The Revenant

He was clumsy with his left hand, and it took several attempts to find the right rhythm, moving the bow in a steady motion without losing his grip on the spindle stick. Soon, though, he had the spindle twirling smoothly. After several minutes, smoke began to rise from the hole. Suddenly the tinder burst into flames. He grabbed cattail cotton and set it to the lick of flame, protecting it with a cupped hand. When the cotton caught fire, he transferred the flame to the tinder in the small pit. He felt the wind whip across his back, and panicked for an instant that it would extinguish the flame, but the tinder caught, then the dry grass. In a few minutes he was feeding the buffalo chips into a small blaze.

There wasn’t much meat left by the time he skinned the tiny rodents and removed their entrails. Still, it was fresh. If his trapping technique was time-consuming, at least it had the benefit of simplicity.

Glass was still ravenous as he picked at the tiny rib cage of the last rodent. He resolved to stop earlier the next day. Perhaps dig pits in two locations. The thought of slower progress irritated him. How long could he avoid Arikara on the banks of the well-traveled Grand? Don’t do that. Don’t look too far ahead. The goal each day is tomorrow morning.

With his dinner cooked, the fire no longer merited its risk. He covered it with sand and went to sleep.

TEN

SEPTEMBER 15, 1823

TWIN BUTTES FRAMED THE VALLEY in front of Glass, forcing the Grand River through a narrow channel between. Glass remembered the buttes from the trip upriver with Captain Henry. As he crawled farther east along the Grand, distinctive features became increasingly rare. Even the cottonwoods seemed to have been swallowed by the sea of prairie grass.

Henry and the fur brigade had camped near the buttes, and Glass intended to stop in the same spot, hoping that something useful might have been left behind. In any event, he remembered that the high bank near the buttes made good shelter. Great stacks of black thunderheads sat ominously on the western horizon. The storm would be overhead in a couple of hours, and he wanted to dig in before it hit.

Glass crawled along the river to the campsite. A ring of blackened stones marked a recent fire. He remembered that the fur brigade had camped with no fire, and wondered who had followed behind them. He stopped, removed the possibles bag and blanket from his back, and took a long drink from the river. Behind him, the cut bank created the shelter he remembered. He scanned up and down the river, watchful for signs of Indians, disappointed that the vegetation looked sparse. He felt the familiar rumble of hunger, and wondered if there was enough cover to dig an effective mouse pit. Is it worth the effort? He weighed the benefits of shelter against the benefits of food. Rodents had sustained him now for a week. Still, Glass knew he was treading water—not drowning, but making no progress toward a safer shore.

A light breeze heralded the approaching clouds, cool across the sweat on his back. Glass turned from the river and crawled up the high bank to check on the storm.

What lay beyond the rim of the bank took his breath away. Thousands of buffalo grazed in the vale below the butte, blackening the plain for a solid mile. A great bull stood sentry no more than fifty yards in front of him. The animal stood close to seven feet at the hump. The shaggy shawl of tawny fur on top of its black body accentuated the powerful head and shoulders, making the horns seem almost redundant. The bull snorted and sniffed at the air, frustrated by the swirling breeze. Behind the bull, a cow wallowed on her back, lifting a cloud of dust. A dozen other cows and calves grazed obliviously nearby.

Glass had glimpsed his first buffalo on the Texas plains. Since then he had seen them, in herds great and herds small, on a hundred different occasions. Yet the sight of the animals never failed to fill him with awe, awe for their infinite numbers, awe for the prairie that sustained them.

A hundred yards downstream from Glass, a pack of eight wolves also watched the great bull and the outliers he guarded. The alpha male sat on his haunches near a clump of sage. All afternoon he had waited patiently for the moment that just arrived, the moment when a gap emerged between the outliers and the rest of the herd. A gap. A fatal weakness. The big wolf raised himself suddenly to all fours.

The alpha male stood tall but narrow. His legs seemed ungainly, knobby and somehow oddly proportioned to his coal-black body. His two pups wrestled playfully near the river. Some of the wolves lay sleeping, placid as barnyard hounds. Taken together, the animals seemed more like pets than predators, though they all perked to life at the sudden movement from the big male.

It wasn’t until the wolves began to move that their lethal strength became obvious. The strength was not derivative of muscularity or grace. Rather it flowed from a single-minded intelligence that made their movements deliberate, relentless. The individual animals converged into a lethal unit, cohering in the collective strength of the pack.

The alpha male trotted toward the gap between the outliers and the herd, breaking into a full run after a few yards. The pack fanned out behind him with a precision and unity of purpose that struck Glass as almost military. The pack poured into the gap. Even the pups seemed to grasp the purpose of their enterprise. Buffalo on the edge of the main herd retreated, pushing their calves in front of them before turning outward, shoulder to shoulder in a line against the wolves. The gap widened with the movement of the main herd, stranding the bull and a dozen other buffalo outside its perimeter.

The great bull charged, catching one wolf with its horn and tossing the yelping animal twenty feet. The wolves snarled and growled, snapping with brutal fangs at exposed flanks. Most of the outliers broke for the main herd, realizing instinctively that their safety lay in numbers.

The alpha male nipped at the tender haunch of a calf. Confused, the calf broke away from the herd, toward the steep bank by the river. Collectively aware of the deadly error, the pack fell instantly behind its prey. Bawling as it ran, the calf dashed wildly ahead. It tumbled over the bank, snapping its leg in the fall. The calf struggled to regain its feet. Its broken leg dangled in an odd direction and then collapsed completely when the calf tried to plant it. The calf fell to the ground and the pack was on it. Fangs planted themselves in every part of its body. The alpha male sunk its teeth into the tender throat and ripped.

The calf’s last stand took place no more than seventy-five yards down the bank from Glass. He watched with a mixture of fascination and fear, glad that his vantage point lay downwind. The pack focused its complete attention on the calf. The alpha male and his mate ate first, their bloody snouts buried in the soft underbelly. They let the pups eat, but not the others. Occasionally another wolf would slink up to the fallen prey, only to be sent scrambling by a snap or snarl from the big black male.