain Henry’s thoughts concerned not what he did see, but rather what he did not: He did not see horses. He saw the scattered motion of men and the smoke of a large fire, but not a single horse. Not even a damn mule. He fired his rifle into the air, as much in frustration as in greeting. The men in the camp stopped their activities, searching for the source of the shot. Two guns answered in return. Henry and his seven men trudged down the valley toward Fort Union.

  It had been eight weeks since Henry left Fort Union, rushing to Ashley’s aid at the Arikara village. Henry left two instructions behind: Trap the surrounding streams and guard the horses at all costs. Captain Henry’s luck, it appeared, would never change.

  Pig lifted his rifle from his right shoulder, where it seemed to have augured a permanent indentation in his flesh. He started to move the heavy gun to his left shoulder, but there the strap of his possibles bag had worn its own abrasion. He finally resigned himself to simply carrying the gun in front of him, a decision that reminded him of the aching pain in his arms.

  Pig thought of the comfortable straw tick in back of the cooper’s shop in St. Louis, and he arrived once again at the conclusion that joining Captain Henry had been a horrible mistake.

  In the first twenty years of his life, Pig had never once walked more than two miles. In the past six weeks, not a single day had passed when he had walked fewer than twenty miles, and often the men covered thirty or even more. Two days earlier, Pig had worn through the bottoms of his third pair of moccasins. Gaping holes admitted frosty dew in the morning. Rocks cut jagged scrapes. Worst of all, had he had stepped squarely on a prickly pear cactus. He had failed in repeated efforts to pick out the tines with his skinning knife, and now a festering toe made him wince with every step.

  Not to mention the fact that he had never been hungrier in his life.

  He longed for the simple pleasure of dunking a biscuit in gravy, or sinking his teeth into a fat chicken leg. He remembered fondly the heaping tin plate of food provided thrice daily by the cooper’s wife. Now his breakfast consisted of cold jerky—and not much of that. They barely stopped for lunch, which also consisted of cold jerky. With the captain skittish about gunshots, even dinners consisted primarily of cold jerky. And on the occasions when they did have fresh game, Pig struggled to eat it, hacking at slabs of wild game or wrestling to break bones for their marrow. Food on the frontier required so damn much work. The effort it took to eat left him famished.

  Pig questioned his decision to go west with each rumble of his stomach, with every painful step. The riches of the frontier remained as elusive as ever. Pig had not set a beaver trap for six months. As they walked into the camp, horses were not the only thing absent. Where are the pelts? A few beaver plews hung on willow frames against the timber walls of the fort, along with a mishmash of buffalo, elk, and wolf. But this was hardly the bonanza to which they had hoped to return.

  A man named Stubby Bill stepped forward and started to extend his hand to Henry in greeting.

  Henry ignored the hand. “Where the hell are the horses?”

  Stubby Bill’s hand hung there for a moment, lonely and uncomfortable.

  Finally he let it drop. “Blackfeet stole ’em, Captain.”

  “You ever hear of posting a guard?”

  “We posted guards, Captain, but they came out of nowhere and stampeded the herd.”

  “You go after them?”

  Stubby Bill shook his head slowly. “We ain’t done so well against the Blackfeet.” It was a subtle reminder, but also effective. Captain Henry sighed deeply. “How many horses left?”

  “Seven … well, five and two mules. Murphy’s got all of them with a trapping party on Beaver Creek.”

  “Doesn’t look like there’s been much trapping going on.”

  “We’ve been at it, Captain, but everything near the Fort is trapped out. Without more horses we can’t cover any ground.”

  Jim Bridger lay curled beneath a threadbare blanket. There would be heavy frost on the ground in the morning, and the boy felt the damp chill as it seeped into the deepest marrow of his bones. They slept again with no fire. In fits and starts, his discomfort surrendered to his fatigue and he slept.

  In his dream he stood near the edge of a great chasm. The sky was the purple-black of late evening. Darkness prevailed, but enough light remained to illuminate objects in a faint glow. The apparition appeared at first as the vaguest of shapes, still distant. It approached him slowly, inevitably. Its contours took form as it drew closer, a twisted and limping body. Bridger wanted to flee, but the chasm behind him made escape impossible.

