The Revenant

by Michael Punke

  Glass awoke to a potpourri of shouted obscenities. One of the speakers was a man, screaming in French. Glass did not understand the individual words, but context made their general meaning clear.

  The speaker was “La Vierge” Cattoire, having just been rudely roused from the depths of a drunken slumber by his brother Dominique. Weary of his sibling’s antics and unable to awaken him with the standard kick in the ribs, Dominique tried another tactic: He made water on his brother’s face. It was this act of considerable disrespect that triggered the rantings from La Vierge. Dominique’s actions also angered the squaw with whom La Vierge had spent the night. She tolerated many forms of indecency in her teepee. Some she even encouraged. But Dominique’s indiscriminate pissing had soiled her best blanket, and that made her mad. She yelled with the piercing screech of an offended magpie.

  By the time Glass emerged from the cabin, the yelling match had degenerated into a fistfight. Like an ancient Greek wrestler, La Vierge stood facing his brother without a stitch of clothing. La Vierge had the advantage of size over his elder brother, but he bore the disadvantage of three consecutive days of heavy drinking, not to mention a rather abrupt and distasteful awakening. His vision had not cleared and his balance was off, though these handicaps did not temper his willingness to engage. Familiar with La Vierge’s fighting style, Dominique stood firm, waiting for the inevitable attack. With a guttural roar, La Vierge lowered his head and barreled forward.

  La Vierge put the full momentum of his charge behind the looping swing he aimed at his brother’s head. Had he connected, he might well have planted Dominique’s nose in the back of his brain. As it was, Dominique parried casually to the side.

  Missing his target completely, La Vierge’s swing threw him completely off balance. Dominique kicked him hard across the back of his knees, sweeping his feet from under him. La Vierge landed square on his back, knocking the wind from his lungs. He writhed pathetically for a moment, gasping for air. As soon as he could breathe again, he resumed his swearing and struggled for his feet. Dominique kicked him hard in the solar plexus, returning La Vierge to his quest for air.

  “I told you to be ready, you miserable pinhead! We leave in half an hour.” To underscore his point, Dominique kicked La Vierge in the mouth, splitting his upper and lower lips.

  The fight over, the assembled crowd broke up. Glass walked down to the river. Langevin’s bâtard floated at the dock, the swift current of the Missouri tugging against its mooring rope. As its name implied, the bâtard lay between the normal sizes of voyageur cargo canoes. Though smaller than the big canots de maître, the bâtard was sizable, almost thirty feet in length.

  With the downstream current of the Missouri to propel them, Langevin and Professeur had been able to steer the bâtard by themselves, along with a full load of furs obtained in trade with the Mandans. Fully loaded, the bâtard would have required ten men to paddle upstream. Langevin’s cargo would be light—a few gifts to bestow upon the Mandan and Arikara. Still, with only four men to paddle, their progress would be arduous.

  Toussaint Charbonneau sat atop a barrel on the dock, casually eating an apple, while Professeur loaded the canoe under Langevin’s supervision. To distribute the weight of their cargo, they laid two long poles on the floor of the canoe from bow to stern. On these poles Professeur placed the cargo, neatly arranged in four small bales. Professeur appeared to speak no French (at times, the Scotsman appeared to speak no English). Langevin compensated for Professeur’s lack of comprehension by speaking more loudly. The increased volume aided Professeur very little, though Langevin’s constant gesticulating provided a wealth of clues.

  Professeur’s blind eye contributed to his dim appearance. He lost the eye in a Montreal saloon, when a notorious brawler named “Oyster Joe” nearly shucked it from the Scotsman’s skull. Professeur had managed to pop the eye back in place, but it no longer functioned. The unblinking orb was fixed permanently at a skewed angle, as if watching for an attack from his flank. Professeur had never gotten around to making a patch.

  There was little fanfare to their departure. Dominique and La Vierge arrived at the dock, each with a rifle and a small bag of possessions. La Vierge squinted at the glare of the morning sun on the river. Mud caked his long hair, and blood from the split lips painted his chin and the front of his blouse. Still, he hopped spryly into bowsman’s position at the front of the bâtard, and a glint filled his eyes that had nothing to do with the angle of the sun. Dominique took the position of the steersman in the stern. La Vierge said something and both brothers laughed.

