Chapter II: Introduction (1)

If the average student of Western American History in our schools were asked to recall those names which loom large for him during the four decades from the purchase of the Louisiana Territory to the coming of the settlers, he would doubtless think of Lewis and Clark, Lieutenant Pike, Major Long, and General Frémont, with perhaps one or two others. That is to say, the average student of Western History is familiar with the names of official explorers; and but for their exploits, those forty wonderful years would seem to him little more than a lapse of empty time in a vast region waiting for the westering white man.

It is true that the deeds of those above named were important. The journey of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia, and back again, has immense significance in the story of our national life, and it was truly a “magnificent adventure,” to use the phrase of Emerson Hough. Pike holds and deserves a high place for his explorations in the Southwest. Long’s contribution to the early knowledge of the West was considerable; and Frémont’s expeditions served, at least, to awaken the popular Eastern mind to the great possibilities of the Trans-Missouri region. Frémont’s reputation, however, is out of all proportion to his real accomplishment, for the trails he travelled were well known to white men long before he ventured into the wilderness. In this connection, Major Chittenden, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, tells us that “there never has been a time until very recently when the geography of the West was so thoroughly understood as it was by the trader and trapper from 1830 to 1840.”

When Lewis and Clark were descending the Missouri River in the summer of 1806 on their return from the mouth of the Columbia, they met bands of traders pushing on toward the country from whence the explorers had just come. These were the vanguard of the real history makers of the Early West. It was such men as these who, during the next generation, as Chittenden says, “first explored and established the routes of travel which are now and always will be the avenues of commerce in that region.” The period that followed the return of Lewis and Clark was one of the most enthralling in the entire story of the human race, and yet the very names of its principal heroes are practically unknown except to specialists in Western History. The stories of their exploits have not yet reached our schools, and are to be found, for the most part, hidden away in the collections of state historical societies and in contemporary journals and books of travel long since out of print. The Mormon Emigration, the Mexican War, the Gold Rush to California, and the Oregon Question filled the popular imagination during the early years of the West, and thus an important phase of our national development was overlooked and forgotten.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the story of the West during the first four decades of the nineteenth century is the story of the wandering bands of trappers and traders who explored the wilderness in search of furs from the British boundary to Mexico and from the Missouri to the Pacific. History, as written in the past, has been too much a chronological record of official governmental acts, too little an intimate account of the lives of the people themselves. Doubtless, the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole conception of history, bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glory of a chosen few, but that it radiates from the precious heroic stuff of common human lives. And that view, I am proud to say, is quite in keeping with our dearest national traditions.

Now the fur trade on the Missouri River dates well back into the eighteenth century, and at the time of the Revolutionary War, parties of trappers had already ascended as far north as the Big Bend in the present state of South Dakota. But it was not until after the return of Lewis and Clark from the Northwest, and of Lieutenant Pike from the Southwest, that the great era of the fur trade began. In 1807 the Spanish trader, Manuel Lisa, ascended the Missouri and the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Big Horn, where he erected a trading post. Returning to St. Louis the next year, he became the leading spirit in the “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company,” the troubled career of which, during the succeeding fifteen years, was rich in the stuff of which epics are made. Major Andrew Henry, who appears in “The Song of Hugh Glass” as leader of the westbound expedition from the mouth of the Grand River, was a member of that company, ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks in the summer of 1809. Driven thence by the Blackfeet, he crossed the Great Divide and built a post on what has since been called Henry’s fork of the Snake River, thus being the first American trader to operate on the Pacific side of the Rockies.

In the spring of 1811, the Overland Astorians, under the command of W. P. Hunt, left St. Louis, bound for the mouth of the Columbia where they expected to join forces with a sea expedition that had set sail from New York during the previous autumn for the long and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn. This is the only widely known expedition in the whole history of the Trans-Missouri fur trade, thanks to Washington Irving, whose account of it is an American classic.

During the War of 1812 the fur trade on the Missouri declined; and though in the year 1819 five companies of some importance were operating from St. Louis, none of these was doing a profitable business. The revival of the trade, which ushered in the great epic period of our national development, may be dated from March 20th, 1822, when the following advertisement appeared in the _Missouri Republican_ of St. Louis:

To Enterprising Young Men:

The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the
Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two or
three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the
lead mines in the County of Washington, who will ascend with and
command the party; or of the subscriber near St. Louis.

(Signed) WILLIAM H. ASHLEY.

Major Henry has already been mentioned as a veteran trader of the upper country. Ashley, who was at that time General of the Missouri Militia and Lieutenant Governor of the recently admitted state, was about to make his first trip into the wilderness.

Setting out in the spring of 1822, Major Henry, with his one hundred “enterprising young men” (some of whom were young only in spirit), ascended to the mouth of the Yellowstone. This was before the era of the Missouri River steamboat, and the two keelboats, that bore the trading stock and supplies of the party, were “cordelled,” that is to say, pulled by tow-line. General Ashley accompanied the expedition, returning to St. Louis in the fall. Early in the spring of 1823 he started north again with a second band of one hundred men. Stopping to trade for horses at the Ree villages near the mouth of the Grand, he was attacked by that most treacherous of the Missouri River tribes, received a sound drubbing, lost most of his horses, and was compelled to drop down stream to await reënforcements. It was in this battle that old Hugh Glass received his hip wound.

Jedediah Smith, who was a member of the defeated party, and who had fought with conspicuous bravery, volunteered to carry the news of disaster to Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He was then but twenty-four years old; yet during the next six years he was destined to discover and explore the central and southwestern routes to the Pacific—an achievement of equal importance with that of Lewis and Clark, and performed under much greater difficulties. Immediately upon the arrival of Smith at the mouth of the Yellowstone, Henry, with most of his band, started south to the relief of Ashley.

