Shad looked at me. “He told you once about puppies barkin’ and wolves bitin’.”
“Yeah, but—”
“C’mon.” Shad led off, Slim matching his pace so that the still-fighting wolf was dragged forcibly along between them.
As we approached the cossack camp, all of the cowboys from our camp nearby came over to get a better look at the giant wolf, and also to sort of see what was going on.
By now the sun was gone and it was only a short while until dark.
Shad and Slim came to a stop, with me just behind the wolf and a little off to one side.
Rostov stepped toward us, studying the savage-eyed but now motionless wolf.
Then he looked at Shad. “That was an interesting exhibition with your ropes. They’re very effective.”
“We brought this fella over t’ give t’ you,” Shad said quietly. Then he added, “It’s a Montana puppy.”
There was a whole lot being said there, and Rostov understood every word of it. Shad had put him in a tough, touchy spot to get out of.
Yet the way Shad had said it, he wasn’t being quite as mean as it might sound. It was more of a hard kind of a testing where the way a man responds can sometimes make a big difference in your judgment of him.
Right now it was up to Rostov to respond. But just how the hell do you respond upon being presented with a giant, killer wolf as a pet?
He looked at the big wolf and said, “I admire the way he protected the other two with him.”
“Admire!” Crab grunted from where the cowboys had gathered. “I think that’s the bastard that got my arm that night! Only one thing t’ do with that vicious sonofabitch! An’ that’s put a bullet through his head before he bites somebody else’s arm clean off, or tears their throat out!”
Rostov ignored Crab, and now did an amazing and downright terrifying thing, a thing that I’d never dream of doing in a hundred years.
He walked up to where the wolf was still strung out tight between the two lassos. He grabbed Slim’s rope with his left hand about two feet away from those savagely bared fangs and lifted the wolf up onto its hind legs by that rope on its neck. Then, as the wolf thrashed around violently, trying to get its teeth into Rostov anyplace it could, he grabbed it firmly by the neck with his right hand, so that its slashing fangs couldn’t quite get at his arm.
“Slack off your ropes,” he said.
Shad and Slim both gave him slack in their lariats, and he managed somehow to get the nooses quickly off the wolf’s neck with his left hand without losing it.
Then with his powerful right hand still around the wolf’s neck, he lifted it completely off the ground as it snapped and thrashed violently in that iron grip.
It was a damn impressive, and frightening, sight to see.
Holding the wolf up almost at eye level, its fangs flashing only a few inches from his face, he said, “I appreciate your gift, Mr. Northshield. In return I’m going to give this Montana puppy a gift he’ll appreciate too—his freedom.”
With this, he threw the heavy wolf away from him. It landed about six feet from where he stood, whirled and charged away with blinding speed.
On its way out it sped by Mushy Callahan and Mushy leaped aside so fast that he damnere fell over.
Crab, whose arm still wasn’t completely cured, might just possibly have been mad about what Rostov had done, but nobody else was.
Even Shad had a kind of a good look on his face as he watched that big black wolf race off toward the darkening horizon, that one-half of a tail of his sticking straight and level out behind him at the speed he was going.
Rostov turned toward Shad. “I think both gifts that were given were rather interesting, in their own ways.”
Shad nodded briefly, impassively. “They weren’t too bad, Rostov.”
And then, with most everyone somehow feeling sort of good, we rode back to our camp to start supper.
It was two days later that I saw my first Tartars.
Rostov and I were far ahead, as usual, and were approaching the top of a high bluff. I don’t know whether it was out of instinct or because of something he’d seen or heard that I hadn’t, but he pulled up before we were on the skyline.
We dismounted and went up cautiously, finally lying down at the top of the bluff. And ahead of us, maybe two miles away on the flats, were thirty or forty riders that you could just barely see in the distance. Rostov studied them through his little telescope and then, handing the scope grimly to me, he went back down the hill to signal his men behind us to stop.
Rostov hadn’t told me they were Tartars, but when I looked through his spyglass I realized that he hadn’t had to.
In that little round opening I was staring through, the horsemen were brought up pretty close. And they were a scary-looking bunch. A lot of them had long, braided hair hanging far down their backs, and they were dressed every which way, some of them with almost nothing on, and others with dirty and ragged but colorful voluminous shirts and pants, and even some old robes that looked like tucked-in nightgowns.
Most of their weapons weren’t modern, but they sure as hell looked like they were made for killing. Among them they were carrying swords, daggers, spears, bows and arrows and a few rifles and handguns. Some of them were wearing big earrings and other kinds of jewelry. And a lot of them had painted their horses. Some of them were painted in white-and-black stripes, like zebras, and others were designed with blue or red polka dots.
But what got to me most, watching them silently riding along in much the same direction we were going, was the feeling I had deep down in my bones, even from this distance, of intense, animal savagery about them. With that black half-tailed wolf still in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that I’d seen wolf packs that seemed friendly and civilized compared to those deadly-looking Tartars up ahead.
They finally disappeared, moving north by east.
We let them get a good, long head start on us, and we never did see those particular Tartars again.
But late the next day we came upon a dreadful thing they’d left in their wake.
It was a fair-sized cart that had been carrying supplies and probably seven or eight Russians who’d been on their way to somewhere.
You couldn’t tell whether it was seven or eight because of the way they’d left some of their bodies. I can’t remember the scene Rostov and I came upon too well because my mind just sort of blacked out. All I can remember, and I wish I couldn’t, was one little baby of about three years old. It had been nailed to a tree.
Rostov and his cossacks started to bury them, and a little while later Shad, knowing that something was wrong, came galloping up with Igor.
After a long moment Shad said in a quiet, husky voice, “I once saw what was left after a Shoshone attack. But”—it took him a minute to get his voice firmly back—“Christ, even that poor damn little kid!
Rostov looked at him and there was almost a camaraderie between them because of this tragedy that would hit any man hard.
“The Tartars go by a saying they have,” he said quietly. “‘Let there be no eye left open—to weep.’”
We finally left that sad place.
And three days later, from the top of a green, forest-covered mountain, we first saw Khabarovsk.
PART TWO
ARMED TRUCE AT KHABAROVSK
Diary Notes
DURING THESE parlous and often downright spooky times, the Slash-Diamond outfit discovers among other things that there are cossacks—and there are cossacks. You can’t lump them all together any more than you can lump all birds together and try to pretend that a crow and an eagle are exactly the same thing.