The boy felt the blunt pain of a forceful kick against his back and found himself lying facedown on the ground. He struggled to his hands and knees, looking up at Fitzgerald. The rage on Fitzgerald’s face seemed to merge with the distorted features of the wolf-skin hat. “Move, goddamn you!”
Bridger scrambled to his feet, wide-eyed and startled. He watched as Fitzgerald walked to Glass, who lay on his back with his few possessions piled next to him: a possibles bag, a knife in a beaded scabbard, a hatchet, the Anstadt, and a powder horn.
Fitzgerald stooped to pick up Glass’s possibles bag. He dug inside for the flint and steel, dropping them into the pocket on the front of his leather tunic. He grabbed the powder horn and slung it over his shoulder. The hatchet he tucked under his broad leather belt.
Bridger stared, uncomprehending. “What are you doing?”
Fitzgerald stooped again, picked up Glass’s knife, and tossed it to Bridger. “Take that.” Bridger caught it, staring in horror at the scabbard in his hand. Only the rifle remained. Fitzgerald picked it up, checking quickly to ensure it was charged. “Sorry, old Glass. You ain’t got much more use for any of this.”
Bridger was stunned. “We can’t leave him without his kit.”
The man in the wolf skin looked up briefly, then disappeared into the woods.
Bridger looked down at the knife in his hand. He looked at Glass, whose eyes glared directly into him, animated suddenly like coals beneath a bellows. Bridger felt paralyzed. Conflicting emotions fought inside of him, struggling to dictate his action, until one emotion came suddenly and overwhelmingly to prevail: He was afraid.
The boy turned and ran into the woods.
SEVEN
SEPTEMBER 2, 1823—MORNING
THERE WAS DAYLIGHT. Glass could tell that much without moving, but otherwise he had no idea of the time. He lay where he collapsed the day before. His rage had carried him to the edge of the clearing, but his fever stopped him there.
The bear had carved away at Glass from the outside and now the fever carved away from within. It felt to Glass as if he had been hollowed out. He shivered uncontrollably, yearning for the seeping warmth of a fire. Looking around the campsite, he saw that no smoke rose from the charred remains of the fire pits. No fire, no warmth.
He wondered if he could at least scoot back to his tattered blanket, and made a tentative effort to move. When he summoned his strength, the reply that issued back from his body was like a faint echo across a wide chasm.
The movement irritated something deep in his chest. He felt a cough coming on and tensed his stomach muscles to suppress it. The muscles were sore from numerous earlier battles, and despite his effort, the cough burst forth. Glass grimaced at the pain, like the extraction of a deep-set fishhook. It felt like his innards were being ripped out through his throat.
When the pain of coughing receded, he focused again on the blanket.
I have to get warm. It took all his strength to lift his head. The blanket lay about twenty feet away. He rolled from his side to his stomach, maneuvering his left arm out in front of his body. Glass bent his left leg, then straightened it to push. Between his one good arm and his one good leg, he push-dragged himself across the clearing. The twenty feet felt like twenty miles, and three times he stopped to rest. Each breath drew like a rasp through his throat, and he felt again the dull throbbing in his cleaved back. He stretched to grab the blanket when it came within reach. He pulled it around his shoulders, embracing the weighty warmth of the Hudson Bay wool. Then he passed out.
Through the long morning, Glass’s body fought against the infection of his wounds. He slipped between consciousness, unconsciousness, and a confusing state in between, aware of his surroundings like random pages of a book, scattered glimpses of a story with no continuity to bind them. When conscious, he wished desperately to sleep again, if only to gain respite from the pain. Yet each interlude of sleep came with a haunting precursor—the terrifying thought that he might never wake again. Is this what it’s like to die?
Glass had no idea how long he had been lying there when the snake appeared. He watched with a mixture of terror and fascination as it slid almost casually from the woods into the clearing. There was an element of caution; the snake paused on the open ground of the clearing, its tongue slithering in and out to test the air. On the whole, though, this was a predator in its element, in confident pursuit of prey. The snake began to move again, the slow serpentine motion accelerating suddenly to propel it with surprising speed. It went straight for him.
Glass wanted to roll away, but there was something inevitable about the way the snake moved. Some part of Glass remembered an admonishment to hold still in the presence of a snake. He froze, as much from hypnosis as from choice. The snake moved to within a few feet of his face and stopped. Glass stared, trying to mimic the serpent’s unblinking stare. He was no match. The snake’s black eyes were as unforgiving as the plague. He watched, mesmerized, as the snake wrapped itself slowly into a perfect coil, its entire body made for the sole purpose of launching forward in attack. The tongue moved in and out, testing, probing. From the midst of the coil, the snake’s tail began quivering back and forth, the rattle like a metronome marking the brief moments before death. The first strike came so quickly that Glass had no time to recoil. He stared down in horror as the rattler’s head shot forward, jaws distended to reveal fangs dripping with poison. The fangs sunk into Glass’s forearm. He screamed in pain as the venom coursed into his body. He shook his arm but the fangs held on, the snake’s body flailing with Glass’s arm through the air. Finally the snake dropped, its long body perpendicular to Glass’s torso. Before Glass could roll away, the snake rewound itself and struck again. Glass couldn’t scream this time. The serpent had buried its fangs in his throat.
Glass opened his eyes. The sun stood directly above him, the only angle from which it could throw light onto the floor of the clearing. He rolled gingerly to his side to avoid the glare. Ten feet away, a six-foot rattlesnake lay fully extended. An hour before it had swallowed a cottontail kit. Now a large lump distorted the snake’s proportions as the rabbit worked its way slowly down the serpent’s digestive tract.
Panicked, Glass looked down at his arm. There were no fang marks.
Gingerly, he touched his neck, half expecting to find a serpent attached. Nothing. Relief flooded over him as he realized the snake—or at least the snake bites—were the imagined horror of a nightmare. He looked again at the snake, torpid, as its body worked to digest its prey.