In the meanwhile, Ashley had apprised the Indian Agent and military authorities at Fort Atkinson of his rough treatment; and Colonel Leavenworth started north with 220 men, intent upon chastising the Rees and making the Missouri River safe for American traders. The campaign that followed, in which the Whites were aided by a band of Sioux, was in some important respects a fiasco, as the opening lines of the poem suggest. But that does not greatly matter here.

What does matter, is the fact that the muster roll of the two parties of Ashley and Henry, then united at the mouth of the Grand, contained nearly all of the great names in the history of the West from the time of Lewis and Clark to the coming of the settlers. Harrison Clifford Dale, whose “Ashley-Smith Explorations to the Pacific” easily ranks him as the supreme authority on this particular period, has the following to say regarding the Ashley-Henry men: “The wanderings of this group during the next ten or fifteen years cover the entire West.... It was the most significant group of continental explorers ever brought together.”

After the Leavenworth campaign against the Rees, Major Henry, with eighty men, set out for the mouth of the Big Horn by way of the Grand River valley. Hugh Glass acted as hunter for the westbound party, and it is at this point that the following narrative begins. Old Glass was not himself an explorer, yet his adventures serve to illustrate the heroic temper of the men who explored the West, as well as the nature of the difficulties they encountered.

In building the epic cycle, of which “The Song of Hugh Glass” and “The Song of Three Friends” are parts (each, however, being complete in itself), I am concerned with the wanderings of that group of men who were assembled for the last time at the mouth of the Grand. Long ago, when I was younger than most of you who are now about to study the poem here presented, I dreamed of making those men live again for the young men and women of my country. The tremendous mood of heroism that was developed in our American West during that period is properly a part of your racial inheritance; and certainly no less important a part than the memory of ancient heroes. Indeed, it can be shown that those men—Kentuckians, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Ohioans—were direct descendants, in the epic line, of all the heroes of our Aryan race that have been celebrated by the poets of the Past; descendants of Achilles and Hector, of Æneas, of Roland, of Sigurd, and of the knights of Arthur’s court. They went as torch-bearers in the van of our westering civilization. Your Present is, in a great measure, a heritage from their Past.

And their blood is in your veins!

JOHN G. NEIHARDT.

THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS

I
GRAYBEARD AND GOLDHAIR

The year was eighteen hundred twenty three.

‘Twas when the guns that blustered at the Ree
Had ceased to brag, and ten score martial clowns
Turned from the unwhipped Aricara towns,
Earning the scornful laughter of the Sioux.
A withering blast the arid South still blew,
And creeks ran thin beneath the glaring sky;
For ‘twas a month ere honking geese would fly
Southward before the Great White Hunter’s face:
And many generations of their race,
As bow-flung arrows, now have fallen spent.

It happened then that Major Henry went
With eighty trappers up the dwindling Grand,
Bound through the weird, unfriending barren-land
For where the Big Horn meets the Yellowstone;
And old Hugh Glass went with them.
Large of bone,
Deep-chested, that his great heart might have play,
Gray-bearded, gray of eye and crowned with gray
Was Glass. It seemed he never had been young;
And, for the grudging habit of his tongue,
None knew the place or season of his birth.
Slowly he ‘woke to anger or to mirth;
Yet none laughed louder when the rare mood fell,
And hate in him was like a still, white hell,
A thing of doom not lightly reconciled.
What memory he kept of wife or child
Was never told; for when his comrades sat
About the evening fire with pipe and chat,
Exchanging talk of home and gentler days,
Old Hugh stared long upon the pictured blaze,
And what he saw went upward in the smoke.

But once, as with an inner lightning stroke,
The veil was rent, and briefly men discerned
What pent-up fires of selfless passion burned
Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.
There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,
Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began
The downy beard to mark him for a man.
Blue-eyed was he and femininely fair.
A maiden might have coveted his hair
That trapped the sunlight in its tangled skein:
So, tardily, outflowered the wild blond strain
That gutted Rome grown overfat in sloth.
A Ganymedes haunted by a Goth
Was Jamie. When the restive ghost was laid,
He seemed some fancy-ridden child who played
At manliness ‘mid all those bearded men.
The sternest heart was drawn to Jamie then.
But his one mood ne’er linked two hours together.
To schedule Jamie’s way, as prairie weather,
Was to get fact by wedding doubt and whim;
For very lightly slept that ghost in him.
No cloudy brooding went before his wrath
That, like a thunder-squall, recked not its path,
But raged upon what happened in its way.
Some called him brave who saw him on that day
When Ashley stormed a bluff town of the Ree,
And all save beardless Jamie turned to flee
For shelter from that steep, lead-harrowed slope.
Yet, hardly courage, but blind rage agrope
Inspired the foolish deed.

‘Twas then old Hugh
Tore off the gray mask, and the heart shone through.
For, halting in a dry, flood-guttered draw,
The trappers rallied, looked aloft and saw
That travesty of war against the sky.
Out of a breathless hush, the old man’s cry
Leaped shivering, an anguished cry and wild
As of some mother fearing for her child,
And up the steep he went with mighty bounds.
Long afterward the story went the rounds,
How old Glass fought that day. With gun for club,
Grim as a grizzly fighting for a cub,
He laid about him, cleared the way, and so,
Supported by the firing from below,
Brought Jamie back. And when the deed was done,
Taking the lad upon his knee: “My Son,
Brave men are not ashamed to fear,” said Hugh,
“And I’ve a mind to make a man of you;
So here’s your first acquaintance with the law!”
Whereat he spanked the lad with vigorous paw
And, having done so, limped away to bed;
For, wounded in the hip, the old man bled.

