The hurtling form stopped cold at the explosion of the shot, the distance now close enough to perceive the wide eyes and heaving chest. It was Bridger. “I … I … I…” A panicked stammer paralyzed him.
“What happened, Bridger?” demanded the captain, peering beyond the boy into the darkness downstream. The trappers had fallen into a defensive semicircle with the embankment behind them. Most had assumed a firing position, perched on one knee, rifles at full cock.
“I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to fire. I heard a sound, a crash in the brush. I stood up and I guess the hammer slipped. It just went off.”
“More likely you fell asleep.” Fitzgerald uncocked his rifle and rose from his knee. “Every buck for five miles is headed our way now.”
Bridger started to speak, but searched in vain for the words to express the depth of his shame and regret. He stood there, open-mouthed, staring in horror at the men arrayed before him.
Glass stepped forward, pulling Bridger’s smoothbore from his hands.
He cocked the musket and pulled the trigger, catching the hammer with his thumb before the flint struck the frisson. He repeated the action. “This is a poor excuse for a weapon, Captain. Give him a decent rifle and we’ll have fewer problems on watch.” A few of the men nodded their heads.
The Captain looked first at Glass, then at Bridger, and he said, “Anderson, Fitzgerald—it’s your watch.” The two men took their positions, one upstream and one down.
The sentries were redundant. No one slept in the few hours remaining before dawn.
THREE
AUGUST 24, 1823
HUGH GLASS STARED DOWN at the cloven tracks, the deep indentions clear as newsprint in the soft mud. Two distinct sets began at the river’s edge, where the deer must have drunk, and then trailed into the heavy cover of the willows. The persistent work of a beaver had carved a trail, now trod by a variety of game. Dung lay piled next to the tracks, and Glass stooped to touch the pea-sized pellets—still warm.
Glass looked west, where the sun still perched high above the plateau that formed the distant horizon. He guessed there were three hours before sunset. Still early, but it would take the captain and the rest of the men an hour to catch up. Besides, it was an ideal campsite. The river folded gently against a long bar and gravel bank. Beyond the willows, a stand of cottonwoods offered cover for their campfires and a supply of firewood. The willows were ideal for smoke racks. Glass noticed plum trees scattered among the willows, a lucky break. They could grind pemmican from the combined fruit and meat. He looked downriver. Where’s Black Harris?
In the hierarchy of challenges the trappers faced each day, obtaining food was the most immediate. Like other challenges, it involved a complicated balancing of benefits and risks. They carried virtually no food with them, especially since abandoning the flatboats on the Missouri and proceeding on foot up the Grand. A few men still had tea or sugar, but most were down to a bag of salt for preserving meat. Game was plentiful on this stretch of the Grand, and they could have dined on fresh meat each night. But harvesting game meant shooting, and the sound of a rifle carried for miles, revealing their position to any foe within earshot.
Since leaving the Missouri, the men had held closely to a pattern. Each day, two scouted ahead of the others. For the time being their path was fixed—they simply followed the Grand. The scouts’ primary responsibilities were to avoid Indians, select a campsite, and find food. They shot fresh game every few days.
After shooting a deer or buffalo calf, the scouts prepared the camp for the evening. They bled the game, gathered wood, and set two or three small fires in narrow, rectangular pits. Smaller fires produced less smoke than a single conflagration, while also offering more surface for smoking meat and more sources of heat. If enemies did spot them at night, more fires gave the illusion of more men.
Once flames were burning, the scouts butchered their game, pulling choice cuts for immediate consumption and cutting thin strips with the rest. They constructed crude racks with green willow branches, rubbed the meat strips with a little salt and hung them just above the flames. It wasn’t the type of jerky they would make in a permanent camp, which would keep for months. But the meat would keep for several days, enough to last until the next fresh game.
Glass stepped from the willows into a clearing, scanning for the deer he knew must be just ahead.
He saw the cubs before he saw the sow. There was a pair, and they tumbled toward him, bawling like playful dogs. The cubs had been dropped in the spring, and at five months weighed a hundred pounds each. They nipped at each other as they bore down on Glass, and for the briefest of instants the scene had a near comic quality. Transfixed by the whirling motion of the cubs, Glass had not raised his glance to the far end of the clearing, fifty yards away. Nor had he yet to calculate the certain implication of their presence.
Suddenly he knew. A hollowness seized his stomach half an instant before the first rumbling growl crossed the clearing. The cubs skidded to an immediate stop, not ten feet in front of Glass. Ignoring the cubs now, Glass peered toward the brush line across the clearing.
He heard her size before he saw it. Not just the crack of the thick underbrush that the sow moved aside like short grass, but the growl itself, a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree, a bass that could emanate only through connection with some great mass.
The growl crescendoed as she stepped into the clearing, black eyes staring at Glass, head low to the ground as she processed the foreign scent, a scent now mingling with that of her cubs. She faced him head-on, her body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard. Glass marveled at the animal’s utter muscularity, the thick stumps of her forelegs folding into massive shoulders, and above all the silvery hump that identified her as a grizzly.
Glass struggled to control his reaction as he processed his options. His reflex, of course, screamed at him to flee. Back through the willows. Into the river. Perhaps he could dive low and escape downstream. But the bear was already too close for that, barely a hundred feet in front of him. His eyes searched desperately for a cottonwood to climb; perhaps he could scramble out of reach, then shoot from above. No, the trees were behind the bear. Nor did the willows provide sufficient cover. His options dwindled to one: Stand and shoot. One chance to stop the grizzly with a .53 caliber ball from the Anstadt.
The grizzly charged, roaring with the focused hate of protective maternal rage. Reflex again nearly compelled Glass to turn and run. Yet the futility of flight was instantly apparent as the grizzly closed the ground between them with remarkable speed. Glass pulled the hammer to full-cock and raised the Anstadt, staring through the pronghorn sight in stunned horror that the animal could be, at the same time, enormous and lithe. He fought another instinct—to shoot immediately. Glass had seen grizzlies absorb half a dozen rifle balls without dying. He had one shot.