The Celebrated Living Dog, Preferred To Dead Lions

 After a while, he could no longer see the birds and he began to be frightened again.

     I am not my five senses, he thought.

     I am not this thought.

     Though I walk through the valley of the shadow... belay that.

     In the end, there was only the tracks.  That's enough, he said, to himself, I can dig tracks.  Out of spite, out of pride, he counted the crossties aloud.  He counted hundreds and hundreds of them.  When he had to stop, he leaned his head on his rifle and held to the blazing rail with his strong right hand.

Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

    (This is Ray Hicks, about to die.  He has just been in a firefight against 4 evil men, and two of them are dead.  He has been hit under the arm with an air marshal round and is in very bad shape.  Ray was nibbling peyote before the fight and is now on heroin as well to kill the pain. The red circle in a blue triangle is a zen trick to contain the pain, it is not working.  Ray is dehydrated and in shock, he thinks he's walking in a fine mist of rain. He is carrying 3 kilos of weight, not 2.  He has just killed one of his best friends due to a misunderstanding.  He is a Marine and very stand-up.  Bent feds want the heroin.  The book was a National Book Award winner and takes place c. 1970.  It is set in the cold eyed freak show that was the drug subculture of Southern California with a background of the war in Vietnam).

Ray is helping a friend although he does not like dealing in a death drug like heroin.  He is just too stubborn to give up.  This is Nick Nolte's best performance.  

 Who'll Stop The Rain, 1978.

https://youtu.be/BNUWm7DSFWI

 The railroad track scene is based on the death of Neal Cassidy.  Stone met him through his friend Ken Kesey, and the place where the gunfight plays out is based on Ken's house.

http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/searching-for-neal-cassady-in-san-miguel-de-allende-20100503/

“One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.”