Welcome back gentle readers. Sorry for the delay since the last post but holiday activities made it tough to make a blog entry. Besides, I wanted the anticipation for the final two entries in the Hugh Glass saga to build to a fevered pitch.
Now, where did we leave Old Hugh? Oh, right. He was nearly dead, abandoned, and left with only a rattlesnake for company. Well, maybe. At this point the story of Hugh Glass becomes one of second and third party testimony. In other words, all we really know of the crawl of Hugh Glass is what others passed on through the storytelling tradition. We can be reasonably certain that Hugh was mauled in late August of 1823. We can also be reasonably certain he showed up at Fort Kiowa sometime late October of the same year. What happened in between is the stuff of legend.
Both John Myers in The Saga of Hugh Glass and Frederick Manfred in Lord Grizzly attribute Hugh's unbelievable motivation to survive to his need to recover his firearm from the men who had taken it from him.
It might be hard today to imagine the affection a Mountain Man would have bestowed on his gun. The firearm was "at once ally, pet, and up-to-date miracle of industrial progress" according to Myers. The Mountain Man did not travel with dogs as they were considered too noisy and his bond with his horse was usually not strong because wilderness life made for a frequent change of mounts. The gun was his only constant companion.
So Hugh Glass, broken and alone, set out on a crawl of perhaps two hundred miles to recover the object that meant the most to him and to exact a measure of revenge.
The beauty of Frederick Manfred's novel Lord Grizzly is his description of the Crawl. Manfred at one time strapped a board to his leg and crawled along the ground of the Minnesota River bluffs to see what Hugh Glass saw, to feel what Hugh felt. The result is a description that must be read to be appreciated. Frederick Manfred has Hugh progress from a man bent on survival to a man bent on revenge for the Lord's sake. It is an amazing read.
And yes, Hugh did at one point wake up next to a rattlesnake. The snake was fat and lazy from a recent meal so Hugh smashed its head with a rock and ate it. He also probably ate prairie dogs, insects, and any plants he could recognize as not poisonous. Remember the area Hugh crawled along was one of rough, hilly terrain populated by wolves, coyotes, bears, and buffalo. While Hugh Glass probably followed a river for most of his journey he would have found very little in the way of natural cover to protect him from the elements. He probably would have worn through his clothing and his wounds would have become infected. Mosquitoes would have found him to be a ready meal. No doubt buzzards kept a close eye on Old Hugh. Yet he survived.