It was a month before he hobbled out,
And Jamie, like a fond son, hung about
The old man’s tent and waited upon him.
And often would the deep gray eyes grow dim
With gazing on the boy; and there would go—
As though Spring-fire should waken out of snow—
A wistful light across that mask of gray.
And once Hugh smiled his enigmatic way,
While poring long on Jamie’s face, and said:
“So with their sons are women brought to bed,
Sore wounded!”
Thus united were the two:
And some would dub the old man ‘Mother Hugh’;
While those in whom all living waters sank
To some dull inner pool that teemed and stank
With formless evil, into that morass
Gazed, and saw darkly there, as in a glass,
The foul shape of some weakly envied sin.
For each man builds a world and dwells therein.
Nor could these know what mocking ghost of Spring
Stirred Hugh’s gray world with dreams of blossoming
That wooed no seed to swell or bird to sing.
So might a dawn-struck digit of the moon
Dream back the rain of some old lunar June
And ache through all its craters to be green.
Little they know what life’s one love can mean,
Who shrine it in a bower of peace and bliss:
Pang dwelling in a puckered cicatrice
More truly figures this belated love.
Yet very precious was the hurt thereof,
Grievous to bear, too dear to cast away.
Now Jamie went with Hugh; but who shall say
If ‘twas a warm heart or a wind of whim,
Love, or the rover’s teasing itch in him,
Moved Jamie? Howsoe’er, ‘twas good to see
Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,
One age in young adventure. One who saw
Has likened to a February thaw
Hugh’s mellow mood those days; and truly so,
For when the tempering Southwest wakes to blow
A phantom April over melting snow,
Deep in the North some new white wrath is brewed.
Out of a dim-trailed inner solitude
The old man summoned many a stirring story,
Lived grimly once, but now shot through with glory
Caught from the wondering eyes of him who heard—
Tales jaggéd with the bleak unstudied word,
Stark saga-stuff. “A fellow that I knew,”
So nameless went the hero that was Hugh—
A mere pelt merchant, as it seemed to him;
Yet trailing epic thunders through the dim,
Whist world of Jamie’s awe.
And so they went,
One heart, it seemed, and that heart well content
With tale and snatch of song and careless laughter.
Never before, and surely never after,
The gray old man seemed nearer to his youth—
That myth that somehow had to be the truth,
Yet could not be convincing any more.

Now when the days of travel numbered four
And nearer drew the barrens with their need,
On Glass, the hunter, fell the task to feed
Those four score hungers when the game should fail.
For no young eye could trace so dim a trail,
Or line the rifle sights with speed so true.
Nor might the wistful Jamie go with Hugh;
“For,” so Hugh chaffed, “my trick of getting game
Might teach young eyes to put old eyes to shame.
An old dog never risks his only bone.”
‘Wolves prey in packs, the lion hunts alone’
Is somewhat nearer what he should have meant.

And so with merry jest the old man went;
And so they parted at an unseen gate
That even then some gust of moody fate
Clanged to betwixt them; each a tale to spell—
One in the nightmare scrawl of dreams from hell,
One in the blistering trail of days a-crawl,
Venomous footed. Nor might it ere befall
These two should meet in after days and be
Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,
Recounting with a bluff, heroic scorn
The haps of either tale.
‘Twas early morn
When Hugh went forth, and all day Jamie rode
With Henry’s men, while more and more the goad
Of eager youth sore fretted him, and made
The dusty progress of the cavalcade
The journey of a snail flock to the moon;
Until the shadow-weaving afternoon
Turned many fingers nightward—then he fled,
Pricking his horse, nor deigned to turn his head
At any dwindling voice of reprimand;
For somewhere in the breaks along the Grand
Surely Hugh waited with a goodly kill.
Hoofbeats of ghostly steeds on every hill,
Mysterious, muffled hoofs on every bluff!
Spurred echo horses clattering up the rough
Confluent draws! These flying Jamie heard.
The lagging air droned like the drowsy word
Of one who tells weird stories late at night.
Half headlong joy and half delicious fright,
His day-dream’s pace outstripped the plunging steed’s.
Lean galloper in a wind of splendid deeds,
Like Hugh’s, he seemed unto himself, until,
Snorting, a-haunch above a breakneck hill,
The horse stopped short—then Jamie was aware
Of lonesome flatlands fading skyward there
Beneath him, and, zigzag on either hand,
A purple haze denoted how the Grand
Forked wide ‘twixt sunset and the polar star.

A-tiptoe in the stirrups, gazing far,
He saw no Hugh nor any moving thing,
Save for a welter of cawing crows, a-wing
About some banquet in the further hush.
One faint star, set above the fading blush
Of sunset, saw the coming night, and grew.
With hand for trumpet, Jamie gave halloo;
And once again. For answer, the horse neighed.
Some vague mistrust now made him half afraid—
Some formless dread that stirred beneath the will
As far as sleep from waking.
Down the hill,
Close-footed in the skitter of the shale,
The spurred horse floundered to the solid vale
And galloped to the northwest, whinnying.
The outstripped air moaned like a wounded thing;
But Jamie gave the lie unto his dread.
“The old man’s camping out to-night,” he said,
“Somewhere about the forks, as like as not;
And there’ll be hunks of fresh meat steaming hot,
And fighting stories by a dying fire!”

The sunset reared a luminous phantom spire
That, crumbling, sifted ashes down the sky.

Now, pausing, Jamie sent a searching cry
Into the twilit river-skirting brush,
And in the vast denial of the hush
The champing of the snaffled horse seemed loud.

