by Win Blevins
“I’m ready,” Fitzgerald said flatly. “You coming or staying?”
“I can’t go,” Bridger answered dully.
“Boy, I ain’t gonna argue with you. It don’t make no mind to me. But you know what they’re going to do to you, don’t you? Maybe stick slivers of pine into you and light ‘em, so you can burn slow. Maybe skin you alive. This ain’t no joke, boy, and no time for fancy notions.” Bridger said nothing. “Get the hell off your ass and let’s move! You ain’t ready to throw it all away yet, not for a corpse.”
Bridger felt like his body was moving, not himself, like his legs were part of someone else and had their own orders. His whole body felt very, very heavy.
“Get his gear on there quick. I want to move.” Bridger looked at Fitzgerald, unbelieving. Fitzgerald barked, “Get the gun and the knife and everything else put up here. You don’t leave a dead man’s things when you bury him. You take ‘em along. And we buried old Glass. You remember that, boy.”
Bridger didn’t look at Glass, but a glimpse out of the corner of one eye hinted that maybe Glass was trying to make a movement. He turned away. He walked alongside the horse in a stupor, and they were miles away before Bridger thought or felt anything again. Then he was violently angry, and maybe a little sick.
When Bridger and Fitzgerald left, Glass passed out. He didn’t know how many days went by before we woke up. At first he wanted to holler and get them to come running back. But he knew it had been too long.
His body felt hot and he was aching for water. His tongue was dry and swollen, filling his mouth. He started to roll toward the spring, felt pain hit him like a club, and almost lost consciousness. He rested for a long time. Then he calculated slowly how he could do it. He rolled once, hard. The pain took his breath away. Then, lying on his stomach, he pivoted slowly until his face slid into the wetness. He thought later that he might have slept a little before he drank. He noticed that the movements had gotten the bleeding started in thin trickles. He couldn’t feel the gashes separately. His whole body pained him, and it must be pain that was keeping half his consciousness away. He slept.
He woke up alive, and thought that was a good start. He wanted food. Another good sign: Dying men aren’t hungry. A half-dozen buffalo berries hung low enough to reach, after he rolled onto his back. He would wait until tomorrow to try for more.
The next day Glass felt clearer in his head. First the berries: He had an idea. He would scoot to the base of the bush and put his weight on the branches, forcing them to the ground and breaking them so they would stay. Afterwards he felt like he had been trampled by a horse. He rested a long time before he scooted out to get the berries and spent the rest of the day in a kind of daydream.
He kept seeing Fitzgerald and Bridger leaving. He could go backwards some in his mind and hear the words they said before they left—not all of them and not clearly, but some of the words. Then he saw Bridger taking off his possibles and the two of them leave him empty-handed. When he woke up the next morning, Glass knew for the first time what had happened to him. He could put it in order in his mind. He spoke his first words, and they made him sure of it: “Sons of bitches went off and left me to die. Took everything I had.”
He spent the rest of the day mulling over that. Come morning, he had decided that he was going to get out of this hole, get up the river, and square accounts with Bridger and Fitzgerald. The ache to get square came on him like a new fever.
On the following day the desire for vengeance got a lucky break. Waking up from a nap, he saw a rattlesnake lazing nearby. It had just eaten a bird, and was swollen in the middle to the size of a man’s fist. Hugh knew that he wouldn’t even have to be especially agile. He slammed the rock down just in back of the rattler’s head four or five times, cutting it in half. Then he shredded the meat, soaked the pieces in water, and fed himself like a baby. His medicine was good.
And when the sun came up one morning, just far enough to warm things, he decided: He might as well move today as any day. He felt pretty good. He didn’t know how many days had gone by since he met the grizzly, but enough of them. He might as well start for Fort Kiowa today.
Fort Kiowa it would have to be. That was a lot closer than Fort Henry. It was also generally downhill. And he could follow the river. A man who couldn’t walk had best stay next to his water and not set out across country toward the Yellowstone.
