The Crow, in particular, were flush with horses. Murphy traded for seventy-two of the animals. Streams spilled off the nearby Big Horn Mountains, and Captain Henry set out a plan for the aggressive deployment of his newly mobile trappers.
For two weeks, Henry kept checking his back, as if misfortune must be stalking him from behind. He allowed himself the smallest bit of optimism. Maybe my luck has changed? It had not.
* * *
Hugh Glass stood before the remnants of Fort Union. The gate itself lay flat on the ground, its hinge carried off when Captain Henry abandoned the post. The indignities of the failed venture continued inside. All of the metal hinges had been removed, salvaged, Glass assumed, for use at their next destination. Logs had been torn from the palisades, apparently used as firewood by the boorish visitors who followed Henry’s departure. One of the bunkhouses had a blackened wall from what appeared to be a halfhearted attempt to fire the fort. Dozens of horse tracks had churned the snow in the yard.
I’m chasing a mirage. How many days had he walked—crawled toward this moment? He thought back to the clearing by the spring on the Grand River. What month was that? August? What is it now? December?
Glass climbed the crude ladder to the blockhouse, scanning the whole valley from the top. A quarter mile away he saw the rusty smudge of a dozen antelope, pawing through the snow to nibble at sage. A big “V” of geese, wings locked to land, settled on the river. Otherwise there were no signs of life. Where are they?
He camped for two nights in the fort, unable to simply walk away from the destination he had so long pursued. Yet he knew his true aim was not a place, but two people—two people and two final, vengeful acts.
* * *
Glass followed the Yellowstone from Fort Union. He could only guess at Henry’s path, but he doubted that the captain would risk a repeat of his failure on the Upper Missouri. That left the Yellowstone.
He had followed the Yellowstone for five days when he crested a high bench above the river. He stopped, awestruck.
Fusing heaven to earth, the Big Horn Mountains stood before him. A few clouds swirled around the highest peaks, furthering the illusion of a wall reaching forever upward. His eyes watered from the glare of the sun against snow, but he could not look away. Nothing in Glass’s twenty years on the plains had prepared him for such mountains.
Captain Henry had spoken often of the enormity of the Rockies, but Glass assumed his stories were infused with the standard dose of campfire embellishment. In actuality, Glass thought, Henry’s portrait had been woefully inadequate. Henry was a straightforward man, and his descriptions focused on the mountains as obstacles, barriers to be surmounted in the drive to connect a stream of commerce between east and west. Missing entirely from Henry’s description had been any hint of the devout strength that flowed into Glass at the sight of the massive peaks.
Of course he understood Henry’s more practical reaction. The terrain of the river valleys was difficult enough. Glass could scarcely imagine the effort required to portage furs over mountains such as those before him now.
His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.
And so he walked, day after day, toward the mountains at the end of the plain.
* * *
Fitzgerald stood outside the crude stockade, enduring the interrogation of the runty, coughing man on the rampart above the gate.
Fitzgerald had practiced the lie during his long days in the canoe. “I’m carrying a message to St. Louis for Captain Henry of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.”
“Rocky Mountain Fur Company?” The runty man snorted. “We just saw another of yours headed the other direction—bad-mannered fellow riding double with a redskin. In fact, if you’re from his company, you can make good on his draft.”
Fitzgerald felt his stomach contract and his breath drew suddenly short. The white man on the river! He struggled to keep his voice calm, nonchalant. “I must have missed him on the river. What was his name?”
“Don’t even recall his name. We gave him a couple of things and he left.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Well, I do remember that. Scars all over his face, like he’d been chewed on by a wild animal.”
Glass! Alive! Goddamn him!
Fitzgerald traded two plews for jerky, eager to get back on the water.
No longer content to drift with the current, he paddled to propel the dugout forward. Forward and away. Glass might be headed in the opposite direction, thought Fitzgerald, but he harbored no doubt about the old bastard’s intent.
TWENTY-ONE
DECEMBER 31, 1823
SNOW BEGAN FALLING about halfway through the day. The storm clouds approached casually, obscuring the sun so gradually that Henry and his men took little notice.
They had no reason to be concerned. Their refurbished fort stood complete, ready to withstand whatever challenges the elements might present. Besides, Captain Henry had declared the day a celebration. Then he had broken out a surprise that resulted in delirious excitement among his men—alcohol.
Henry was a failure at many things, but he understood the power of incentives. Henry’s brew was made from yeast and serviceberries, buried for a month in a barrel to allow fermentation. The resulting concoction tasted like acid. None of the men could drink it without wincing in pain, and none of them passed up the opportunity. The liquid resulted in a profound and almost immediate state of drunkenness.
Henry had a second bonus for his men. He was a decent fiddle player, and for the first time in months, his mood lifted sufficiently to pick up his battered instrument. The shrieking fiddle combined with drunken laughter to create a foundation of jovial chaos in the crowded bunkhouse.
A good part of the merriment centered around Pig, whose obese carcass lay sprawled in front of the fireplace. Pig’s capacity for alcohol, it turned out, did not match his girth.
“Looks like he’s dead,” said Black Harris, kicking him squarely in the belly. Harris’s foot disappeared momentarily in the squishy fat around Pig’s midsection, but otherwise the kick evoked no response.
“Well if he’s dead…” said Patrick Robinson, a quiet man who most of the trappers had never heard speak before the application of Henry’s moonshine, “we owe him a decent burial.”