Nor did Henry stop to contemplate the philosophical significance of two rivers joining. He did not imagine the high mountain meadows where the waters began their journey as pure as liquid diamond. He did not even linger to appreciate the practical import of the fort’s location, neatly collecting commerce from two great highways of water.
Captain Henry’s thoughts concerned not what he did see, but rather what he did not: He did not see horses. He saw the scattered motion of men and the smoke of a large fire, but not a single horse. Not even a damn mule. He fired his rifle into the air, as much in frustration as in greeting. The men in the camp stopped their activities, searching for the source of the shot. Two guns answered in return. Henry and his seven men trudged down the valley toward Fort Union.
It had been eight weeks since Henry left Fort Union, rushing to Ashley’s aid at the Arikara village. Henry left two instructions behind: Trap the surrounding streams and guard the horses at all costs. Captain Henry’s luck, it appeared, would never change.
Pig lifted his rifle from his right shoulder, where it seemed to have augured a permanent indentation in his flesh. He started to move the heavy gun to his left shoulder, but there the strap of his possibles bag had worn its own abrasion. He finally resigned himself to simply carrying the gun in front of him, a decision that reminded him of the aching pain in his arms.
Pig thought of the comfortable straw tick in back of the cooper’s shop in St. Louis, and he arrived once again at the conclusion that joining Captain Henry had been a horrible mistake.
In the first twenty years of his life, Pig had never once walked more than two miles. In the past six weeks, not a single day had passed when he had walked fewer than twenty miles, and often the men covered thirty or even more. Two days earlier, Pig had worn through the bottoms of his third pair of moccasins. Gaping holes admitted frosty dew in the morning. Rocks cut jagged scrapes. Worst of all, he stepped squarely on a prickly pear cactus. He had failed in repeated efforts to pick out the tines with his skinning knife, and now a festering toe made him wince with every step.
Not to mention the fact that he had never been hungrier in his life.
He longed for the simple pleasure of dunking a biscuit in gravy, or sinking his teeth into a fat chicken leg. He remembered fondly the heaping tin plate of food provided thrice daily by the cooper’s wife. Now his breakfast consisted of cold jerky—and not much of that. They barely stopped for lunch, which also consisted of cold jerky. With the captain skittish about gunshots, even dinners consisted primarily of cold jerky. And on the occasions when they did have fresh game, Pig struggled to eat it, hacking at slabs of wild game or wrestling to break bones for their marrow. Food on the frontier required so damn much work. The effort it took to eat left him famished.
Pig questioned his decision to go west with each rumble of his stomach, with every painful step. The riches of the frontier remained as elusive as ever. Pig had not set a beaver trap for six months. As they walked into the camp, horses were not the only thing absent. Where are the pelts? A few beaver plews hung on willow frames against the timber walls of the fort, along with a mishmash of buffalo, elk, and wolf. But this was hardly the bonanza to which they had hoped to return.
A man named Stubby Bill stepped forward and started to extend his hand to Henry in greeting.
Henry ignored the hand. “Where the hell are the horses?”
Stubby Bill’s hand hung there for a moment, lonely and uncomfortable.
Finally he let it drop. “Blackfeet stole ’em, Captain.”
“You ever hear of posting a guard?”
“We posted guards, Captain, but they came out of nowhere and stampeded the herd.”
“You go after them?”
Stubby Bill shook his head slowly. “We ain’t done so well against the Blackfeet.” It was a subtle reminder, but also effective. Captain Henry sighed deeply. “How many horses left?”
“Seven … well, five and two mules. Murphy’s got all of them with a trapping party on Beaver Creek.”
“Doesn’t look like there’s been much trapping going on.”
“We’ve been at it, Captain, but everything near the Fort is trapped out. Without more horses we can’t cover any ground.”
* * *
Jim Bridger lay curled beneath a threadbare blanket. There would be heavy frost on the ground in the morning, and the boy felt the damp chill as it seeped into the deepest marrow of his bones. They slept again with no fire. In fits and starts, his discomfort surrendered to his fatigue and he slept.
In his dream he stood near the edge of a great chasm. The sky was the purple-black of late evening. Darkness prevailed, but enough light remained to illuminate objects in a faint glow. The apparition appeared at first as the vaguest of shapes, still distant. It approached him slowly, inevitably. Its contours took form as it drew closer, a twisted and limping body. Bridger wanted to flee, but the chasm behind him made escape impossible.
At ten paces he could see the horrible face. It was unnatural, its features distorted like a mask. Scars crisscrossed the cheeks and forehead. The nose and ears were placed haphazardly, with no relation to balance or symmetry. The face was framed by a tangled mane and beard, furthering the impression that the being before him was something no longer human.
As the specter moved closer still, its eyes began to burn, locked onto Bridger in a hateful gaze he could not break.
The specter raised its arm in a reaper’s arc and drove a knife deep into Bridger’s chest. The knife cleaved his sternum cleanly, shocking the boy with the piercing strength of the blow. The boy staggered backward, caught a final glimpse of the burning eyes, and fell.
He stared at the knife in his chest as the chasm swallowed him. He recognized with little surprise the silver cap on the pommel. It was Glass’s knife. In some ways it was a relief to die, he thought, easier than living with his guilt.
Bridger felt a sharp thud in his ribs. He opened his eyes with a start to find Fitzgerald standing above him. “Time to move, boy.”
THIRTEEN
OCTOBER 5, 1823
THE BURNT REMAINS OF THE Arikara village reminded Hugh Glass of skeletons. It was eerie to walk among them. This place that teemed so recently with the vibrant life of five hundred families now sat dead as a graveyard, a blackened monument on the high bluff above the Missouri.
The village lay eight miles north of the confluence with the Grand, while Fort Brazeau lay seventy miles south. Glass had two reasons for the diversion up the Missouri. He had run out of jerky from the buffalo calf and found himself once again reliant upon roots and berries. Glass remembered the flush cornfields surrounding the Arikara villages and hoped to scavenge from them.