Roger said, “That’s worth more than the MacLeish poem, I’d wager.”
He said nothing more about this, and I did not mention it myself for at least a year. Then, one night, while we were having dinner together, I showed him the first chapter of John Colter’s race for life. Once again, we were sipping coffee. He smiled and put down his mug.
“That’s good writing,” he said.
“I wanted you to see it for a special reason,” I told him.
“Oh?” He took another sip of coffee, set the mug down again.
“I would like to know if you would write this tale with me, if we could possibly write it together?’’
“What’s the main thread?” he asked curiously.
“Two men,” I said, “two mountain men, John Colter and Hugh Glass. Colter, pursued by Indians, runs a hundred fifty miles to safety; Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear, and crawls an equal distance. That is about all I know at the moment. But I know that I want to write it with you.”
Roger’s interest seemed to cool before my eyes. He told me that he had so much to do, contracts to fulfill for books as yet unwritten, and there was just no time for this one. “Maybe in a few years,” he said. Then he changed the subject to what a good book Islands in the Stream had turned out to be, and how much he liked the poem by MacLeish. And that was all he said about Colter/Glass for quite some time.
Then, one day, two years later, while we were discussing an audio project of his which I was busy putting together, he showed me something that he was working on. At the top of the page was the word “Glass.” Amazed, I read on, discovering that this was chapter two of the novel I had proposed that we would write together, a book about two men fighting their own personal daemons in the American West; one turning hawk, the other turning bear, both switching identities somewhere near the end of their travail, so that Colter crawled upon his belly and Glass danced across the snow.
I remember well the day we finished the book. Well, it wasn’t “we,” it was “he.” For when I received the last sheet of typing paper from him, he had written something at the bottom of the page. It was there in his neat and tidy, scrunched-down script: “Wherefore the rest is silence.”