  Langevin and Professeur sat next to each other in the wide middle of the canoe, each paddling to one side. One cargo bale sat before them, one behind. Charbonneau and Glass arranged themselves around the cargo, with Charbonneau toward the bow and Glass toward the stern.

  The four voyageurs picked up their paddles, bringing the bow into the swift current. They dug deep and the bâtard moved upstream.

  La Vierge began to sing as he paddled, and the voyageurs joined in:

  Le laboureur aime sa charrue,

  Le chasseur son fusil, son chien;

  Le musicien aime sa musique;

  Moi, mon canot—c’est mon bien!

  His cart is beloved of the ploughman,

  The hunter loves his gun, his hound;

  The musician is a music lover;

  To my canoe I’m bound!

  “Bon voyage, mes amis!” yelled Kiowa. “Don’t lay up with the Mandans!” Glass turned to look behind him. He stared for a moment at Kiowa Brazeau, standing and waving from the dock at his little fort. Then Glass turned to look upriver and did not look back.

  It was October 11, 1823. For more than a month he had moved away from his quarry. A strategic retreat—but retreat none the less. Beginning today, Glass resolved to retreat no more.

  PART TWO

  SIXTEEN

  November 29, 1823

  Four paddles hit the water in perfect unison. The slender blades cut the surface, pushed to a depth of eighteen inches, then dug hard. The bâtard slogged forward with the stroke, bucking against the heavy flow of the current. When the stroke ended, the paddles lifted from the water. For an instant it appeared that the river would steal back their progress, but before it could rob them completely, the paddles hit the water again.

  A paper-thin layer of ice had covered the still water when they embarked at dawn. Now, a few hours later, Glass leaned back against a thwart, basking appreciatively in the midmorning sun and enjoying the nostalgic, buoyant sensation of floating on water.

  On their first day out of Fort Brazeau, Glass actually tried to handle a paddle. After all, he reasoned, he was a sailor by training. The voyageurs laughed when he picked up the oar, strengthening his determination. His folly became obvious immediately. The voyageurs paddled at the remarkable rate of sixty strokes a minute, regular as a fine Swiss watch. Glass could not have kept pace even if his shoulder had been fully healed. He flailed at the water for several minutes before something soft and wet hit him in the back of the head. He turned to see Dominique, a mocking grin filling his face. “For you, Mr. Pork Eater!” For yew, meeSTER pork eeTAIR! For the rest of their voyage, Glass manned not a paddle but an enormous sponge, constantly bailing water as it pooled on the bottom of the canoe.

  It was a full-time job, since the bâtard leaked steadily. The canoe reminded Glass of a floating quilt. Its patchwork skin of birch bark was sewn together with wattope, the fine root of a pine tree. The seams were sealed with pine tar, reapplied constantly as leaks appeared. As birch had become more difficult to find, the voyageurs were forced to use other materials in their patching and plugging. Rawhide had been employed in several spots, stitched on and then slathered in gum. Glass was amazed at the fragility of the craft. A stiff kick would easily puncture the skin, and one of La Vierge’s main tasks as steersman was the avoidance of lethal, floating debris. At least they benefited from the relatively docile flow of the fall season. The spring floods
could send entire trees crashing downstream.

  There was an upside to the bâtard’s shortcomings. If the vessel was frail, it was also light, an important consideration as they labored against the current. Glass came quickly to understand the odd affection of voyageurs for their craft. It was a marriage of sorts, a partnership between the men who propelled the boat and the boat that propelled the men. Each relied upon the other. The voyageurs spent half their time complaining bitterly about the manifold ails of the craft, and half their time nursing them tenderly.

  They took great pride in the appearance of the bâtard, dressing it in jaunty plumes and bright paint. On the high prow they had painted a stag’s head, its antlers tilted challengingly toward the flowing water. (On the stern, La Vierge had painted the animal’s ass.)

  “Good landing up ahead,” said La Vierge from his vantage point on the prow.