Because Hugh couldn’t walk yet. He figured that if he waited til he could, his wait would outlast his food. Eating was his biggest worry. A lone man could make out in the Dakota, even if he was crawling, if he had a gun to shoot buffler and a knife to cut it with. But those sons of bitches had taken both his knife and his rifle. Well, he would eat roots. Living with the Pawnees and knowing their ways came in handy sometimes.
Before that day was half over, he collapsed with weariness. He had begun by crawling along the creek. With every movement one of his wounds opened and bled. He nearly passed out a couple of times from the pain and was so weak that he felt like he was carrying a mule on his back. He had only been able to make about a mile that day, and he told himself that he would have to do better tomorrow because he didn’t figure to get any stronger just eating roots. But telling himself didn’t help. He wasn’t sure that he could move at all tomorrow.
He did move, though. Another mile, and it felt about the same. On the third day he thought he went somewhat farther. But he would never make two hundred and fifty miles this way.
A couple of days later he heard wolves yipping close by on a plain. He crawled up the bank to take a look. They were harassing a buffalo calf. He watched with desperate hope while they brought the calf down and began to tear away the flesh ravenously. He waited and waited, calculating what he was going to do, until the calf was nearly half gone. He had to have that meat. But he had no hope of scaring off the wolves if he went up on all fours. They would see that he was a crippled man and would attack, as a predator will attack any crippled enemy. He bided his time and got set in his mind.
At last the wolves slowed down in their gorging. They were full now, feeling heavy of belly and sluggish. Glass, taking along his driftwood club, crawled to within fifty yards of the carcass. Already the wolves had noticed him and were beginning to stir. He couldn’t wait any longer. Leaning heavily on the club, he tried to stand up for the first time since old Ephraim downed him. His mind reeled and he felt like his body must be swaying like an old bull shot and about to fall. When he began to steady, he held onto the club and let loose with a fantastic screech, a Pawnee war cry. The wolves scattered a few feet and then began to ease back toward the calf. He walked straight forward now, depending on the club, letting loose with the screech again and again, rocking like a dinghy pitching on a heavy sea. The wolves slunk off.
When he reached the calf, Glass knelt down slowly, clinging to his crutch, trying not to break his wounds open any worse. What blood he was losing, he thought, we would get back right here. He tore at the raw flesh, and he stuffed great chunks into his mouth. I’m gonna live, he thought, I’m gonna live.
Hugh stayed by the carcass for several days, sleeping on the lee side at night, gorging himself on liver and heart and blood and intestine during the day. He stayed until the flesh began to go so bad that even he could smell it, used to it as he was.
When he left that spot, he was walking upright. It made him feel like a lord. Now he was high enough to see over the scrub brush that covered the plains. He could watch for bears or Indians. He might be able to kill a rabbit or badger if he was lucky and quick. But most of all it just felt different with his head up. Instead of staring into the sandy soil all the time, he could look around from horizon to horizon. He felt like a man again, not a four-legged critter.
His wounds were better now. They all seemed to be on the way to healing except for a bad one that was infected on his back where he couldn’t reach it. If he went slow and steady, he could make ten miles in a day now. He did go slow and steady. His mind bounced betwee
n jubilation at being alive to ornery vengefulness at having been left to die alone. The two drove him down the Grand River to where it meets the Missouri and south along the great river toward Fort Kiowa. There Ashley was known and an Ashley man’s credit would be good. He would get a new outfit, gun, knife, flint, powder, ball, and other possibles. And from there he would turn around, head upriver, and get the men who abandoned him.
He made Fort Kiowa in the second week of October. It had been seven weeks since the grizzly had had her whacks at him. He had survived six of those weeks alone, and had risen from the state of near-corpse to crawl and walk some two hundred and fifty miles through hostile territory with no way to get meat and no protection from the marauding Rees.
It astounded the trader Cayewa Brazeau, who ran Fort Kiowa.
Hugh was proud, but he was not enough impressed with himself to give his battered body a rest. Brazeau was outfitting a mackinaw to go up to the Mandan villages. The wilderness grapevine reported that the Rees had bought a village from the Mandans, who lived in permanent huts and not tipis. The Rees had given the peaceful Mandans the promise of good behavior. Brazeau thought that now might be the time for a peaceful mission to reestablish trade with both tribes.
