He also knew that the village would provide the makings of a raft.
With a raft, he could float lazily downstream to Fort Brazeau. As he walked slowly through the village, he realized there would be no problem finding building materials. Between the huts and the palisades, there were thousands of suitable logs.
Glass stopped to peer into a big lodge near the center of the village, clearly some type of communal building. He saw a flash of motion in the dark interior. He stumbled back a step, his heart racing. He stopped, peering into the lodge as his eyes adjusted to the light. No longer needing the crutch, he had sharpened the end of the cottonwood branch to make a crude spear. He held it in a ready position.
A small dog, a pup, whimpered in the middle of the lodge. Relieved and excited at the prospect of fresh meat, Glass took a slow step forward. He turned the spear to bring the blunt end forward. If he could lure the dog closer, a quick whack would smash the animal’s skull. No need to damage the meat. Sensing the danger, the dog bolted toward dark recesses at the back of the open room.
Glass moved quickly in pursuit, stopping in shock when the dog jumped into the arms of an ancient squaw. The old woman huddled on a pallet, curled into a tight ball on a tattered blanket. She held the puppy like a baby. With her face buried against the animal, only her white hair was visible in the shadows. She cried out and began to wail hysterically. After a few moments, the wailing took on a pattern, a frightening and foreboding chant. Her death chant?
The arms and shoulders gripping the little dog were nothing more than leathery old skin hung loosely on bone. As Glass’s eyes adjusted, he saw the waste and filth scattered about her. A large earthen pot contained water, but there was no sign of food. Why hasn’t she gathered corn? Glass had gathered a few ears as he walked into the village. The Sioux and the deer had taken most of the crop, but certainly remnants remained. Is she lame?
He reached into his parfleche and pulled out an ear of corn. He shucked it and bent down to offer it to the old woman. Glass held out the corn for a long time as the woman continued her wailing chant. After a while the puppy sniffed at the corn, then began to lick it. Glass reached out and touched the old woman on the head, gently stroking the white hair. Finally the woman stopped chanting and turned her face toward the light that streamed in from the door.
Glass gasped. Her eyes were perfectly white, completely blind. Now Glass understood why the old woman had been left behind when the Arikara fled in the middle of the night.
Glass took the old woman’s hand and gently wrapped it round the corn. She mumbled something that he could not understand and pushed the corn to her mouth. Glass saw that she had no teeth, pressing the raw corn between her gums. The sweet juice seemed to awaken her hunger, and she gnawed ineffectively at the cob. She needs broth.
He looked around the hut. A rusty kettle sat next to the fire pit in the center of the room. He looked at the water in the large earthen pot. It was brackish and sediment floated on the surface. He picked up the pot and carried it outside. He dumped the water and refilled it from a small creek that flowed through the village.
Glass spotted another dog by the creek, and this one he did not spare.
Soon he had a fire burning in the center of the hut. Part of the dog he roasted on a spit over the fire and part he boiled in the kettle. He threw corn into the pot with the dog meat and continued his search through the village. Fire had not affected many of the earthen huts, and Glass was pleased to find several lengths of cordage for a raft. He also found a tin cup and a ladle made from a buffalo horn.
When he returned to the big lodge he found the blind old woman as he had left her, still sucking at the cob of corn. He walked to the kettle and filled the tin cup with broth, setting it next to her on the pallet. The pup, unsettled at the smell of his brethren roasting on the fire, huddled at the woman’s feet. The woman could smell the meat too. She grasped the cup and gulped the broth the first moment the temperature would allow. Glass filled the cup again, this time adding tiny bits of meat that he cut with the razor. He filled the cup three times before the old woman stopped eating and fell asleep. He adjusted the blanket to cover her bony shoulders.
Glass moved to the fire and began to eat the roasted dog. The Pawnee considered dog a delicacy, harvesting an occasional canine the way white men butchered a spring pig. Glass certainly preferred buffalo, but in his present state, dog would do just fine. He pulled corn from the pot and ate that too, saving the broth and the boiled meat for the squaw.
He had eaten for about an hour when the old woman cried out. Glass moved quickly to her side. She said something over and over. “He tuwe he … He tuwe he…” She spoke this time not in the fearful tone of her death chant, but in a quiet voice, a voice seeking urgently to communicate an important thought. The words meant nothing to Glass. Not knowing what else to do, he took the woman’s hand. She squeezed it weakly and pulled it to her cheek. They sat like that for a while. Her blind eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.
In the morning she was dead.
Glass spent the better part of the morning building a crude pyre overlooking the Missouri. When it was finished, he returned to the big hut and wrapped the old woman in her blanket. He carried her to the pyre, the dog trailing pitifully behind them in an odd cortege. Like his wounded leg, Glass’s shoulder had healed nicely in the weeks since the battle with the wolves. Still, he winced as he hoisted the body up on the pyre. He felt the familiar, disconcerting twinges along his spine. His back continued to worry him. With luck, he would be at Fort Brazeau in a few days. Someone there could tend to him properly.
He stood for a moment at the pyre, old conventions calling from a distant past. He wondered for a moment what words had been spoken at his mother’s funeral, what words had been spoken for Elizabeth. He pictured a mound of fresh-turned earth next to an open grave. The notion of burial had always struck him as stifling and cold. He liked the Indian way better, setting the bodies up high, as if passing them to the heavens.
The dog growled suddenly and Glass whipped around. Four mounted Indians rode slowly toward him from the village at a distance of only seventy yards. From their clothing and hair, Glass recognized them immediately as Sioux. He panicked for an instant, calculating the distance to the thick trees of the bluff. He thought back to his first encounter with the Pawnee, and decided to hold his ground.
It had been little more than a month since the trappers and the Sioux had been allies in the siege against the Arikara. Glass remembered that the Sioux had quit the fight in disgust over Colonel Leavenworth’s tactics, a sentiment shared by the men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Do remnants of that alliance still stand? So he stood there, affecting as much confidence as he could muster, and watched the Indians approach.