"Wait," Tolbukhin called to them, his voice low but urgent. "I think we still have Germans on our tail. This is the best place I can think of to make them regret it."
"We serve the Soviet Union!" one of the soldiers said. They returned and took cover behind bushes and stones. So did Tolbukhin. He could not have told anyone how or why he believed the fascists remained in pursuit of this little band, but he did. Instinct of the hunted, he thought.
And the instinct did not fail him. Inside a quarter of an hour, men in coal-scuttle helmets began going down into the balka. One of them tripped, stumbled, and fell with a thud. "Those God-damned stinking Russian pigdogs," he growled in guttural German. "They’ll pay for this. Screw me out of sack time, will they?"
"Ja, better we should screw their women than they should screw us out of sack time," another trooper said. "That Natasha in the soldiers’ brothel, she’s limber like she doesn’t have any bones at all."
"Heinrich, Klaus, shut up!" another voice hissed. "You’ve got to play the game like those Red bastards are waiting for us on the far side of this miserable gully. You don’t, your family gets a Fallen for Fьhrer and Fatherland telegram one fine day." By the way the other two men fell silent, Tolbukhin concluded that fellow was a corporal or sergeant. From his hiding place, he kept an eye on the sensible Nazi. I’ll shoot you first, he thought.
Grunting and cursing-but cursing in whispers now- -the Germans started making their way up the side of the balka. Yes, there was the one who kept his mind on business. Kill enough of that kind and the rest grew less efficient. The Germans got rid of Soviet officers and commissars on the same brutal logic.
Closer, closer… A submachine gun spat a great number of bullets, but was hardly a weapon of finesse or accuracy. "Fire!" Tolbukhin shouted, and blazed away. The Nazi noncom tumbled down the steep side of the wash. Some of those bullets had surely bitten him. The rest of the German squad lasted only moments longer. One of the Hitlerites lay groaning till a Red Army man went down and cut his throat. Who could guess how long he might last otherwise? Too long, maybe.
"Now we go on home," Tolbukhin said.
They had practiced withdrawal from such raids many times before, and maskirovka came naturally to Soviet soldiers. They took an indirect route back to the collective farm, concealing their tracks as best they could. The Hitlerites sometimes hunted them with dogs. They knew how to deal with that, too. Whenever they came to rivulets running through the steppe, they trampled along in them for a couple of hundred meters, now going one way, now the other. A couple of them also had their canteens filled with fiery pepper-flavored vodka. They poured some on their trail every now and then; it drove the hounds frantic.
"Waste of good vodka," one of the soldiers grumbled.
"If it keeps us alive, it isn’t wasted," Tolbukhin said. "If it keeps us alive, we can always get outside of more later."
"The Comrade General is right," Khrushchev said. Where he was often too familiar with Tolbukhin, he was too formal with the men.
This time, though, it turned out not to matter. One of the other soldiers gave the fellow who’d complained a shot in the ribs with his elbow. "Da, Volya, the Phantom is right," he said. "The Phantom’s been right a lot of times, and he hasn’t hardly been wrong yet. Let’s give a cheer for the Phantom."
It was another soft cheer, because they weren’t quite safe yet, but a cheer nonetheless: "Urra for the Phantom Tolbukhin!"
Maybe, Tolbukhin thought as a grin stretched itself across his face, maybe we’ll lick the Hitlerites yet, in spite of everything. He didn’t know whether he believed that or not. He knew he’d keep trying. He trotted on. Collective Farm 122 wasn’t far now.
MOSO
"Moso" is also an alternate history, but of a different sort-an ecological a-h, you might say. Each member of the cat family chooses prey based not least on size. Cats eat mice; bobcats eat ground squirrels; and so on up to leopards, which eat things like baboons and smaller antelopes, and lions, which eat larger antelopes and zebras. No feline big enough to hunt critters like rhinos and elephants ever evolved. But what if one did?
Tshingana saw the vultures spiraling down from the sky as he walked out from the kraal to the cattle. Many, many vultures were descending. Something large must have died, Tshingana thought, and not far away. He trotted through the scrubby grass to see what it was.
Large indeed: an elephant lay not far from a stand of acacia trees. The vultures hopped around, not getting too close to the great mountain of meat. Other, larger scavengers were there before them-hunting dogs; hyenas; and three lions, one a big, black-maned male. Tshingana’s hand tightened round the knobkerrie he was carrying, through he was nearly a quarter-mile away, not close enough to be interesting.
Not even the lion showed any inclination to approach the elephant’s carcass. Tshingana understood why a moment later, when a moso climbed up onto its prey and began to feed.
The youth dropped his club. He shivered all over, though the morning was already warm. He had never seen a moso before. Now he understood why the storytellers of the baTlokwa tribe likened the greatest of all cats to lightning and fire. What but lightning, fire, or a moso could bring down an elephant?
The moso would have made three, perhaps four, of the big male lion. Even across several hundred yards, Tshingana could see its fangs gleaming as it tore chunk after chunk of flesh from the flank of the animal it had killed. Had it not been atop the elephant, though, he might never have spied it at all, for its striped coat, dark brown on tawny, was made for blending into grassland.
It raised its enormous head and looked toward Tshingana. Those golden eyes seemed to pierce his very soul. He shook his head, rejecting the idea. Surely he was too small and puny for the moso to notice.
So it seemed, for the beast started eating again. Tshingana remembered the cattle he was supposed to be tending. The rest of the boys in his iNtanga-his age group-would be angry at him for giving them more to do. He loped away with a ground-eating stride he could keep up for a couple of hours at a stretch.
The cattle were not that far away. The other herdboys jeered and waved their fists at Tshingana as he approached. "Was the inside of your hut too dark to remind you it’s daytime?" asked the tallest of them, a skinny youth named Inyangesa.
"More likely he stopped for ukuHlobonga with one of the girls," suggested Tshingana’s half-brother Sigwebana. Everyone laughed at that; Tshingana felt his face grow hot. Men and women did ukuHlobonga when they did not want to start children. None of the herdboys had yet spent seed even at night, though, so Sigwebana was just being rude. He was good at that, Tshingana thought.
"Where were you, Tshingana?" asked his best friend Mafunzi.
"I saw the vultures come down, so I went to see why," he answered.
"I didn’t see that," Sigwebana said.
"I did," Mafunzi said, "and over from the east, the direction Tshingana came from. What was it, Tshingana?"
"A moso killed an elephant, over by the acacias. I saw it eating," Tshingana said importantly.
The rest of the youths stared at him, eyes wide and white in their black faces. Then Sigwebana snickered. "You lie, Tshingana," he said. "Come on, tell us who you were playing ukuHlobonga with. Was it Matiwane? She’s pretty, isn’t she?" His hips thrust obscenely.
Tshingana hit him. Yelling at each other, the two herdboys rolled in the dirt, punching and wrestling. The others cheered them on. Finally, with honors about even, they warily separated. Tshingana wiped dirt, dry grass, and a few bugs from his hide. "It’s the truth," he told Sigwebana, who was doing the same thing. "Go look for yourself if you don’t believe me. I hope the moso eats you, too."
"It wouldn’t," Inyangesa said. "Moso don’t bother with people, any more than lions with rabbits: not enough meat for them to worry about. Moso don’t even bother much with cattle."