Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (3 page)

For

MOTHER MARY SHORBA

and

MY WIFE MARYANNA

who once again pitched in

PREFACE

Although Hugh Glass was a real person whose most notable adventures occurred between 1822 and 1833, this book is a novel—not a history.

The very first time I ran into the Hugh Glass legend I knew that someday I would have to do something about it. Hugh's great wrestle with the grizzly, his desertion by friends, his fabulous crawl, his vengeful chase after the deserters, and its outcome—all these things seized hold of my imagination. I saw Hugh and his agony. I saw his matted grizzled beard, his flashing grieving eyes, his torn bleeding body, his godlike stubborn manner. I saw all this not with the eye of an historian but with the eye of a novelist.

For the last ten years, when I found the time, I sought out all the available accounts and legends of Hugh and the grizzly. Finally last year, a plot, a way of going for Hugh, came to me that seemed to be true to the spirit of this vision I had of him.

In a few instances I did not follow what some claim as fact or the most plausible legend. (There are many versions which conflict in part, though almost all versions agree on the three basic elements: the wrestle, the desertion and the crawl, and the showdown.)

But nowhere, so far as I know, did I go against the vision.

Frederick F. Manfred

Part I • The Wrestle

1

I
T ALL BEGAN
the second day of the Moon of Fattening, June 2, 1823. In the pre-dawn dark the Missouri River bluffs lay like sleeping mountain lions. There was for once no wind. A heavy dew mizzled down on the horseshoe-shaped sand bar, beading the hair of the sleeping men and the fur of the restless mustangs and the tips of the riverbank willows and the faintly cliddering leaves of the cottonwoods.

The mosquitoes near the river swarmed thick. Men to either side of Old Hugh Glass slapped softly at them in their sleep. Old Hugh couldn't see the men in the dark on the sand bar but he could hear them. The men were dead-tired from all the poling up the wild Missouri and their day-long orgy with the pennyskinned Arikaree maidens, and might have slept on had bees been working them over.

For early June the night was quite hot, and the ground under the men was at last warm enough for comfortable sleeping. From now until late in October the men could rest any place at all on the Old Bed. Except where the madding red ants bristled. Or where the prickly-pear cactus flourished. Or where diamondback rattlers liked to nest.

Old Hugh was on watch duty and was lying flat on his belly on the sand bar. He was anxiously awaiting the return of the lads Jim Anderson and Augie Neill who still were out sparking the Arikaree maidens. The spot Hugh's company was in, below and between the two Ree villages, and the stealthy sibilant silence, and the occasional rustling behind the Ree picket fence ahead was not at all to Hugh's liking.

Hugh peered past the jagged edge of the driftwood behind which he'd forted up, a cottonwood butt that had washed up on shore, and tried to catch movement on the sand bar. But narrow his gray eyes as he might he couldn't make out a thing. It was still too dark out. He scrounged around in the grit sand until his buckskin-clad body found a comfortable lay. With a deft touch of his weather-cracked fingers he made sure of his flint, made sure Old Bullthrower his rifle was cocked.

A pony snorted behind him, snorted again, and stamped on the giving sand, and flailed the night air with a whistling tail, trying to get rid of the mosquitoes. Immediately all the other Indian ponies joined in, some twenty of them, stamping, snorting, pounding the sliding dry sand with hard crisp hooves. Sometimes in their desperation they whinnied under their breath.

“Give us just two more hours,” Hugh muttered, pulling wolfskin cap down over his ears and forehead and wriggling bone-bulky shoulders inside his buckskin shirt, “give us just two more hours and we'll be up and away with our hair still in place. Whaugh! This child'll be mighty glad to be on the move at last.”

Glancing back over his shoulder Hugh could just make out, across a long narrow island in the river, a faint lessening of the nightdark all along the tumbled eastern horizon. The ripples and the floating bonebare tree skeletons in the main channel of the swift rousting Missouri, which ran on the west side of the island, had begun to gleam a little. And looking sharper, Hugh could just make out the low whorled silhouettes of the fur company's keelboats,
Rocky Mountains
and
Yellowstone Packet
. The keelboats rode at anchor between the sand bar and the cottonwood-covered island, slowly dipping and rising some ninety feet from shore, each at a right angle to the horseshoe-shaped sandy beach.

It was good to know the boats were there. Hugh felt sure of the forty or so men sleeping beside and behind him, always with loaded flintlock rifle in hand. They could probably hold off a small nation, if need be, but those fifty extra armed men on board the two keelboats, plus the two swivel guns and sure-handed General Ashley in command, were a comfort.