  Langevin peered upriver, where a gentle current brushed lightly against a sandy bank; then he glanced up to judge the position of the sun. “Okay, I’d say that’s a pipe. Allumez.”

  So vaunted was the pipe in voyageur culture that they used it to measure distance. A “pipe” stood for the typical interval between their short breaks for smoking. On a downstream run, a pipe might represent ten miles; on flat water, five; but on the tough pull up the Missouri, they felt lucky to make two.

  Their days fell quickly into a pattern. They ate breakfast in the purple-blue glow before dawn, fueling their bodies with leftover game and fried dough, chasing away the morning chill with tin cups of scalding hot tea. They were on the water as soon as the light allowed them to see, eager to squeeze motion from every hour of the day. They made five or six pipes a day. Around noon they stopped long enough to eat jerky and a handful of dried apples, but they didn’t cook again until supper. They put ashore with the setting sun after a dozen hours on the water. Glass usually had an hour or so of dimming light to find game. The men waited with anticipation for the single shot that signaled his success. Rarely did he return to camp without meat.

  La Vierge jumped into the knee-deep water near the bank, careful to keep the bâtard’s fragile bottom from scraping against the sand. He waded ashore, securing the cordelle to a large piece of driftwood. Langevin, Professeur, and Dominique jumped out next, rifles in hand, scanning the tree line. Glass and Professeur covered the others from the canoe as they waded ashore, then followed. The day before, Glass found an abandoned campsite, including the stone rings of ten teepees. They had no way of knowing if it was Elk Tongue’s band, but the discovery put them on edge.

  The men pulled pipes and tobacco from the sacs au feu at their waists, passing a flame from a tiny fire set by Dominique. The two brothers sat on their butts in the sand. In their positions as bowsman and steersman, Dominique and La Vierge stood to paddle. As a consequence, they sat to smoke. The others stood, happy for the opportunity to stretch the kinks from their legs.

  The colder weather settled into Glass’s wounds the way a storm creeps its way up a mountain valley. He awoke each morning stiff and sore, his condition made worse by the long hours at his cramped perch in the bâtard. Glass took full advantage of the break, pacing up and down the sandbar to coax circulation through his aching limbs.

  He regarded his travel companions as he walked back toward them. The voyageurs were remarkably similar in dress, almost, thought Glass, as if they all had been issued a formal uniform. They wore red woolen caps with sides that could be turned down to cover their ears and a tassel trailing off the top. (La Vierge dressed his cap with a jaunty ostrich feather.) For shirts they wore long cotton blouses in white, red, or navy, tucked in at the waist. Each voyageur tied a parti-colored sash around his waist, its ends left to dangle down one leg or the other. Over the sash hung the sac au feu, keeping their pipes and a few other essentials close at hand. They wore doeskin breeches, supple enough to allow the comfortable folding of legs in a canoe. Below each knee they tied a bandanna, adding more dandy dash to their attire. On their feet they wore moccasins with no socks.

  With the exception of Charbonneau, who was gloomy as January rain, the voyageurs approached each waking moment with an infallibly cloudless optimism. They laughed at the slimmest opportunity. They showed little tolerance for silence, filling the day with unceasing and passionate discussion of women, water, and wild Indians. They fired constant insults back and forth. Indeed, to pass up an opportunity for a good joke was viewed as a character flaw, a sign of weakness. Glass wished he understood more French, if only for the entertainment value of following the banter that kept them all so jolly.

  In the rare moments when conversation lagged, someone would break out in zestful song, an instant cue for the others to join in. What they lacked in musical ability, they compensated in unbridled enthusiasm. All in all, thought Glass, an agreeable way of life.

  During this break, Langevin interrupted their brief rest with a rare moment of seriousness. “We need to start setting a sentry at night,” he said. “Two men each night, half shifts.”

  Charbonneau blew a long stream of smoke from his lungs. “I told you at Fort Brazeau—I translate. I don’t stand watch.”

  “Well, I’m not pulling extra watch so he can sleep,” stated La Vierge flatly.

  “Me either,” said Dominique.

  Even Professeur looked distressed.

  They all looked to Langevin expectantly, but he refused to allow the dispute to intrude on his enjoyment of the pipe. When he finished, he simply stood and said, “Allons-y. We’re wasting daylight.”