Then, startling as a voice beneath a shroud,
A muffled boom woke somewhere up the stream
And, like vague thunder hearkened in a dream,
Drawled back to silence. Now, with heart abound,
Keen for the quarter of the perished sound,
The lad spurred gaily; for he doubted not
His cry had brought Hugh’s answering rifle shot.
The laggard air was like a voice that sang,
And Jamie half believed he sniffed the tang
Of woodsmoke and the smell of flesh a-roast;
When presently before him, like a ghost,
Upstanding, huge in twilight, arms flung wide,
A gray form loomed. The wise horse reared and shied,
Snorting his inborn terror of the bear!
And in the whirlwind of a moment there,
Betwixt the brute’s hoarse challenge and the charge,
The lad beheld, upon the grassy marge
Of a small spring that bullberries stooped to scan,
A ragged heap that should have been a man,
A huddled, broken thing—and it was Hugh!

There was no need for any closer view.
As, on the instant of a lightning flash
Ere yet the split gloom closes with a crash,
A landscape stares with every circumstance
Of rock and shrub—just so the fatal chance
Of Hugh’s one shot, made futile with surprise,
Was clear to Jamie. Then before his eyes
The light whirled in a giddy dance of red;
And, doubting not the crumpled thing was dead
That was a friend, with but a skinning knife
He would have striven for the hated life
That triumphed there: but with a shriek of fright
The mad horse bolted through the falling night,
And Jamie, fumbling at his rifle boot,
Heard the brush crash behind him where the brute
Came headlong, close upon the straining flanks.
But when at length low-lying river banks—
White rubble in the gloaming—glimmered near,
A swift thought swept the mind of Jamie clear
Of anger and of anguish for the dead.
Scarce seemed the raging beast a thing to dread,
But some foul-playing braggart to outwit.
Now hurling all his strength upon the bit,
He sank the spurs, and with a groan of pain
The plunging horse, obedient to the rein,
Swerved sharply streamward. Sliddering in the sand,
The bear shot past. And suddenly the Grand
Loomed up beneath and rose to meet the pair
That rode a moment upon empty air,
Then smote the water in a shower of spray.
And when again the slowly ebbing day
Came back to them, a-drip from nose to flank,
The steed was scrambling up the further bank,
And Jamie saw across the narrow stream,
Like some vague shape of fury in a dream,
The checked beast ramping at the water’s rim.
Doubt struggled with a victor’s thrill in him.
As, hand to buckle of the rifle-sheath,
He thought of dampened powder; but beneath
The rawhide flap the gun lay snug and dry.
Then as the horse wheeled and the mark went by—
A patch of shadow dancing upon gray—
He fired. A sluggish thunder trailed away;
The spreading smoke-rack lifted slow, and there,
Floundering in a seethe of foam, the bear
Hugged yielding water for the foe that slew!

Triumphant, Jamie wondered what old Hugh
Would think of such a “trick of getting game”!
“Young eyes” indeed!—And then that memory came,
Like a dull blade thrust back into a wound.
One moment ‘twas as though the lad had swooned
Into a dream-adventure, waking there
To sicken at the ghastly land, a-stare
Like some familiar face gone strange at last.
But as the hot tears came, the moment passed.
Song snatches, broken tales—a troop forlorn,
Like merry friends of eld come back to mourn—
O’erwhelmed him there. And when the black bulk churned
The star-flecked stream no longer, Jamie turned,
Recrossed the river and rode back to Hugh.

A burning twist of valley grasses threw
Blear light about the region of the spring.
Then Jamie, torch aloft and shuddering,
Knelt there beside his friend, and moaned: “O Hugh,
If I had been with you—just been with you!
We might be laughing now—and you are dead.”
With gentle hand he turned the hoary head
That he might see the good gray face again.
The torch burned out, the dark swooped back, and then
His grief was frozen with an icy plunge
In horror. ‘Twas as though a bloody sponge
Had wiped the pictured features from a slate!
So, pillaged by an army drunk with hate,
Home stares upon the homing refugee.
A red gout clung where either brow should be;
The haughty nose lay crushed amid the beard,
Thick with slow ooze, whence like a devil leered
The battered mouth convulsed into a grin.

Nor did the darkness cover, for therein
Some torch, unsnuffed, with blear funereal flare,
Still painted upon black that alien stare
To make the lad more terribly alone.

Then in the gloom there rose a broken moan,
Quick stifled; and it seemed that something stirred
About the body. Doubting that he heard,
The lad felt, with a panic catch of breath,
Pale vagrants from the legendry of death
Potential in the shadows there. But when
The motion and the moaning came again,
Hope, like a shower at daybreak, cleansed the dark,
And in the lad’s heart something like a lark
Sang morning. Bending low, he crooned: “Hugh, Hugh,
It’s Jamie—don’t you know?—I’m here with you.”

As one who in a nightmare strives to tell—
Shouting across the gap of some dim hell—
What things assail him; so it seemed Hugh heard,
And flung some unintelligible word
Athwart the muffling distance of his swoon.

Now kindled by the yet unrisen moon,
The East went pale; and like a naked thing
A little wind ran vexed and shivering
Along the dusk, till Jamie shivered too
And worried lest ‘twere bitter cold where Hugh
Hung clutching at the bleak, raw edge of life.
So Jamie rose, and with his hunting-knife
Split wood and built a fire. Nor did he fear
The staring face now, for he found it dear
With the warm presence of a friend returned.
The fire made cozy chatter as it burned,
And reared a tent of light in that lone place.
Then Jamie set about to bathe the face
With water from the spring, oft crooning low,
“It’s Jamie here beside you—don’t you know?”
Yet came no answer save the labored breath
Of one who wrestled mightily with Death
Where watched no referee to call the foul.