He had six men, led by Antoine Citoluex and including the famous Charbonneau, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, to make the journey. He was glad to add a seventy hand, Hugh Glass—though he must have thought the fellow was a bit queer, stating right out like that. After what Hugh had been through, though, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. He’d made up his mind to the thing.
Citoleux was nervous. He made his will, just in case. The party began to get close to the Mandan villages, in what is now North Dakota, in the fourth week of November. Abruptly Charbonneau decided to get out and walk. The Ree village was a mile south of the Mandan village, and Tilton’s force was up by the Mandans. Charbonneau wanted to circle around the Ree village on the west bank and go directly into Tilton’s Fort. His medicine told him something. He trusted the Mandans but not the Rees. The Frenchmen who made up the boat’s crew just laughed.
The next day Glass also put into shore. The Missouri makes a considerable bend just below the villages. Hugh had no business at the villages or the Fort. He could move faster and over a shorter route cutting overland. So he set out.
A few miles across he saw several squaws. Rees, he noticed. They disappeared quickly. Glass figured they had gone for their men, and he started running. His wounds still bothered him some, and he couldn’t make much time. Soon several braves came after him, mounted and screeching. Hugh saw he didn’t have a chance. Maybe his luck, which had gotten him through two impossible situations, had just played out. Just when the Rees were within rifle shot, Glass heard hooves from the opposite direction. Mandans. Being ridden down from two sides, Hugh just stood and waited for whatever was going to happen. One of the Mandans pulled him up on the horse behind, and sprinted off toward the upper village.
The Rees had attracted the Mandan’s attention with their whooping. The Mandans were tired of the Rees’ troublemaking, and afraid that the whites might take their revenge against both tribes. So they delivered Hugh to their village when he found Charbonneau. That evening, at the fort, they got the news that the party in the mackinaw had been slaughtered on the river by the Rees.
Hugh figured, with what he had come through, he didn’t have much to worry about traveling on to Fort Henry. The next day he took off, only taking the precaution of walking along the east bank of the Missouri where he was less likely to run into Rees, Assiniboins, or Blackfeet. Most tribes were unpredictable; the Blackfeet, alone among the Plains tribes, were always hostile to whites. Had been, since John Colter had run away from them. Last time he heard, they had been plaguing Fort Henry like devils.
The snow was a foot deep now. Sometimes the wind swept down cuttingly from the north. The Missouri here flows through country bare of timber, and the wind could run unobstructed for miles. He hunted along the way, spent some cold nights, and got within sight of Fort Henry, three hundred river miles from the Mandans, in less than three weeks. He tied some logs together with bark to cross the icy river. But he had already begun to suspect that something was wrong.
In the fort he found only some friendly Sioux, exercising squatters’ rights. The Henry brigade had gone up the Yellowstone River, they said, to the Big Horn. That doubled the length of Hugh’s lone journey, and took him still higher into mountain country. He started straight out through the snow.
On the night of December 31, 1823, Andrew Henry’s brigade was celebrating the new year inside the new Fort Henry. They had reason: They had relocated from Blackfoot country to Crow country, after losing life after life to the Blackfeet. The Crows seemed nothing but friendly. The trapping in the fall hunt had equaled the Missouri trapping, if not topped it. They were finally about to take some beaver and take some money. They had found Indians who would trade pelts instead of stealing them. The country was good, sheltered enough, and with plenty of buffalo for the long winter. Life looked good.
They barely heard the pounding on the gate above the howling wind. Someone stumbled through the driving snow to open up for whatever Indians might be there. What he saw he couldn’t believe for a moment: The grizzled, hoar-frosted ghost of Hugh Glass, his hair, beard, and buckskins whitened by caked ice. Glass strode on into the room where the men were celebrating. The debauch stopped dead.
“It’s Glass you’re seeing,” Hugh said bluntly. “Where’s Fitzgerald and Bridger?” One man edged forward and touched Hugh to see if he was solid. The other barraged him with questions he couldn’t sort out, much less answer.
