The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Trapping beaver, they contend daily with the threat of Indian tribes turned warlike over the white men's encroachment on their land, and other prairie foes-like the unforgiving landscape and its creatures. Hugh Glass is among the Company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive.
The Company's captain dispatches two of his men to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies, and to give him the respect of a proper burial. When the two men abandon him instead, taking his only means of protecting himself-including his precious gun and hatchet- with them, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.
With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out crawling inch by inch across more than three thousand miles of uncharted American frontier, negotiating predators both human and not, the threat of starvation, and the agony of his horrific wounds. In Michael Punke's hauntingly spare and gripping prose, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits, and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.
***
[They were abandoning him]***
(@HarperCollinsUK, 23 November 2015, first published 20 June 2002, 229 pages, ebook, A Year Of @EpicReads 2019, a book based on real events, copy from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
***
***
I saw and loved the movie so I knew what to expect. The book however, like most adaptations is that little bit better than the movie. I was completely absorbed in the world of Hugh Glass and the other trappers. Punke doesn't waste a word of this book. There is very little description to build up character or the setting but what there is does the job. The sparse writing emphasises the sparse, harsh life of the characters. The afterword by the author makes it clear this is fiction but based on what really happened to Hugh Glass. This book chills me to the bone. Hugh Glass's determination to make his robbers and deserters pay is compelling and chilling in equal measures. He should not have survived his injuries after the bear attack but he does, against all odds. Reading his journey as he makes his way across three thousand miles tackling things worse than being robbed and deserted chilled and unnerved me. Hugh Glass was a bad ass. I'd have just lay where they left me until I died.