  At ten paces he could see the horrible face. It was unnatural, its features distorted like a mask. Scars crisscrossed the cheeks and forehead. The nose and ears were placed haphazardly, with no relation to balance or symmetry. The face was framed by a tangled mane and beard, furthering the impression that the being before him was something no longer human.

  As the specter moved closer still, its eyes began to burn, locked onto Bridger in a hateful gaze he could not break.

  The specter raised its arm in a reaper’s arc and drove a knife deep into Bridger’s chest. The knife cleaved his sternum cleanly, shocking the boy with the piercing strength of the blow. The boy staggered backward, caught a final glimpse of the burning eyes, and fell.

  He stared at the knife in his chest as the chasm swallowed him. He recognized with little surprise the silver cap on the pommel. It was Glass’s knife. In some ways it was a relief to die, he thought, easier than living with his guilt.

  Bridger felt a sharp thud in his ribs. He opened his eyes with a start to find Fitzgerald standing above him. “Time to move, boy.”

  THIRTEEN

  October 5, 1823

  The burnt remains of the Arikara village reminded Hugh Glass of skeletons. It was eerie to walk among them. This place that teemed so recently with the vibrant life of five hundred families now sat dead as a graveyard, a blackened monument on the high bluff above the Missouri.

  The village lay eight miles north of the confluence with the Grand, while Fort Brazeau lay seventy miles south. Glass had two reasons for the diversion up the Missouri. He had run out of jerky from the buffalo calf and found himself once again reliant upon roots and berries. Glass remembered the flush cornfields surrounding the Arikara villages and hoped to scavenge from them.

  He also knew that the village would provide the makings of a raft.

  With a raft, he could float lazily downstream to Fort Brazeau. As he walked slowly through the village, he realized there would be no problem finding building materials. Between the huts and the palisades, there were thousands of suitable logs.

  Glass stopped to peer into a big lodge near the center of the village, clearly some type of communal building. He saw a flash of motion in the dark interior. He stumbled back a step, his heart racing. He stopped, peering into the lodge as his eyes adjusted to the light. No longer needing the crutch, he had sharpened the end of the cottonwood branch to make a crude spear. He held it in a ready position.

  A small dog, a pup, whimpered in the middle of the lodge. Relieved and excited at the prospect of fresh meat, Glass took a slow step forward. He turned the spear to bring the blunt end forward. If he could lure the dog closer, a quick whack would smash the animal’s skull. No need to damage the meat. Sensing the danger, the dog bolted toward dark recesses at the back of the open room.

  Glass moved quickly in pursuit, stopping in shock when the dog jumped into the arms of an ancient squaw. The old woman huddled on a pallet, curled into a tight ball on a tattered blanket. She held the puppy like a baby. With her face buried against the animal, only her white hair was visible in the shadows. She cried out and began to wail hysterically. After a few moments, the wailing took on a pattern, a frightening and foreboding chant. Her death chant?

  The arms and shoulders gripping the little dog were nothing more than leathery old skin hung loosely on bone. As Glass’s eyes adjusted, he saw the waste and f
ilth scattered about her. A large earthen pot contained water, but there was no sign of food. Why hasn’t she gathered corn? Glass had gathered a few ears as he walked into the village. The Sioux and the deer had taken most of the crop, but certainly remnants remained. Is she lame?

  He reached into his parfleche and pulled out an ear of corn. He shucked it and bent down to offer it to the old woman. Glass held out the corn for a long time as the woman continued her wailing chant. After a while the puppy sniffed at the corn, then began to lick it. Glass reached out and touched the old woman on the head, gently stroking the white hair. Finally the woman stopped chanting and turned her face toward the light that streamed in from the door.

  Glass gasped. Her eyes were perfectly white, completely blind. Now Glass understood why the old woman had been left behind when the Arikara fled in the middle of the night.