“It’s Glass,” he said. “Fitzgerald and Bridger went off and left me, goddamn ‘em. Even took my rifle and my possibles. I been to Kiowa and the Mandans and I come to square with them. Where are they?”
Henry said that Fitzgerald was gone—gone downriver—given up and returned to the settlements. Why, Glass must have passed him on the river, him and Black Harris, going down in a canoe. Henry stalled a bit. Harris was taking an express down to Ashley, he went on, and Fitzgerald and another fellow went with him—mustered out, just quit. Looks like Fitzgerald wasn’t much account anyway.
“Don’t back me off,” Glass snapped. “Where in hell’s Bridger?”
Stuck, Henry just pointed into a corner. Bridger had been shrinking there since Glass materialized from the dead. He had been shouldering a secret, festering wrong all these months, relieved only by the knowledge that dead men tell no tales. And here stood a dead man, sent by the devils of hell against Jim Bridger, who more than half believed in ghosts. Stunned, he could hardly keep his mind conscious against the welling of guilt, hardly considering whether this specter were dead or alive.
Hugh stared at the man he had pursued for a thousand miles. Bridger had the look of a man ready to be killed and go to hell for his mortal sin. He wasn’t going to say anything. He looked pathetic, and pathetically young.
One of the two men he had pursued, Glass corrected himself. He remembered the scene of the two leaving him, and Bridger coming over and taking the rifle and the knife. He hated Bridger. He remembered what he could of the words Fitzgerald had hit Bridger with at the time, words that struck fear into the boy. Glass wavered. Bridger had committed the unpardonable sin, not of God, but of the mountain man: Never skip out on your friends in a fix. Glass glared at him. But he was just a boy.
“It’s Glass, Bridger—the one you left to die, and not only left, but robbed. Robbed them of things as might have helped him survive, alone and crippled, on them plains. I came back because I swore I’d put you under. I had that notion in front of me when I crawled across the prairie starving and walked up the river alone, just to get the job done, to make you a dead niggur like you tried to make me. But I see you’re ashamed and sorry.
“I think you might have stayed by me if Fitzgerald hadn’t got on you. You don’t have to be afraid of me. You’re just a kid. For your youth, I for
give you.”
Bridger’s face didn’t show relief, or anything else in particular. He looked dazed, maybe sick. Glass felt lighter and easier, having gotten out all those words at once. He sat down, someone handed him a glass of whisky, and within a few minutes he had passed out.
Bridger felt almost nauseated with guilt and shame. He had been let off because he was a kid. He’d rather have been put under there and then.
When Glass woke up, he lazed around, thinking of starting downriver after Fitzgerald. The laze stretched on for several days. The idea didn’t seem to be goading him quite as hard now. He told himself that it was a bad winter, and he might as well wait for better weather. And he listened to himself.
In a few more days Glass found his vendetta route: Henry wanted to send a dispatch to Ashley. He intended to tell Ashley about the abandoning of the original Fort Henry, the new post among the Crows, and the upswing in business. And he wanted to add some bad news—that Ashley had better find a new partner. Major Andrew Henry, who had been run out of the mountains by Blackfeet in 1810, had lost a lot of men and horses to the Blackfeet the last two years, and had had five casualties among thirteen men of last autumn’s cross-country to the mouth of the Yellowstone, didn’t care that business was looking good. Henry was the unluckiest brigade captain who ever led men into the mountains. He meant to quit the business, and fast—as soon as spring broke up the ice and he could get a boat down the Missouri.
And who better to take the message down to Ashley than Hugh Glass, who was demonstrably the luckiest man in the mountains and kept coming up when he should have gone down? As for Hugh, it meant he would be paid handsomely to make a trip he was going to make anyway, to get his revenge.
The dispatch had to go to Fort Atkinson, where it could be taken by government courier to Ashley in St. Louis. At the fort, Hugh would make inquiries about Fitzgerald, and track the bastard down. Four men, Marsh, Chapman, More, and Dutton, decided to go along to give the party some strength: two were going for company money, and two were quitting the mountains.