The moon now cleared the world’s end, and the owl
Gave voice unto the wizardry of light;
While in some dim-lit chancel of the night,
Snouts to the goddess, wolfish corybants
Intoned their wild antiphonary chants—
The oldest, saddest worship in the world.

And Jamie watched until the firelight swirled
Softly about him. Sound and glimmer merged
To make an eerie void, through which he urged
With frantic spur some whirlwind of a steed
That made the way as glass beneath his speed,
Yet scarce kept pace with something dear that fled
On, ever on—just half a dream ahead:
Until it seemed, by some vague shape dismayed,
He cried aloud for Hugh, and the steed neighed—
A neigh that was a burst of light, not sound.
And Jamie, sprawling on the dewy ground,
Knew that his horse was sniffing at his hair,
While, mumbling through the early morning air,
There came a roll of many hoofs—and then
He saw the swinging troop of Henry’s men
A-canter up the valley with the sun.

Of all Hugh’s comrades crowding round, not one
But would have given heavy odds on Death;
For, though the graybeard fought with sobbing breath,
No man, it seemed, might break upon the hip
So stern a wrestler with the strangling grip
That made the neck veins like a purple thong
Tangled with knots. Nor might Hugh tarry long
There where the trail forked outward far and dim;
Or so it seemed. And when they lifted him,
His moan went treble like a song of pain,
He was so tortured. Surely it were vain
To hope he might endure the toilsome ride
Across the barrens. Better let him bide
There on the grassy couch beside the spring.
And, furthermore, it seemed a foolish thing
That eighty men should wait the issue there;
For dying is a game of solitaire
And all men play the losing hand alone.

But when at noon he had not ceased to moan,
And fought still like the strong man he had been,
There grew a vague mistrust that he might win,
And all this be a tale for wondering ears.
So Major Henry called for volunteers,
Two men among the eighty who would stay
To wait on Glass and keep the wolves away
Until he did whatever he should do.
All quite agreed ‘twas bitter bread for Hugh,
Yet none, save Jamie, felt in duty bound
To run the risk—until the hat went round,
And pity wakened, at the silver’s clink,
In Jules Le Bon.

‘He would not have them think
That mercenary motives prompted him.
But somehow just the grief of Little Jim
Was quite sufficient—not to mention Hugh.
He weighed the risk. As everybody knew,
The Rickarees were scattered to the West:
The late campaign had stirred a hornet’s nest
To fill the land with stingers (which was so),
And yet—’
Three days a southwest wind may blow
False April with no drop of dew at heart.
So Jules ran on, while, ready for the start,
The pawing horses nickered and the men,
Impatient in their saddles, yawned. And then,
With brief advice, a round of bluff good-byes
And some few reassuring backward cries,
The troop rode up the valley with the day.

Intent upon his friend, with naught to say,
Sat Jamie; while Le Bon discussed at length
The reasonable limits of man’s strength—
A self-conducted dialectic strife
That made absurd all argument for life
And granted but a fresh-dug hole for Hugh.
‘Twas half like murder. Yet it seemed Jules knew
Unnumbered tales accordant with the case,
Each circumstantial as to time and place
And furnished with a death’s head colophon.

Vivaciously despondent, Jules ran on.
‘Did he not share his judgment with the rest?
You see, ‘twas some contusion of the chest
That did the trick—heart, lungs and all that, mixed
In such a way they never could be fixed.
A bear’s hug—ugh!’
And often Jamie winced
At some knife-thrust of reason that convinced
Yet left him sick with unrelinquished hope.
As one who in a darkened room might grope
For some belovéd face, with shuddering
Anticipation of a clammy thing;
So in the lad’s heart sorrow fumbled round
For some old joy to lean upon, and found
The stark, cold something Jamie knew was there.
Yet, womanlike, he stroked the hoary hair
Or bathed the face; while Jules found tales to tell—
Lugubriously garrulous.
Night fell.
At sundown, day-long winds are like to veer;
So, summoning a mood of relished fear,
Le Bon remembered dire alarms by night—
The swoop of savage hordes, the desperate fight
Of men outnumbered: and, like him of old,
In all that made Jules shudder as he told,
His the great part—a man by field and flood
Fate-tossed. Upon the gloom he limned in blood
Their situation’s possibilities:
Two men against the fury of the Rees—
A game in which two hundred men had failed!
He pointed out how little it availed
To run the risk for one as good as dead;
Yet, Jules Le Bon meant every word he said,
And had a scalp to lose, if need should be.

