The lake remained frozen all year round, but the fishing used to be good in summer. The mysterious lake was somewhere on the other side of it. It would take six or more hours to go around the boot-shaped lake, but they could cross it in under an hour — that was, if it were still possible.
Everyone knew that the story of it being an enormous nuclear power plant was just a cover, one of their mother Russia’s many disinformation campaigns. Ilya just couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to hide it any better. There was no doubt in his mind what it was, and he was still a kid — it was a secret military installation.
A big fence went up right around the damned lake, too. A road was built around it and heavily patrolled during construction, but all of that had mostly ceased, since. After all, why bother? The location was secure enough in itself. No one could get there, except on foot, and those who could were too cold to do anything destructive. Ilya and Demyan stumbled their way down the hill and approached the lake’s edge.
Ilya stopped at the fence.
A reindeer must have taken offense to the barbed wire fence, because there was now a small hole in it. Not big, but enough for the two of them to squeeze through.
“Do you want to take a shortcut?” he asked, out of bravado more than desire.
Demyan wasn’t to be provoked into stupidity. “No. We’ll go around. We’re not supposed to even know about the mysterious new lake, let alone if it's guarded. We’re better off not getting spotted before we even get there.”
Ilya felt that he’d achieved one rung above his brother on the bravery ladder, but knew better than to mention it. Instead, the two of them followed the service trail as it wrapped its way around the shore of Boot Lake.
It took them until the late afternoon to reach the empty hunter’s hut toward the southern end of the lake. They stayed there overnight and in the morning continued along the service trail, toward the far end of the lake.
Now on the eastern side of Boot Lake, Ilya glanced back at the old island in the middle of the sea of ice. There were no windows on the old stone prison, but somehow, he felt as though he was being watched. He’d been told since he was a kid to stay away from the place, because it was haunted by the ghosts of those who’d been imprisoned there during the reign of Stalin’s Death Camps. Ilya was old enough to know that haunted islands are nothing more than stories to frighten children, and yet he’d never heard of anyone ever going anywhere near it.
He turned to face his brother. “Do you think they can see us?”
“I doubt it. If they could, we’d probably already see one of their patrol cars on its way to intercept us.” Demyan turned to the east. “Come on, the old airstrip and strange new lake isn’t far now. I want to catch some fish and get back to the hut before we freeze to death.”
Ilya nodded and followed him across the snow-covered hills to the east. He felt uneasy with his back to the strange island behind him, as though some sort of evil predator was watching him. He shook the fear off, but kept glancing over his shoulder as though he might catch something or someone.
Thirty minutes later, they reached the mysterious new lake.
It was approximately a mile wide by another three in length. There was very little to identify it as anything other than the remains of the old, World War II era, landing strip made out of thick ice.
Ilya just stared at it. “We’ve been had, haven’t we?”
“I don’t know,” Demyan replied, his eyes sweeping the entire area for signs of ice thinning. His eyes stopped at a small section toward the southern end of the field, where the icy ground had dipped, and some parts had collapsed. His lips turned upward into a smile. “There! I’d say that’s the remnants of the thin ice collapsing.”
“You think there’s a hot spring below?”
“Must be! But there’s only one way to find out for certain. Let’s go check it out.”
Demyan stepped onto the ice.
His eyes swept the entire frozen lake. There were no cracks or breaks in the surface ahead of him and no flowing water at its edge. He made a mental note to stay clear of the southern end, where the hard surface of the ice appeared to dip and a small patch of white ice spread over several feet — a sign the ice had recently thawed and then refrozen, making it highly unstable.
His boots tentatively crunched into the hard ice at the edge of the lake — often the most dangerous part to walk on any frozen lake. Ice near the shore is weakest. The shifting, expansion and buckling action of the lake or stream over the winter continually breaks and refreezes ice along the shoreline.
The surface underneath his feet was solid.
He took another step, followed by a number of small, slow steps toward the middle of the lake. After crossing thousands of frozen lakes and rivers he’d developed the intrinsic knowledge of what ice would hold his weight and what wouldn’t. His senses were specifically attuned to such knowledge. A skill grown over his relatively short lifetime in the harsh, Siberian landscape. Despite his confidence, his nerves were on edge, as he strained to hear the sharp snapping of ice. His center of balance told him the ground wasn’t moving even an inch.
A third of the way across the frozen lake, he stopped and dropped his rucksack on the ground.
“What do you think?” Ilya asked.
“I think there’s only one way to find out if there are fish.”
He withdrew an axe and started chipping away a six-inch-wide by eight-inch-long hole into the ice. It was a slow process, but he’d done that, too, a thousand times before.
The ice was thick, more than a foot in total.
Demyan could have kept going, but it would have meant widening the opening, and that would have increased their risk of falling through. He glanced at his little brother, whose face betrayed his eagerness and naïve willingness to take risks.
“Do you want me to try?” Ilya asked.
Demyan shook his head and picked up the axe. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll head farther toward the middle. The ice is always thinner as it approaches the center. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of water in there.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. Look at all those air bubbles. There’s flowing water down there and that means fish.”
They both glanced into the hole.
Water was easily visible just below the ice. It had a soft prism of red, yellow and blue. There was something unusual about that in itself. In ice, the absorption of light at the red end of the spectrum is six times greater than at the blue end. As a consequence, the ice surrounding every other opening he’d ever made for ice-fishing had always appeared blue.
Demyan was about to make a comment about the strange prism of color, but a swift movement from down below the surface of the ice, interrupted his thoughts. A large fish swam by, providing a dark silhouette from the light below.
“Whoa!” Ilya’s grin was visible beneath his thick woven scarf. “Did you see that fish!”
Demyan smiled. “That’s got to be a Hucho Taimen!”
He felt his heart race and forced himself to breathe slowly. A fish like that could be over two hundred pounds. Catching it would go a long way to providing for both of them throughout the last of the winter, into early spring.
Hucho Taimen were normally found in fresh water. They preferred cold flowing water over a stony or gravel bottom and never migrated to sea. It was extremely good luck to find one trapped in a lake.
“Come with me, quickly,” Demyan said.
He picked up his rucksack and ran across the ice toward the middle of the lake, in the same direction the Taimen had swum — without stopping for one second to ask why the fish should cast a shadow on the underside of the ice.