The Revenant – Michael Punke

After losing both his career and his fiancée (the back story revealed early) Hugh Glass finds himself in St Louis with no clear idea of his next move. He joins an expedition up the Missouri River in the employ of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

It is the 1820’s and west of the Mississippi is hotchpotch of dangers. The native American Indians are subdued but unreliable, some keen to trade, others keen to kill; the winter in the Rockies is severe; and the grizzly bears roam wild and free.

While out scouting Glass comes across a she bear with cubs. She goes for him and though he puts a shot in her chest it doesn’t halt the charging beast and Glass has his arm and back clawed and his leg badly bitten before the bullet takes effect and reduces the bear to a lifeless mass on top of him.

Found by the main group and inexpertly patched together Glass hangs on to life but he slows down progress, dangerous with the hostile Arikara tribe in the vicinity. Two volunteers agree to stay put, the expectation being to bury him when he finally expires; young Jim Bridger out of gratitude for Glass’s past kindnesses, the mercenary John Fitzgerald out of greed for the promised extra pay and with an eye to inheriting Glass’s rather fine rifle.

When Glass inconveniently fails to die he is abandoned, left with only his clothes and blanket; Fitzgerald making off with his rifle, powder and flint, and Bridger with his hunting knife. Glass still refuses to give up the ghost and instead begins to crawl.

What follows is a story of survival over the stacked odds of climate, starvation, wild beasts, and wilder Indians; and of revenge on the two miscreants not so much for the abandonment but for the theft of his only means of self-support. Hugh Glass will survive (the included map gives that away) so the real tension is in the pursuit of Bridger and Fitzgerald.

It is a well written yarn, based on elements of truth, which make it authentic in its setting and detail - a western with a difference and a pretty good read.

The Road to Reckoning – Robert Lautner

New York 1837, and twelve year old Thomas Walker’s father’s business, supplying spectacles, is not going well as the US economy sags. However John Walker gets wind of a new invention by one Samuel Colt – a factory produced (so cheap) hand gun with a revolving chamber that gives “five pistols in each hand” – and decides to take the job selling them.

But the market for such weaponry is in the wilder west – Illinois & Indiana – so equipped with an order book, a dozen samples, and a working wooden replica, father and son set off by wagon as travelling salesmen dealing in death and destruction.

At an early stop at a frontier town called Milton, the sales pitch to a storekeeper is interrupted by a drifter emerging from the bar, who ridicules the claims made (and the wooden toy) and forces father and son into a humiliating exit from the store and the town.

But there is no escape; as they camp that night their tormentor, and three henchmen, arrive to continue the discussion. John Walker again attempts to walk away but pays the price of a bullet in the back (no spoiler here – it is only page 30).

The men take the money and guns but leave Thomas with the wagon, horse, wooden gun and order book, which he gathers up and leaving his father’s corpse under a blanket returns to Milton.

His one aim is to get back home and to that end he latches on to ex-ranger Henry Stands who is heading that way. Reluctantly at first, Stands takes charge of him, and just as well as the murderous gang realise Thomas’s testimony could get them hanged, and so are in pursuit.

Adventures ensue with young Thomas also at danger from religious do-gooders and a reclusive mountain man who is rather too welcoming.

Related by the now mature Thomas looking back, the prose reflects a mid-western slow drawl that adds authenticity at some cost to fluency. But at just a couple of hundred pages that is no drawback to a very readable western.