The Revenant: a Novel of Revenge

Midway through Michael Punke’s crackling frontier novel, The Revenant, an ancient figure from a vanished place steps off the page: “Black paint covered the upper half of his face, and he had tied a dead, withered raven behind his right ear.” Time stalls and the air stills as a Sioux medicine man approaches a fur trapper disfigured by maggot-infested wounds. Wounds inflicted by a grizzly bear so ferocious that the animal seems to have swayed before us a few chapters earlier, its growl “…. a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree…. body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard.” Generously spiced with such thrilling details and encounters, The Revenant, (first published in 2002 and soon to become a movie) tells the story of legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, mauled by a grizzly and left for dead by treacherous comrades in 1823. “Murdered him, as surely as a knife in the heart or a bullet in the brain,” Glass says of his betrayers, John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger, “Murdered him, except he would not die.” Not before he has tracked down the two men, killed them and retrieved his treasured rifle.

Treachery, survival, revenge. On this reliable frame, Punke constructs a Western drama familiar yet fresh, with language as sinewy as Glass himself and taut as a bowstring. “Eleven men hunkered in the camp with no fire,” he writes of fur trappers crouched, watchful, under an embankment on the Grand River in August 1823. Hired by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to harvest beaver pelts in the unchartered waters of the Yellowstone, Missouri and Platte, they scent further danger. “Misfortune seemed to hang on him like day-old smoke,” Glass observes of Captain Andrew Henry, the man fated to command an expedition already decimated by an Arikara Indian attack.

Throughout the novel, Punke fleshes out a few of these characters; the boy Jim Bridger, for example, who imagines the west as “…. a life in which he never once retraced his steps,” the gallant Henry and the reptilian Fitzgerald. Punke’s central drama, however, revolves around Glass’s astonishing three hundred and fifty mile journey – crawling, crippled and starving – downstream to safety and then upstream for vengeance. Competing with a wolf pack for a buffalo, facing down a rattlesnake, falling into the hands of the Sioux, he nurtures his hatred and stays his course. Punke too avoids detours and digressions. As Glass tracks his human prey, their paths crossing, diverging and finally meeting, Henry’s expedition struggles upriver and the novel’s tension, strung between these parallel lines, is expertly sustained.

Grace and mystery reside in the land and in its first people, both economically yet movingly described. “In his tightly braided hair he wore three eagle feathers, notched to signify enemies killed in battle,” Glass observes of an approaching Sioux brave, “Two decorative bands ran down the doeskin tunic…hundreds of interwoven porcupine quills dyed brilliantly in vermillion and indigo.” If all of this – the voyageurs, the showdowns, the whizzing bullets – consigns Punke’s novel to what Mark Twain derided as the “broken twig” school of realism, so be it. The Revenant is certainly not Guy Vanderhaege’s The Last Crossing or Charles Portis’s True Grit. But who could forget that grizzly?