That night through Jamie’s dreaming swarmed the Ree.
Gray-souled, he wakened to a dawn of gray,
And felt that something strong had gone away,
Nor knew what thing. Some whisper of the will
Bade him rejoice that Hugh was living still;
But Hugh, the real, seemed somehow otherwhere.
Jules, snug and snoring in his blanket there,
Was half a life the nearer. Just so, pain
Is nearer than the peace we seek in vain,
And by its very sting compels belief.
Jules woke, and with a fine restraint of grief
Saw early dissolution. ‘One more night,
And then the poor old man would lose the fight—
Ah, such a man!’
A day and night crept by,
And yet the stubborn fighter would not die,
But grappled with the angel. All the while,
With some conviction, but with more of guile,
Jules colonized the vacancy with Rees;
Till Jamie felt that looseness of the knees
That comes of oozing courage. Many men
May tower for a white-hot moment, when
The wild blood surges at a sudden shock;
But when, insistent as a ticking clock,
Blind peril haunts and whispers, fewer dare.
Dread hovered in the hushed and moony air
The long night through; nor might a fire be lit,
Lest some far-seeing foe take note of it.
And day-long Jamie scanned the blank sky rim
For hoof-flung dust clouds; till there woke in him
A childish anger—dumb for ruth and shame—
That Hugh so dallied.
But the fourth dawn came
And with it lulled the fight, as on a field
Where broken armies sleep but will not yield.
Or had one conquered? Was it Hugh or Death?
The old man breathed with faintly fluttering breath,
Nor did his body shudder as before.
Jules triumphed sadly. ‘It would soon be o’er;
So men grew quiet when they lost their grip
And did not care. At sundown he would slip
Into the deeper silence.’
Jamie wept,
Unwitting how a furtive gladness crept
Into his heart that gained a stronger beat.
So cities, long beleaguered, take defeat—
Unto themselves half traitors.
Jules began
To dig a hole that might conceal a man;
And, as his sheath knife broke the stubborn sod,
He spoke in kindly vein of Life and God
And Mutability and Rectitude.
The immemorial funerary mood
Brought tears, mute tribute to the mother-dust;
And Jamie, seeing, felt each cutting thrust
Less like a stab into the flesh of Hugh.
The sun crept up and down the arc of blue
And through the air a chill of evening ran;
But, though the grave yawned, waiting for the man,
The man seemed scarce yet ready for the grave.

Now prompted by a coward or a knave
That lurked in him, Le Bon began to hear
Faint sounds that to the lad’s less cunning ear
Were silence; more like tremors of the ground
They were, Jules said, than any proper sound—
Thus one detected horsemen miles away.
For many moments big with fate, he lay,
Ear pressed to earth; then rose and shook his head
As one perplexed. “There’s something wrong,” he said.
And—as at daybreak whiten winter skies,
Agape and staring with a wild surmise—
The lad’s face whitened at the other’s word.
Jules could not quite interpret what he heard;
A hundred horse might noise their whereabouts
In just that fashion; yet he had his doubts.
It could be bison moving, quite as well.
But if ‘twere Rees—there’d be a tale to tell
That two men he might name should never hear.
He reckoned scalps that Fall were selling dear,
In keeping with the limited supply.
Men, fit to live, were not afraid to die!

Then, in that caution suits not courage ill,
Jules saddled up and cantered to the hill,
A white dam set against the twilight stream;
And as a horseman riding in a dream
The lad beheld him; watched him clamber up
To where the dusk, as from a brimming cup,
Ran over; saw him pause against the gloom,
Portentous, huge—a brooder upon doom.
What did he look upon?
Some moments passed;
Then suddenly it seemed as though a blast
Of wind, keen-cutting with the whips of sleet,
Smote horse and rider. Haunched on huddled feet,
The steed shrank from the ridge, then, rearing, wheeled
And took the rubbly incline fury-heeled.

Those days and nights, like seasons creeping slow,
Had told on Jamie. Better blow on blow
Of evil hap, with doom seen clear ahead,
Than that monotonous, abrasive dread,
Blind gnawer at the soul-thews of the blind.
Thin-worn, the last heart-string that held him kind;
Strung taut, the final tie that kept him true
Now snapped in Jamie, as he saw the two
So goaded by some terrifying sight.
Death riding with the vanguard of the Night,
Life dwindling yonder with the rear of Day!
What choice for one whom panic swept away
From moorings in the sanity of will?

Jules came and summed the vision of the hill
In one hoarse cry that left no word to say:
“Rees! Saddle up! We’ve got to get away!”

Small wit had Jamie left to ferret guile,
But fumblingly obeyed Le Bon; the while
Jules knelt beside the man who could not flee:
For big hearts lack not time for charity
However thick the blows of fate may fall.
Yet, in that Jules Le Bon was practical,
He could not quite ignore a hunting knife,
A flint, a gun, a blanket—gear of life
Scarce suited to the customs of the dead!

And Hugh slept soundly in his ample bed,
Star-canopied and blanketed with night,
Unwitting how Venality and Fright
Made hot the westward trail of Henry’s men.

II
THE AWAKENING

No one may say what time elapsed, or when
The slumberous shadow lifted over Hugh:
But some globose immensity of blue
Enfolded him at last, within whose light
He seemed to float, as some faint swimmer might,
A deep beneath and overhead a deep.
So one late plunged into the lethal sleep,
A spirit diver fighting for his breath,
Swoops through the many-fathomed glooms of death,
Emerging in a daylight strange and new.

Rousing a languid wonder, came on Hugh
The quiet, steep-arched splendor of the day.
Agrope for some dim memory, he lay
Upon his back, and watched a lucent fleece
Fade in the blue profundity of peace
As did the memory he sought in vain.
Then with a stirring of mysterious pain,
Old habit of the body bade him rise;
But when he would obey, the hollow skies
Broke as a bubble punctured, and went out.

Again he woke, and with a drowsy doubt,
Remote unto his horizontal gaze
He saw the world’s end kindle to a blaze
And up the smoky steep pale heralds run.
And when at length he knew it for the sun,
Dawn found the darkling reaches of his mind,
Where in the twilight he began to find
Strewn shards and torsos of familiar things.
As from the rubble in a place of kings
Men school the dream to build the past anew,
So out of dream and fragment builded Hugh,
And came upon the reason of his plight:
The bear’s attack—the shot—and then the night
Wherein men talked as ghosts above a grave.

Some consciousness of will the memory gave:
He would get up. The painful effort spent
Made the wide heavens billow as a tent
Wind-struck, the shaken prairie sag and roll.
Some moments with an effort at control
He swayed, half raised upon his arms, until
The dizzy cosmos righted, and was still.
Then would he stand erect and be again
The man he was: an overwhelming pain
Smote him to earth, and one unruly limb
Refused the weight and crumpled under him.