Imperceptibly the darkness lessened. Imperceptibly. Looking ahead Hugh at last could begin to make out the toothlike ten-foot-high picket fence at the head of the sand bar behind which he was sure the Rees had been crawling all night. He was sure they were waiting for dawn, their usual hour of attack. The picket fence had been made of barked cottonwood set in a ridge of sand. A deep dry moat ran all around the fence on the outside, with inside still another trench, not so deep, through which the Ree braves could slither in and out without being seen from the sand bar even in daylight.

“Doggone my skin, this old hoss sure wishes the lads would show up. They've already been with them Ree squaws long enough to sprout a half-dozen family trees. Let alone pushin' their luck.” Hugh grumbled to himself. “Rollin helps clear the mind all right. But too much'll take away what little a man has to begin with.” Hugh tried to make out the opening in the picket fence off to the right where the lads and all the others in the company had passed in and out during the previous day when it looked like the Rees were going to behave peacefully. “I don't like it. I don't like it at all. The lads should've been back long ago.”

Not a half hour before, right after he'd taken his turn at watch, he'd heard a short quick yell, the sort of yelp a man might make surprised in the act of love. It was so short a yelp, in fact, it sounded cut off.

Hugh nodded. It could easily have been one of the lads caught in the arms of one of the Ree maidens. One of the braves might have at last had enough of renting out his woman for what little fofurraw he got for it: mirrors, ribbons, vermilion, and such.

“Yesterday wasn't enough for the lads,” Hugh grumbled on. “Oh, no. They had to go back and push their luck some more.”

Hugh remembered the trouble General Ashley had keeping even a small watch on board. All the way up the Missouri the lads had heard how easy the pennyskinned Ree squaws were, so that when they at last got to the villages they were primed for a wild spree. From early in the forenoon on, the cherry-eyed chattering Ree women had entertained the boys in the tall bluejoint grass to either side of the villages and in the jungle growth of riverbank willows along the rolling Missouri.

Some of the boys hadn't even bothered to seek cover with their pennyskinned quick loves, had womaned where they found it, in the roundhouses with the husband brave standing guard in the doorway for them or in the shadow of the picket fence with Ree policemen trying to keep giggling chokecherry-eyed little girls and little boys from watching from behind the midden piles. Even more scandalous had been the behavior of the Ree women when they spotted Willis the Nigger. They'd fought for a touch and a chance at that black oak, like he might have been big medicine itself.

Hugh had sensed animosity in the villages while the desperate coupling went on. With a surly Ree brave named Stabbed, he'd been assigned policeman for the day and so couldn't participate himself. And as watchdog policeman with Stabbed, and looking with a different pair of eyes, Hugh had caught an undercurrent in the villages that meant danger to the mountain men.

On the surface the Rees seemed willing enough to trade some twenty Indian-trained mustangs for powder and guns and vermilion, and they might palaver civilly enough about a treaty General Ashley wished to bring about between the Sioux and the Rees and between the Mandans up the river and the Rees, but underneath they were thinking secret council. For Hugh, the ripe-cherry eyes of both Stabbed and other Ree chiefs glittered a little too fiercely out of their oldpenny faces. The Rees weren't holding out the open hand so fully and so far as they might. Any time an Indian refused liquor, even watered-down whisky, as both Stabbed and the Ree chiefs had done, it was sign, and time to keep one's eyes peeled.

Thinking about all this, Hugh cautiously reached down to rub his right thigh and knee. Then he exercised his right calf a little, the buckskin legging making a soft tussing sound on the grit sand. “Doggone that leg. Gettin' stiffer by the day.” Hugh kneaded it with powerful stub fingers, all the while warily watching the picket fence ahead for the least movement of stealth. “Well, it was kill or cure then,” Hugh muttered under his breath, thinking of the time he had jumped off Pirate Lafitte's good ship
The Pride
and escaped to the coasts of Texas and in so doing had severely wrenched and strained his right leg. “Kill or cure then, and dog me if it don't look like we're in for the same peedoodles again.”

By mountain-man standards Hugh Glass was an old man—in his late fifties. Most of the recruits in General Ashley's fur company were men in the bloom of life, ranging in age from the boy Jim Bridger's seventeen to General Ashley's own forty-five, with most of the men running middle twenties, fellows like Jim Clyman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Johnnie Gardner, John S. Fitzgerald, and Willis the Nigger.