  Glass took the old woman’s hand and gently wrapped it round the corn. She mumbled something that he could not understand and pushed the corn to her mouth. Glass saw that she had no teeth, pressing the raw corn between her gums. The sweet juice seemed to awaken her hunger, and she gnawed ineffectively at the cob. She needs broth.

  He looked around the hut. A rusty kettle sat next to the fire pit in the center of the room. He looked at the water in the large earthen pot. It was brackish and sediment floated on the surface. He picked up the pot and carried it outside. He dumped the water and refilled it from a small creek that flowed through the village.

  Glass spotted another dog by the creek, and this one he did not spare.

  Soon he had a fire burning in the center of the hut. Part of the dog he roasted on a spit over the fire and part he boiled in the kettle. He threw corn into the pot with the dog meat and continued his search through the village. Fire had not affected many of the earthen huts, and Glass was pleased to find several lengths of cordage for a raft. He also found a tin cup and a ladle made from a buffalo horn.

  When he returned to the big lodge he found the blind old woman as he had left her, still sucking at the cob of corn. He walked to the kettle and filled the tin cup with broth, setting it next to her on the pallet. The pup, unsettled at the smell of his brethren roasting on the fire, huddled at the woman’s feet. The woman could smell the meat too. She grasped the cup and gulped the broth the first moment the temperature would allow. Glass filled the cup again, this time adding tiny bits of meat that he cut with the razor. He filled the cup three times before the old woman stopped eating and fell asleep. He adjusted the blanket to cover her bony shoulders.

  Glass moved to the fire and began to eat the roasted dog. The Pawnee considered dog a delicacy, harvesting an occasional canine the way white men butchered a spring pig. Glass certainly preferred buffalo, but in his present state, dog would do just fine. He pulled corn from the pot and ate that too, saving the broth and the boiled meat for the squaw.

  He had eaten for about an hour when the old woman cried out. Glass moved quickly to her side. She said something over and over. “He tuwe he … He tuwe he …” She spoke this time not in the fearful tone of her death chant, but in a quiet voice, a voice seeking urgently to communicate an important thought. The words meant nothing to Glass. Not knowing what else to do, he took the woman’s hand. She squeezed it weakly and pulled it to her cheek. They sat like that for a while. Her blind eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning she was dead.

  Glass spent the better part of the morning building a crude pyre overlooking the Missouri. When it was finished, he returned to the big hut and wrapped the old woman in her blanket. He carried her to the pyre, the dog trailing pitifully behind them in an odd cortege. Like his wounded leg, Glass’s shoulder had healed nicely in the weeks since the battle with the wolves. Still, he winced as he hoisted the body up on the pyre. He felt the familiar, disconcerting twinges along his spine. His back continued to worry him. With luck, he would be at Fort Brazeau in a few days. Someone there could tend to him properly.

  He stood for a moment at the pyre, old conventions calling from a distant past. He wondered for a moment what words had been spoken at his mother’s funeral, what words had been spoken for Elizabeth. He pictured a mound of fresh-turned earth next to an open grave. The notion of burial had always struck him as stifling and cold. He liked the Indian way better, setting the bodies up high, as if passing them to the heavens.

  The dog growled suddenly and Glass whipped around. Four mounted Indians rode slowly toward him from the village at a distance of only seventy yards. From their clothing and hair, Glass recognized them immediately as Sioux. He panicked for an instant, calculating the distance to the thick trees of the bluff. He thought back to his first encounter with the Pawnee, and decided to hold his ground.

  It had been little more than a month since the trappers and the Sioux had been allies in the siege against the Arikara. Glass remembered that the Sioux had quit the fight in disgust over Colonel Leavenworth’s tactics, a sentiment shared by the men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Do remnants of that alliance still stand? So he stood there, affecting as much confidence as he could muster, and watched the Indians approach.