  Five days later they arrived at the confluence of the river and a small creek. The crystal water of the stream discolored quickly when it mixed with the muddy flow of the Missouri. Langevin stared at the stream, wondering what to do.

  “Let’s camp, Langevin,” said Charbonneau. “I’m sick of drinking mud.”

  “I hate to agree with him,” said La Vierge, “but Charbonneau’s right. All this bad water is giving me the shits.”

  Langevin too liked the prospect of clear drinking water. What bothered him was the location of the stream—on the western bank of the Missouri. He assumed that Elk Tongue’s band was west of the river. Since Glass found the recent Indian campsite, the deputation had hung scrupulously to the eastern bank, especially when deciding where to stop for the night. Langevin looked west, where the horizon swallowed the last crimson sliver of sun. He looked east, but there were no landings before the next bend in the river. “Okay. We don’t have much choice.”

  They paddled to the bank. Professeur and La Vierge unloaded the packs, and with the canoe empty, the voyageurs carried it ashore. There they flipped the boat on its side, creating a rough shelter that opened toward the river.

  Glass waded ashore, nervously scanning the landing. The sandbar ran a hundred yards downstream to natural jetty-mounded boulders overgrown with thick willows and brush. Driftwood and other debris caught behind the jetty, obstructing the river and forcing it away from the gentle bank. Beyond the sandbar, more willows led to a stand of cottonwoods, increasingly rare as they paddled north.

  “I’m hungry,” said Charbonneau. “Get us some good supper, Mr. Hunter.”

  Geet US some goood suPEUR, MeeSTER HunTEUR.

  “No hunting tonight,” said Glass. Charbonneau started to object, but Glass cut him off. “We’ve got plenty of jerky. You can go a night without fresh meat, Charbonneau.”

  “He’s right,” agreed Langevin.

  So they ate jerky along with fried mush, cooked in an iron skillet over a low fire. The fire drew them close. A bitter wind had diminished with the setting sun, but they could see their breath. The clear sky meant a cold night and a hard frost by morning.

  Langevin, Dominique, and La Vierge lit their clay pipes and sat back to enjoy a smoke. Glass had not smoked since the grizzly attack; the burning sensation hurt his throat. Professeur scraped mush from the skillet. Charbonneau had walked away from the camp a half hour before.

  Dominique sang quietly to himself, as if
daydreaming out loud:

  I have culled that lovely rosebud,

  I have culled that lovely rosebud,

  I have culled petal by petal,

  Filled my apron with its scent …

  “It’s a good thing you can sing about it, brother,” remarked La Vierge. “I bet you haven’t culled any rosebuds for a year. They ought to call you the Virgin.”

  “Better to go thirsty than to drink out of every mud hole on the Missouri.”

  “Such a man of standards. So discriminating.”

  “I don’t see a need to apologize for having standards. Unlike you, for example, I am quite fond of women with teeth.”

  “I’m not asking them to chew my food.”

  “You’d lay down with a pig if it wore a calico skirt.”

  “Well, I guess that makes you the pride of the Cattoire family. I’m sure Maman would be very proud to know that you only sleep with the fancy whores in St. Louis.”

  “Maman, no. Papa—maybe.” They both laughed loudly, then solemnly crossed themselves.

  “Keep your voices down,” hissed Langevin. “You know how sound carries on the water.”

  “Why are you so cross tonight, Langevin?” asked La Vierge. “It’s bad enough putting up with Charbonneau. I’ve had more fun at funerals.”

  “We’ll be having a funeral if you two keep yelling.”

  La Vierge refused to let Langevin spoil a good conversation. “Do you know that squaw back at Fort Kiowa had three nipples.”

  “What good are three nipples?” asked Dominique.

  “Your problem is that you lack imagination.”

  “Imagination, eh? If you had a little bit less imagination maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad when you piss.”

  La Vierge pondered a reply, but in truth, he had grown weary of conversation with his brother. Langevin clearly was not in a talking mood. Charbonneau was off in the woods. He looked at Professeur, with whom he’d never known anyone to have a conversation.