He learned his lesson. He spent the rest of the daylight hours carving small bits of meat with the razor, pounding them between two rocks to break down the fibrous flesh, and then mixing each bite with a mouthful of spring water. It was an arduous way to eat, and Glass still felt hungry when he reached the tail. It was worrisome, since he doubted that his next meal would be delivered to him so easily.
In the last moments of daylight he examined the rattles at the tip of the tail. There were ten, one added in each year of the snake’s life. Glass had never seen a snake with ten rattles. A long time, ten years. Glass thought about the snake, surviving, thriving for a decade on the strength of its brutal attributes. And then a single mistake, a moment of exposure in an environment without tolerance, dead and devoured almost before its blood ceased to pump. He cut the rattles from the remains of the snake and fingered them like a rosary. After a while he dropped them into his possibles bag. When he looked at them, he wanted to remember.
It was dark. Glass pulled his blanket around him, hunched his back, and fell asleep.
He awoke thirsty and hungry from a fitful sleep. Every wound ached.
Three hundred and fifty miles to Fort Kiowa. He knew he couldn’t allow himself to think about it, not in its totality. A mile at a time. He set the Grand as his first goal. He’d been unconscious when the brigade veered off the main river up the spring creek, but from Bridger and Fitzgerald’s discussions he assumed it lay near.
Glass pulled the Hudson Bay blanket from his shoulders. With the razor, he cut three long strips from the wool cloth. He wrapped the first around his left knee—his good knee. He would need a pad if he was going to crawl. The other two strips he wrapped around his palms, leaving the fingers free. He rolled up the rest of the blanket and looped the long strap of the possibles bag around both ends. He checked to make sure the bag was tied firmly shut, then situated the bag and blanket across his back. The strap he wore around both shoulders, leaving his hands free.
Glass took a long drink from the creek and began to crawl. Actually, it wasn’t a crawl so much as a scooting sort of drag. He could use his right arm for balance, but it would not support his weight. His right leg he could only string along behind him. He had worked to loosen the muscles by bending and straightening the leg, but it remained as rigid as a flagpole.
He fell into the best rhythm he could manage. With his right hand as a sort of outrigger, he kept his weight on his left side, leaning forward on his left arm, pulling up his left knee, then dragging his stiff right leg behind him. Over and over, yard after yard. He stopped several times to adjust the blanket and the possibles bag. His hurky-jerk motion kept loosening the ties of his pack. Eventually he found the right series of knots to keep the bundle in place.
For a while the wool strips on his knee and palms worked fairly well, though they required frequent adjustment. He had failed to consider the effect of dragging his right leg. His moccasin provided protection to the lower part of his foot, but did not cover his ankle. Within a hundred yards he had developed an abrasion, and stopped to cut a strip of blanket for the area in contact with the ground.
It took him almost two hours to crawl down the creek to the Grand.
By the time he arrived at the river, his legs and arms ached from the awkward, unaccustomed motion. He stared down at the old tracks of the brigade and wondered by what providence the Indians had not seen them.
Though he would never see it, the explanation lay clearly on the opposite bank. Had he crossed the river, he would have found the enormous prints of a bear spread throughout a patch of serviceberries. Just as clear were the tracks of the five Indian ponies. In an irony that Glass would never appreciate, it was a grizzly bear that saved him from the Indians. Like Fitzgerald, the bear had discovered the berry patch near the Grand. The animal was gorging itself when the five Arikara warriors rode up the river. In fact it was the scent of the bear that had made the pinto skittish. Confused by the sight and smell of five mounted Indians, the bear lumbered into the brush. The hunters charged after it, never to notice the tracks on the opposite bank.
Once Glass emerged from the protective shelter of the pines, the horizon broadened in a landscape broken only by rolling buttes and scattered clumps of cottonwoods. Thick willows along the river impeded his ability to crawl forward, but did little to block the penetrating heat of the late morning sun. He felt the rivulets of sweat across his back and chest and the sting of salt when it seeped into his wounds. He took one last drink from the cool spring creek. He gazed upriver between swallows, giving one last consideration to the idea of direct pursuit. Not yet.
The frustrating necessity of delay was like water on the hot iron of his determination—hardening it, making it unmalleable. He vowed to survive, if for no other reason than to visit vengeance on the men who betrayed him.
Glass crawled for three more hours that day. He guessed he had covered two miles. The Grand’s banks varied, with alternating stretches of sand, grass, and rock. Had he been able to stand, there were frequent stretches of shallow water, and Glass could have crossed the river frequently to take advantage of the easiest terrain.
But crossing was not an option for Glass, whose crawling relegated him to the north bank. The rocks created particular difficulty. By the time he stopped, the woolen pads were in tatters. The wool succeeded in keeping abrasions from forming, but it could not stop the bruising. His knee and his palms were black-and-blue, tender to the touch. The muscle in his left arm began to cramp, and once again he felt the quivering weakness from a lack of food. As he anticipated, no easy source of meat fell into his path. For the time being, his subsistence would have to come from plants.
From his time with the Pawnee, Glass possessed a broad familiarity with the plants of the plains. Cattails grew in plentiful clumps wherever the terrain flattened to create marshy backwaters, their furry brown heads capping slender green stalks as high as four feet. Glass used a stave to dig up the root stalks, peeled away the outer skin, and ate the tender shoots. While cattails grew thickly in the marsh, so too did mosquitoes. They buzzed incessantly around the exposed skin on his head, neck, and arms. He ignored them for a while as he dug hungrily among the cattails. Eventually, he gnawed the edge off his hunger, or at least fed his hunger sufficiently that he worried more about the stinging bites of the mosquitoes. He crawled another hundred yards down the river. There was no escaping the mosquitoes at that hour, but their numbers diminished away from the stagnant water of the marsh.
For three days he crawled down the Grand River. Cattails continued to be plentiful, and Glass found a variety of other plants that he knew to be edible—onions, dandelions, even willow leaves. Twice he happened upon berries, stopping each time to gorge himself, picking until his fingers were purple from the juice.