  They were young; three were barely more than teens. The fourth was slightly older, perhaps in his mid-twenties. The younger braves approached warily, weapons ready, as if moving toward a strange animal. The older Sioux rode a half-length ahead of the others. He carried a London fusil, but he held the gun casually, the barrel resting across the neck of an enormous buckskin stallion. A brand etched the animal’s haunch, “U.S.” One of Leavenworth’s. In another setting, Glass might have found humor in the colonel’s misfortune.

  The older Sioux reined his horse five feet in front of Glass, studying him from head to foot. Then the Sioux looked beyond him to the pyre. He struggled to understand the relationship between this mangled, filthy white man and the dead Arikara squaw. From a distance they had watched him struggle to place her body on the scaffolding. It made no sense.

  The Indian swung his leg across the big stallion and slipped easily to the ground. He walked up to Glass, his dark eyes penetrating. Glass felt his stomach roil, though he met the gaze unflinchingly.

  The Indian accomplished effortlessly what Glass was compelled to pretend—an air of complete confidence. His name was Yellow Horse. He was tall, over six feet, with square shoulders and perfect posture that accentuated a powerful neck and chest. In his tightly braided hair he wore three eagle feathers, notched to signify enemies killed in battle. Two decorative bands ran down the doeskin tunic on his chest. Glass noticed the intricacy of the work, hundreds of interwoven porcupine quills dyed brilliantly in vermillion and indigo.

  As the two men stood face-to-face, the Indian reached out, slowly extending his hand to Glass’s necklace, examining the enormous bear claw as he turned it in his fingers. He let the claw drop, his eyes moving to trace the scars around Glass’s skull and throat. The Indian nudged Glass’s shoulder to turn him, examining the wounds beneath his tattered shirt. He said something to the other three as he looked at Glass’s back. Glass heard the other braves dismount and approach, then talk excitedly as they pushed and probed at his back. What’s happening?

  The source of the Indians’ fascination was the deep, parallel wounds extending the length of Glass’s back. The Indians had seen many wounds, but never this. The deep gashes were animated. They were crawling with maggots.

  One of the Indians managed to pinch a twisting white worm between his fingers. He held it for Glass to see. Glass cried out in horror, tearing at the remnants of his shirt, reaching ineffectively toward the wounds he could not touch, and then falling to his hands and knees, retching at the sickening thought of this hideous invasion.

  They put Glass on a horse behind one of the young braves and rode away from the Arikara village. The old woman’s dog started to follow behind the horses. One of the Indians stopped, dismounted, and coaxed the dog close. With the dull side of a tomahawk, he bashed the dog’s skull, grabbed the animal by the hind
legs, and rode to catch the others.

  The Sioux camp lay just south of the Grand. The arrival of the four braves with a white man sparked immediate excitement, and scores of Indians trailed behind them like a parade as they rode through the teepees.

  Yellow Horse led the procession to a low teepee set away from the camp. Wild designs covered the teepee: lightning bolts spewing from black clouds, buffalo arranged geometrically around a sun, vaguely human figures dancing around a fire. Yellow Horse called out a greeting, and after a few moments, an ancient, gnarled Indian emerged from a flap on the teepee. He squinted in the bright sun, although even without squinting, his eyes were barely visible beneath deep wrinkles. Black paint covered the upper half of his face, and he had tied a dead, withered raven behind his right ear. He was naked from the chest up despite the chill of the October day, and below the waist he wore only a loincloth. The skin hanging loosely from his sunken chest was painted in alternating stripes of black and red.

  Yellow Horse dismounted, and signaled Glass to do the same. Glass stepped down stiffly, his wounds aching anew from the unaccustomed bouncing of the ride. Yellow Horse told the medicine man about the strange white man they found in the remains of the Arikara village, how they had watched as he set loose the spirit of the old squaw. He told the medicine man that the white man had shown no fear as they approached him, though he had no weapons but a sharpened stick. He told about the bear-claw necklace and the wounds on the man’s throat and back.

  The medicine man said nothing during Yellow Horse’s long explanation, though his eyes peered intently through the furrowed mask of his face. The assembled Indians huddled close to listen, a murmur rising at the description of the maggots in the wounded back.

  When Yellow Horse finished, the medicine man stepped up to Glass.