He saw the girl. She had the dogs with her. The older village women were already heading for the river, carried buckets. Some boys were on the move and were loading into pick-ups and might be going farther up the road, perhaps had work to get to. Her dogs were always at her heel. He had known this girl for months, had seen from the cheekiness of her smile, the mischief in her eyes, that the secret of his hiding place was known to her. Although she often sat within a couple of feet of his netting, close enough to reach out and touch him, near enough to whisper a confidence, they had never spoken, her to him, him to her – and it made for a sort of comfort. Gaz was certain that she went back to the village and never blathered that he had been there, was still there, never boasted of her skill at finding him. He would have known… The boys from the village would have come out and stared up the hillside and then edged closer, overwhelmed by curiosity… a village elder would have come with fruit and a soft drink… and the Hereford boys would have been told. It would have been fed into the debriefs that he was compromised and should not go back. She had kept her secret, had walked near to him and shown him the cheekiness, and had kept it close – and he did not know why.
With the dogs, she had gone to the pen of old thorn and had swung back the builder’s pallet that doubled as a gate and the goats were gambolling, crazy and excited. He wondered if she had already eaten, what breakfast she took… Occasionally she would bring some grapes for him, and from a fold of her skirt would put them down beside his head, and then move on with the goats. Music played, then was cut off by a belated call to prayer. She ignored it, and let the goats and the dogs lead her… Then she heard the explosions, and he saw more detonation flashes. Villagers, some half-dressed, were spilling from the doorways and cocked their heads and listened. Every action had consequences, what Gaz had been taught, and he watched and felt that the day would go bad and could see the dull shapes of the personnel carriers coming up the road in convoy.
Perhaps he could have moved then… packed his Bergen, stowed his kit, tidied his hide. Crawled out and up on to the plateau where the ground was flat grit and there was no cover, no trees, bushes or rocks. She ignored the rain and had a heavy scarf across her hair and shoulders, and carried a light stick, and bulging at her waist was a plastic bag of food and water. He thought she would have heard sufficient shell and mortar fire to accept a fatalism: would get on with her day and hope that a storm from rain or wind or ordnance would pass her by. He saw the convoy coming on at speed up the road but still short of the track running down to the village, easy to miss, and Gaz reckoned one of the jeeps – in the faint light and with rain and dirt in the wind – carried a Russian flag tacked to a radio aerial.
Once a soldier in the Soviet army, now a veteran, Jasha had turned his military skills to those of a hunter. Decades before, he had lost most of the flesh, part of the muscle and some of the bone in his left leg from one of those shit little mines that the Afghans had scattered close to the Soviet base at Kunduz. He could walk, in a fashion, but not fast.
The bear, too, was a veteran and wounded.
They watched each other. About forty paces between them, and the bear would have known who he was. He called it Zhukov: a good name for a bear. He would have stood some two and a half metres high and might have weighed almost half a ton. Its coat was a rich mahogany brown, its eyes seemed black and had a lifeless coldness, and Jasha thought that the beast would have torn a man to pieces with the long bent claws of its right front paw. Any man would have had to shoot Zhukov between the eyes, and drop him as dead weight if he were that close… any man but not Jasha. He was in his middle sixties, had been a sniper in a regiment of mechanised infantry, had been invalided out and had come to Murmansk in search of some form of hunting therapy while his wound seemed to heal, then went gangrenous, seemed to improve then deteriorate. And Zhukov, his supposed friend – only friend – was in no better health. Both damaged, both suspicious and introverted, and both with the easy habit of killing.
The bear might have wished to end the hunter’s life because it was in perpetual pain and savage tempered, could have done it without difficulty. Jasha might have wanted to kill Zhukov out of pity, out of boredom and the need for splurged excitement, and had a rifle in his hands, cocked, the safety on and a bullet in place.
But both, in their differing ways, held the other in respect. He accepted the bear wandering close to his cabin, and the bear tolerated the old man intruding on its space in the tundra wilderness of the Kola peninsula. For a full half-hour, under light rain, they had eyed each other. Jasha was usually the first to break off and to go home, and he assumed that Zhukov would feel an honour satisfied and would resume the search for berries, the staple of its diet. A year before, Jasha had gone into Murmansk and had taken himself to a veterinary surgeon and had slapped down a wad of notes and had asked for a tranquilliser dose. For how big a creature? Big. Big enough for a cow? Big enough for a moose. To pacify it or to knock it out? To shut it down, at least a fifteen-minute dose. Money talked and a dart came with the dose and was loaded into the Dragunov marksman’s rifle. He had shot it, the same range as he was now, a good hit in the left shoulder, and the animal had reeled around, had staggered and snarled, had shown teeth and one claw set, but only one. The other front leg, just above the pads, was coiled in a tight knot of barbed wire that had pushed aside the fur and punctured the skin, and had made a wound that was infected and coated in rust. He could have shot it with the wire still attached, could have ended its misery, instead had gone to Murmansk and flashed the money at the veterinary surgeon and had told him the requirement was to sedate a full-grown male moose. He had approached the prone creature with apprehension and had noted the malevolence in the eyes and sensed it wrestled with the power of the drug coursing through it. He had taken a deep breath and had knelt on the ground and used pliers to pull away the wire and blood had flowed. He was not a sentimental man and was familiar with pain, and they were the same pliers with which he had taken out one of his own back teeth, but tears had flowed while he had performed this crude surgery. Five loops of wire had come free and the wound was open and the summer flies swarmed and he had seen then that the bear had already chewed away half of its paw and half of its claws, chewed and worried at them. He had laced it in disinfectant and had realised that the bear’s breathing quickened and had seen the first twitch of a back leg and the first movement of the tongue across massive yellowed teeth. He had given the animal the name of the most distinguished of Stalin’s generals, a man of iron will… Zhukov. He had gone back to his cabin, his refuge, that he had found as a wreck, had insulated and made dry, and had barricaded the door and the windows. The bear had come the next day, and the evening of the following day, had sat on its haunches outside the door and Jasha had peeped through a spyhole and realised that the rest of its foot was now eaten off. A stump had been left at the height of the wire wound. His intervention might have achieved nothing. But the flesh seemed clean and the bear snorted regularly with a hiss of breath to drive away the congregation of flies, and it had watched Jasha’s home, then had seemed satisfied that it had located a benefactor, and it had gone. He had seen the bear many time since, had noted the limping gait and the curve of the wounded leg as it put less weight on the ground, and the way it sucked and spat to remove dirt: the pink flesh had disappeared, replaced by a coarse leathery cover. The hunter was familiar with the single paw print with the pads and the claws, and in front of them the smooth mark of the self-inflicted stump. It was a fine animal… It might stalk him, it might be his friend. But he would kill it if that was the requirement, if the pain ever became unbearable. The wire would have come from the work of the border troops. The border troops had brought up wire when they had reinforced the fence that separated the Murmansk district on the Kola peninsula from Norwegian territory. They’d have dumped it. He hated them.