Yet he did not find what his body craved. It had been twelve days since the attack by the grizzly. Before he was abandoned, Glass had swallowed a few sips of broth on a couple occasions. Otherwise, the rattler had been his only real food. Berries and roots might sustain him for a few days. To heal, though, to regain his feet, Glass knew he needed the rich nourishment that only meat could provide. The snake had been a bit of random luck, unlikely to be repeated.
Still, he thought, there was no luck at all in standing still. The next morning he would crawl forward again. If luck wouldn’t find him, he would do his best to make his own.
NINE
SEPTEMBER 8, 1823
HE SMELLED THE BUFFALO CARCASS before he saw it. He heard it too. Or at least he heard the clouds of flies that swirled around the heaping mass of hide and bone. Sinews held the skeleton mostly intact, although scavengers had picked it clean of any meat. The massive, bushy head and swooping black horns lent the animal its only measure of dignity, though this too had been undermined by the birds that had picked away the eyes.
Looking at the beast, Glass felt no revulsion, only disappointment that others had beaten him to this potential source of nourishment. A variety of tracks surrounded the area. Glass guessed that the carcass was four or five days old. He stared at the pile of bones. For an instant he imagined his own skeleton—scattered across the bleak ground on some forgotten corner of prairie, his flesh eaten away, carrion for the magpies and coyotes. He thought about a line from Scripture, “dust to dust.” Is this what it means?
His thoughts turned quickly to more practical considerations. He had seen starving Indians boil hides into a gluey, edible mass. He would willingly have attempted the same, except he had no vessel to contain boiling water. He had another thought. The carcass lay next to a head-sized rock. He picked it up with his left hand and threw it clumsily against the line of smaller ribs. One of the bones snapped, and Glass reached for one of the pieces. The marrow he sought was dry. I need a thicker bone.
One of the buffalo’s forelegs lay apart from the rest, bare bone down to the hoof. He laid it against a flat stone and began to beat on it with the other rock. Finally a crack appeared, and then the bone broke.
He was right—the thicker bone still contained the greenish marrow. In hindsight, he should have known not to eat it by the smell, but his hunger robbed him of reason. He ignored the bitter taste, sucking the liquid from the bone, then digging for more with the piece of broken rib. Better to take the risk than to die of starvation. At least the marrow was easy to swallow. Frenzied by the idea of food, by the very mechanics of eating, he spent the better part of an hour breaking bones and scraping their contents.
About then the first cramp hit. It began as a hollow aching deep inside his bowels. He felt suddenly incapable of supporting his own weight and rolled to his side. The pressure in his head became so intense that Glass was aware of the very fissures in his skull. He began to sweat profusely. Like sunlight through glass, the pain in his abdomen became quickly more focused, burning. Nausea rose in his stomach like a great and inevitable tide. He began to retch, the indignity of the convulsions secondary to the excruciating pain as the bile passed his wounded throat.
For two hours he lay there. His stomach emptied quickly but did not cease to convulse. Between bouts of retching he was perfectly still, as if through lack of motion he could hide from the sickness and pain.
When the first round of sickness was over, he crawled away from the carcass, eager now to escape the sickeningly sweet smell. The motion reignited both the pain in his head and the nausea in his stomach. Thirty yards from the buffalo he crawled into a thick stand of willows, curled onto his side, and lapsed into a state that resembled unconsciousness more than sleep.
For a day and a night his body purged itself of the rancid marrow. The focused pain of his wounds from the grizzly now combined with a diffuse and permeating weakness. Glass came to visualize his strength as the sand in an hourglass. Minute by minute he felt his vitality ebbing away. Like an hourglass, he knew, a moment would arrive when the last grain of sand would tumble down the aperture, leaving the upper chamber void.
He could not shake the image of the buffalo skeleton, of the mighty beast, stripped of its flesh, rotting away on the prairie.
On the morning of the second day after the buffalo, Glass awoke hungry, ravenously hungry. He took it as a sign that the poison had passed from his system. He had tried to continue his laborious crawl downriver, in part because he still hoped to stumble across some other source of food, but more because he sensed the significance of stopping. In two days, he estimated that he had covered no more than a quarter mile. Glass knew that the sickness had cost him more than time and distance. It had sapped him of strength, eaten away at whatever tiny reservoir remained to him.
Without meat in the next few days, Glass assumed that he would die.
His experience with the buffalo carcass and its aftermath would keep him away from anything not freshly killed, no matter how desperate he grew. His first thought was to make a spear, or to kill a cottontail with a stone. But the pain in his right shoulder kept him from raising his arm, let alone thrusting it hard enough to generate a lethal throw. With his left hand, he lacked the accuracy to hit anything.
So hunting was out. That left trapping. With cordage and a knife to carve triggers, Glass knew a variety of ways to trap small game with snares. Lacking even those basics, he decided to try deadfalls. A deadfall was a simple device—a large rock leaning precariously on a stick, rigged to collapse when some unwary prey tripped a trigger.
The willows along the Grand were zigzagged with game trails. Tracks dotted the moist sand near the river. In the tall grass he saw the swirling depressions where deer had bedded down for the night. Glass considered it unlikely that he could trap a deer with a deadfall. For one thing, he doubted he could hoist a rock or tree of sufficient heft. He decided to set his sights on rabbits, which he encountered continuously along the river.
Glass looked for trails near the thick cover preferred by rabbits. He found a cottonwood downed recently by beaver, its leaf-covered branches creating a giant web of obstacles and hiding places. The trails leading to and from the tree were littered with pea-sized scat.
Near the river Glass found three suitable stones: flat enough to provide a broad surface for crushing when the trap was tripped; heavy enough to provide lethal force. The stones he selected were the size of a powder keg and weighed about thirty pounds each. With his crippled arm and leg, it took nearly an hour to push them, one by one, up the bank to the tree.