Yet Hugh was a well-preserved man. He couldn't run as far or as fast as, say, Johnnie Gardner or the boy Jim Bridger maybe, but he was stronger, tougher, wiser. And around women he was still as much a green buck as any of the lads. If Bending Reed, who'd once been his young sweet squaw, could see him today, she'd see he was still some. Some, and shining with the best. He might have the miseries in his right leg now and again, yes, but his thoughts were young willow and his narrowed gray eyes could still spark like a hungry wolf's with down buffalo calf in sight.

Hugh was about six feet two in height, which, not counting the boat crews of pork-eating neds or the halfbreed voyageurs, was about the average of Ashley's company. Hugh was bulky in the shoulders, round and slim as a young cottonwood bole through the middle, with ash limbs for arms and young forked oak for legs. For all his six two he didn't look tall until someone of average height stood up to him, and then he not only towered but loomed.

His hair was gray and thick. Even the hair over his arms and his brushlike brows and the matt over his chest and back was thick and gray. He didn't shave like the other mountain men did, something both General Ashley and Major Henry requested of all their men. Major Henry had been in the mountains many years as an explorer and a leader of trappers, and it was his opinion that shaven palefaces got along better with the beardless Indians. Instead, Hugh clipped his beard, or rather sawed it off with his skinning knife, when it got more than a couple inches long. Hugh said he liked the comfort of the gray bush in winter blizzards and the shade of it in the summer. Major Henry also wanted his men shaved as a way of keeping the graybacks—the lice—under control, but Hugh said he wasn't bothered much with graybacks, probably because there was bitter alkali in his sweat which gave them the spits.

Since the days of his captivity with the Pawnees along the Platte River, Hugh had worn hide instead of cloth for clothes: a wolfskin cap, a fringed elkskin hunting shirt that came almost down to his knees, a soft clay-worked doeskin undershirt, soft doeskin breeches, tough buckskin leggings stagged at the knees, and double-soled moccasins fashioned out of the neck leather of tough old buffalo bull. His leathers were dark with sweat and dirt and the fat of many a feast of buffalo meat, and they smelled a little like an open crock of old rancid lard. He wore a powder horn and bullet pouch slung over his left shoulder and under his right arm. In the pouch he carried such other possibles as flint and steel for fire-making and a small whetstone.

He wore a belt around his middle with a long sheathed butcher or skinning knife stuck in it along with a loaded horse pistol. Hugh's set of possibles, the knife, the gun, the flint, the steel, were prime. He knew the value of being prepared for the worst with the best. His rifle, which he affectionately called Old Bullthrower, and which he kept at his side night and day, was a Henry, made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a flintlock of a simple though sturdy make with a thirty-six inch barrel and a .59 bore and a full stock of hard maple. With it Hugh had made many a spectacular shot, plumb center, well-aimed or snap shot.

Unlike most mountain men, Hugh was not much for trapping. He didn't like the bone-chilling icy water that a man had to wade in before dawn to set the beaver traps and again after dusk to pick up the beaver. Such cold doings were not for his game leg. From a long life with the Pawnees he had picked up the Indian brave's scorn for trapping. That was squaw work, not work for braves. He liked hunting and scouting better, alone, at which he was the company's acknowledged master. Making meat and scalping red devils was an honorable profession for a brave.

Hugh didn't take easily to other men, nor they to him. He had a look about him that kept others from confiding in him. His brushy brows shadowed haunted gray eyes, eyes that one moment could be fierce with battle, the next closed over with inward reverie. He had killed often, and well, and there was an air about him that suggested he could easily kill again, at any moment if there was need.

There was about him too the lonesome aggrieved mien of the touchy old grizzly bear, the grizzly who would probably leave you alone if you left him alone, but if you didn't—whaugh! mind your topknot. Even General Ashley was afraid of Old Hugh and had trouble controlling him. Hugh hated taking orders, and, taking them, acted as if maybe in youth he'd gotten his crop full of taking too many and still felt rebellious about it.

But if Old Hugh once set his cap for an adventure, if he once agreed to undertake an order, nothing could deter him. Under fire he was a bold, daring man of great ingenuity. When the action became furious, he had a way of shouting as if he were taking part in a revolution.

Every man flashes a little flag when aroused. With some it's a widening or a whitening of the nostrils, with others it's a narrowing or darkening of the eye. With Hugh it was little arteries that ran down either side of his nose, one on each side, a rivulet of red that vanished into the brush of his gray beard. When he got mad, or showed passion, or became involved in the action of battle, a pulse could be seen beating in the little red rivulets, a pulse so clear it was as if blood were trickling in spurts out of a wound.

The old wind came up then, stirring the chiddering cottonwood leaves overhead, and the fluttering heart-shaped willow leaves down river. The dew quit and the air dried, though in the rising soughing wind there was the fine sweet smell of rain far off.