As he lay on the riverbank in the early moments of dawn, a fat doe emerged from the willows on the opposite shore. She looked cautiously left and right before stepping forward, haltingly, to drink from the river. She was barely thirty yards away, an easy shot with his rifle. The Anstadt.
For the first time that day, he thought about the men who abandoned him. His rage grew as he stared at the doe. Abandonment seemed too benign to describe their treachery. Abandonment was a passive act—running away or leaving something behind. If his keepers had done no more than abandon him, he would at this moment be sighting down the barrel of his gun, about to shoot the deer. He would be using his knife to butcher the animal, and sparking his flint against steel to start a fire and cook it. He looked down at himself, wet from head to toe, wounded, reeking from the skunk, the bitter taste of roots still in his mouth.
What Fitzgerald and Bridger had done was much more than abandonment, much worse. These were not mere passersby on the road to Jericho, looking away and crossing to the other side. Glass felt no entitlement to a Samaritan’s care, but he did at least expect that his keepers do no harm.
Fitzgerald and Bridger had acted deliberately, robbed him of the few possessions he might have used to save himself. And in stealing from him this opportunity, they had killed him. Murdered him, as surely as a knife in the heart or a bullet in the brain. Murdered him, except he would not die. Would not die, he vowed, because he would live to kill his killers.
Hugh Glass pushed himself up and continued his crawl down the banks of the Grand.
* * *
Glass studied the contour of the land in his immediate vicinity. Fifty yards away, a gentle swale led down on three sides to a broad, dry gully. Sage and low grasses provided moderate cover. The swale reminded him suddenly of the gently rolling hills along the Arkansas River. He remembered a trap he had once seen set by Pawnee children. For the children, it had been a game. For Glass, the exercise was now deadly serious.
He crawled slowly to the bottom of the swale, stopping at the point that seemed like the natural hub. He found a sharp-edged rock and began to dig in the hard-packed, sandy soil.
He dug a pit with a four-inch diameter to the depth of his bicep.
Beginning halfway down, he widened the hole so that it was shaped like a wine bottle with the neck at the top. Glass spread the dirt from the hole to conceal the evidence of recent digging. Breathing heavily from the exertion, he stopped to rest.
Next Glass went in search of a large, flat rock. He found one about forty feet from the hole. He also found three small rocks, which he placed in a triangular pattern around the hole. The flat rock he set on top like a roof over the hole, with a space underneath creating the illusion of a place to hide.
Glass used a branch to camouflage the area around the trap, then crawled slowly away from the hole. In several spots he saw tiny, telltale droppings—a good sign. Fifty yards from the hole he stopped. His knee and palms were raw from crawling. His thigh ached from the motion, and again he felt the awful cracking sensation as the scabbing on his back began to bleed. Stopping provided temporary relief to his wounds, but it also made him aware of his profound fatigue, a low-grade ache that emanated from deep within, then circulated outward. Glass fought the urge to close his eyes and succumb to the beckoning sleep. He knew he could not regain his strength unless he ate.
Glass forced himself into a crawling position. Paying careful attention to his distance, he moved in a wide circle with the pit he had dug as the center point. It took him thirty minutes to complete a circuit. Again his body pleaded with him to stop and rest, but he knew that stopping now would undermine the effectiveness of his trap. He kept crawling, spiraling inward toward the pit in ever-smaller circles. When he encountered a thick clump of brush, he would stop to shake it. Anything inside his circles was driven slowly toward the hidden pit.
An hour later, Glass arrived at his hole. He removed the flat rock from the top and listened. He had seen a Pawnee boy reach his hand into a similar trap and pull it out, screaming, with a rattlesnake attached. The boy’s error left a strong impression. He looked around for a suitable branch. He found a long one with a flat end and pounded it several times into the hole.
Having assured himself that anything in his trap was dead, he reached into the hole. One by one, he pulled out four dead mice and two ground squirrels. There was no glory in this method of hunting, but Glass was elated with the results.
The swale provided some measure of concealment, and Glass decided to risk a fire, cursing the lack of his flint and steel. He knew it was possible to create a flame by rubbing two sticks together, but he had never started a fire that way. He suspected that the method, if it worked at all, would take forever.
What he needed was a bow and spindle—a crude machine for making fire. The machine had three parts: a flat piece of wood with a hole where a spindle stick was planted, a round spindle stick about three-quarters of an inch thick and eight inches long, and a bow—like a cellist’s—to twirl the spindle.
Glass searched the gully to find the parts. It wasn’t hard to locate a flat piece of driftwood and two sticks for the spindle and the bow. String for the bow. He had no cord. The strap on my bag. He pulled out the razor and sliced the strap from his bag, then tied it to the ends of the stick. Next he used the razor to carve away the edges for a hole in the flat piece of driftwood, careful to make it slightly bigger than the spindle stick.
With the bow and spindle assembled, Glass gathered tinder and fuel.
From his possibles bag, he removed the ball patches, ripping them to fray the edges. He also had saved cattail cotton. He piled the tinder loosely in a shallow pit, then added dry grass. To the few pieces of dry wood in the area he added buffalo dung, bone dry from long weeks in the sun.
With the makings of the fire in place, Glass grabbed the components of the bow and spindle. He filled the hole in the flat piece of wood with tinder, set the spindle stick in the hole, and looped the bowstring around it. He held the spindle stick against the palm of his right hand, still protected by the woolen pad he used to crawl. With his left hand he worked the bow. The back-and-forth motion spun the spindle in the hole on the flat driftwood, creating friction and heat.
The fault in his machine became immediately apparent as he spun the spindle with the bow stick. One end of the spindle rubbed in the hole on the flat driftwood—the end where he wanted to create the fire. The other end, though, spun against the flesh of his hand. Glass remembered that the Pawnee used a palm-size piece of wood to hold the top end of the spindle. He searched again to find the right piece of wood. He located an appropriate chunk and used the razor to carve away a hole for the top of the spindle stick.