Sickened with torture he lay huddled there,
Gazing about him with a great despair
Proportioned to the might that felt the chain.
Far-flung as dawn, collusive sky and plain
Stared bleak denial back.
Why strive at all?—
That vacancy about him like a wall,
Yielding as light, a granite scarp to climb!
Some little waiting on the creep of time,
Abandonment to circumstance; and then—

Here flashed a sudden thought of Henry’s men
Into his mind and drove the gloom away.
They would be riding westward with the day!
How strange he had forgot! That battered leg
Or some scalp wound, had set his wits a-beg!
Was this Hugh Glass to whimper like a squaw?
Grimly amused, he raised his head and saw—
The empty distance: listened long and heard—
Naught but the twitter of a lonely bird
That emphasized the hush.
Was something wrong?
‘Twas not the Major’s way to dally long,
And surely they had camped not far behind.
Now woke a query in his troubled mind—
Where was his horse? Again came creeping back
The circumstances of the bear’s attack.
He had dismounted, thinking at the spring
To spend the night—and then the grisly thing—
Of course the horse had bolted; plain enough!
But why was all the soil about so rough
As though a herd of horses had been there?
The riddle vexed him till his vacant stare
Fell on a heap of earth beside a pit.
What did that mean? He wormed his way to it,
The newly wakened wonder dulling pain.
No paw of beast had scooped it—that was plain.
‘Twas squared; indeed, ‘twas like a grave, he thought.
A grave—a grave—the mental echo wrought
Sick fancies! Who had risen from the dead?
Who, lying there, had heard above his head
The ghostly talkers deaf unto his shout?

Now searching all the region round about,
As though the answer were a lurking thing,
He saw along the margin of the spring
An ash-heap and the litter of a camp.
Suspicion, like a little smoky lamp
That daubs the murk but cannot fathom it,
Flung blear grotesques before his groping wit.
Had Rees been there? And he alive? Who then?
And were he dead, it might be Henry’s men!
How many suns had risen while he slept?
The smoky glow flared wildly, and he crept,
The dragged limb throbbing, till at length he found
The trail of many horses westward bound;
And in one breath the groping light became
A gloom-devouring ecstasy of flame,
A dazing conflagration of belief!

Plunged deeper than the seats of hate and grief,
He gazed about for aught that might deny
Such baseness: saw the non-committal sky,
The prairie apathetic in a shroud,
The bland complacence of a vagrant cloud—
World-wide connivance! Smilingly the sun
Approved a land wherein such deeds were done;
And careless breezes, like a troop of youth,
Unawed before the presence of such truth,
Went scampering amid the tousled brush.
Then bye and bye came on him with a rush
His weakness and the consciousness of pain,
While, with the chill insistence of a rain
That pelts the sodden wreck of Summer’s end,
His manifest betrayal by a friend
Beat in upon him. Jamie had been there;
And Jamie—Jamie—Jamie did not care!

What no man yet had witnessed, the wide sky
Looked down and saw; a light wind idling by
Heard what no ear of mortal yet had heard:
For he—whose name was like a magic word
To conjure the remote heroic mood
Of valiant deed and splendid fortitude,
Wherever two that shared a fire might be,—
Gave way to grief and wept unmanfully.
Yet not as they for whom tears fall like dew
To green a frosted heart again, wept Hugh.
So thewed to strive, so engined to prevail
And make harsh fate the zany of a tale,
His own might shook and tore him.
For a span
He lay, a gray old ruin of a man
With all his years upon him like a snow.
And then at length, as from the long ago,
Remote beyond the other side of wrong,
The old love came like some remembered song
Whereof the strain is sweet, the burden sad.
A retrospective vision of the lad
Grew up in him, as in a foggy night
The witchery of semilunar light
Mysteriously quickens all the air.
Some memory of wind-blown golden hair,
The boyish laugh, the merry eyes of blue,
Wrought marvelously in the heart of Hugh,
As under snow the dæmon of the Spring.
And momently it seemed a little thing
To suffer; nor might treachery recall
The miracle of being loved at all,
The privilege of loving to the end.
And thereupon a longing for his friend
Made life once more a struggle for a prize—
To look again upon the merry eyes,
To see again the wind-blown golden hair.
Aye, one should lavish very tender care
Upon the vessel of a hope so great,
Lest it be shattered, and the precious freight,
As water on the arid waste, poured out.
Yet, though he longed to live, a subtle doubt
Still turned on him the weapon of his pain:
Now, as before, collusive sky and plain
Outstared his purpose for a puny thing.

Praying to live, he crawled back to the spring,
With something in his heart like gratitude
That by good luck his gun might furnish food,
His blanket, shelter, and his flint, a fire.
For, after all, what thing do men desire
To be or have, but these condition it?
These with a purpose and a little wit,
And howsoever smitten, one might rise,
Push back the curtain of the curving skies,
And come upon the living dream at last.

Exhausted, by the spring he lay and cast
Dull eyes about him. What did it portend?
Naught but the footprints of a fickle friend,
A yawning grave and ashes met his eyes!
Scarce feeling yet the shock of a surprise,
He searched about him for his flint and knife;
Knew vaguely that his seeking was for life,
And that the place was empty where he sought.
No food, no fire, no shelter! Dully wrought
The bleak negation in him, slowly crept
To where, despite the pain, his love had kept
A shrine for Jamie undefiled of doubt.
Then suddenly conviction, like a shout,
Aroused him. Jamie—Jamie was a thief!
The very difficulty of belief
Was fuel for the simmering of rage;
That grew and grew, the more he strove to gage
The underlying motive of the deed.
Untempered youth might fail a friend in need;
But here had wrought some devil of the will,
Some heartless thing, too cowardly to kill,
That left to Nature what it dared not do!

So bellowsed, all the kindled soul of Hugh
Became a still white hell of brooding ire,
And through his veins regenerating fire
Ran, driving out the lethargy of pain.
Now once again he scanned the yellow plain,
Conspirant with the overbending skies;
And lo, the one was blue as Jamie’s eyes,
The other of the color of his hair—
Twin hues of falseness merging to a stare,
As though such guilt, thus visibly immense,
Regarded its effect with insolence!

Alas for those who fondly place above
The act of loving, what they chance to love;
Who prize the goal more dearly than the way!
For time shall plunder them, and change betray,
And life shall find them vulnerable still.

A bitter-sweet narcotic to the will,
Hugh’s love increased the peril of his plight;
But anger broke the slumber of his might,
Quickened the heart and warmed the blood that ran
Defiance for the treachery of Man,
Defiance for the meaning of his pain,
Defiance for the distance of the plain
That seemed to gloat, ‘You can not master me.’
And for one burning moment he felt free
To rise and conquer in a wind of rage.
But as a tiger, conscious of the cage,
A-smoulder with a purpose, broods and waits,
So with the sullen patience that is hate’s
Hugh taught his wrath to bide expedience.

Now cognizant of every quickened sense,
Thirst came upon him. Leaning to the spring,
He stared with fascination on a thing
That rose from giddy deeps to share the draught—
A face, it was, so tortured that it laughed,
A ghastly mask that Murder well might wear;
And while as one they drank together there,
It was as though the deed he meant to do
Took shape and came to kiss the lips of Hugh,
Lest that revenge might falter. Hunger woke;
And from the bush with leafage gray as smoke,
Wherein like flame the bullberries glinted red
(Scarce sweeter than the heart of him they fed),
Hugh feasted.
And the hours of waiting crept,
A-gloom, a-glow; and though he waked or slept,
The pondered purpose or a dream that wrought,
By night, the murder of his waking thought,
Sustained him till he felt his strength returned.
And then at length the longed-for morning burned
And beckoned down the vast way he should crawl—
That waste to be surmounted as a wall,
Sky-rims and yet more sky-rims steep to climb—
That simulacrum of enduring Time—
The hundred empty miles ‘twixt him and where
The stark Missouri ran!
Yet why not dare?
Despite the useless leg, he could not die
One hairsbreadth farther from the earth and sky,
Or more remote from kindness.

III
THE CRAWL

Straight away
Beneath the flare of dawn, the Ree land lay,
And through it ran the short trail to the goal.
Thereon a grim turnpikeman waited toll:
But ‘twas so doomed that southering geese should flee
Nine times, ere yet the vengeance of the Ree
Should make their foe the haunter of a tale.

Midway to safety on the northern trail
The scoriac region of a hell burned black
Forbade the crawler. And for all his lack,
Hugh had no heart to journey with the suns:
No suppliant unto those faithless ones
Should bid for pity at the Big Horn’s mouth.

The greater odds for safety in the South
Allured him; so he felt the midday sun
Blaze down the coulee of a little run
That dwindled upward to the watershed
Whereon the feeders of the Moreau head—
Scarce more than deep-carved runes of vernal rain.
The trailing leg was like a galling chain,
And bound him to a doubt that would not pass.
Defiant clumps of thirst-embittered grass
That bit parched earth with bared and fang-like roots;
Dwarf thickets, jealous for their stunted fruits,
Harsh-tempered by their disinheritance—
These symbolized the enmity of Chance
For him who, with his fate unreconciled,
Equipped for travel as a weanling child,
Essayed the journey of a mighty man.

Like agitated oil the heat-waves ran
And made the scabrous gulch appear to shake
As some reflected landscape in a lake
Where laggard breezes move. A taunting reek
Rose from the grudging seepage of the creek,
Whereof Hugh drank and drank, and still would drink.
And where the mottled shadow dripped as ink
From scanty thickets on the yellow glare,
The crawler faltered with no heart to dare
Again the torture of that toil, until
The master-thought of vengeance ‘woke the will
To goad him forth. And when the sun quiesced
Amid ironic heavens in the West—
The region of false friends—Hugh gained a rise
Whence to the fading cincture of the skies
A purpling panorama swept away.
Scarce farther than a shout might carry, lay
The place of his betrayal. He could see
The yellow blotch of earth where treachery
Had digged his grave. O futile wrath and toil!
Tucked in beneath yon coverlet of soil,
Turned back for him, how soundly had he slept!
Fool, fool! to struggle when he might have crept
So short a space, yet farther than the flight
Of swiftest dreaming through the longest night,
Into the quiet house of no false friend.

Alas for those who seek a journey’s end—
They have it ever with them like a ghost:
Nor shall they find, who deem they seek it most,
But crave the end of human ends—as Hugh.

Now swoopingly the world of dream broke through
The figured wall of sense. It seemed he ran
As wind above the creeping ways of man,
And came upon the place of his desire,
Where burned, far-luring as a beacon-fire,
The face of Jamie. But the vengeful stroke
Bit air. The darkness lifted like a smoke—
And it was early morning.
Gazing far,
From where the West yet kept a pallid star
To thinner sky where dawn was wearing through,
Hugh shrank with dread, reluctant to renew
The war with that serene antagonist.
More fearsome than a smashing iron fist
Seemed that vast negativity of might;
Until the frustrate vision of the night
Came moonwise on the gloom of his despair.
And lo, the foe was naught but yielding air,
A vacancy to fill with his intent!
So from his spacious bed he ‘rose and went
Three-footed; and the vision goaded him.