The one-eyed hunter hid behind a fallen pine, its tangled roots sticking out. His dog curled up at his feet. The old man watched the Saami busy at the fire and a narrow-eyed small boy jumping around with a wooden toy while a wrinkled woman, her face yellow as a rotten apple, pounded poisonous spurge laurel into a concoction offering protection from their enemies.
But the old man wasn't the only one who had found Savage. The blue-tattooed runt arrived at the Saami camp just behind him, following him like a predator out of the ravine. «You have to shed someone else's blood to liven up your own,» he used to say when he got involved in other people's fights. Now, scratching his nose with a crooked nail, he licked lips that were dry with excitement.
The dog whined and the hunter shushed it with a kick in the side. It fell silent, hiding its nose in its paws. The hunter was bent with age. The damp made his bones ache and blocked his chest and he wanted rid of Savage so that he could go home quickly. Suddenly he was aware of the steady gaze of someone behind him. The dog gave a hollow bark. The old man cocked the gun. It gave a dull click as though a branch had snapped under foot and the runt, who had been hiding in the ravine, drew himself up to his full height. Covered in tattoos his neck was blue like a corpse's and there were rings tattooed on his fingers. The hunter sneered when he saw his empty hands but the runt, his stance wide, was coming right at him, ignoring the gun. He had the eyes of a killer. He snapped his jaw like a crazed wolf and the one-eyed old man took fright and trembled. He stepped backwards, still holding the gun. The runt leapt at him and sank his teeth into his neck then watched, teeth still clenched, as the hunter's old dog, fled, tail between its legs. The gun fired, splintering the white trunk of a birch. Sap welled up and the Saami leapt out of their houses in a great commotion.
The runt appeared before them, wiping his bloodstained mouth, and took a picture of Savage out of his pocket. Without a word, he unfurled it in front of the old woman.
«Where is he?» the runt kept saying, poking the picture. «Where is he?»
«He, he,» the Saam woman repeated, offering her guest a fragrant herbal elixir, in which black and red berries floated. The runt recoiled from the bitter smell but made himself drink it to get in the old woman's good books.
When Savage came out of the tent, smoothing his hair with his fingers, the runt was already writhing on the ground and the herders were watching how long it would take him to die. Biting her fist so as not to cry out, Salmon hid behind Savage who whistled when he unfurled his picture. He realized he couldn't go back into town where it was open season on him. He would have to keep roaming the forest in search of food and shelter.
The old Saami woman found the body of the hunter in the ravine and, rolling her eyes, called out in her own language. The Saami surrounded the body of the murdered old man, shaking their heads and looking at his torn throat. Savage was assailed by a wave of nausea and turned away, his hand over his mouth.
«Manhunter!» a Saami boy whispered in Savage's ear. «Many people tried to get away from him but he got them all!»
They threw the bodies onto a ragged wide skin and Savage with two of the Saami dragged them away from the camp. Their faces, frozen in death, were so full of malice that the young Saami tried to avoid looking at them.
As he towed the skin along, Savage recalled dragging bodies to the morgue on the days the town had been without electricity and corpses were being thrown out of the back of the hospital. Savage imagined the cold he would endure in the taiga and decided that winter in the forest would be no worse than a town without electricity.
«Yavr!» said the young Saami, pointing to the lake.
«Yavr!» said Savage trying out the new word. «Yavr, yavr, yavr…»
The Saami laughed, imitating Savage.
«Yokk!» The boy pointed at the river.
The one-eyed hunter bared his teeth as he bounced over bumps and stones and the runt stared up morosely as if reproaching the Saami for killing him in such an underhand fashion.
«Yokk?» said a delighted Savage at the sight of a stream glistening on the other side of a hill.
The Saam shook his head.
«Yuay!»
It was Savage's turn to laugh.
«You only have four-letter words!»
The Saami didn't get the joke but they laughed anyway and their laughter rolled down the rocky slope like a loose stone.
Standing around the bodies, the Saami took one last look at them, and whispered something in their own language that rustled like leaves in the wind. Their final expressions frozen on their faces, the hunter and the runt appeared to be staring at one another in hatred. The Saami threw the bodies into a narrow gully, overgrown with bearberry and flowering water hemlock. They covered them with soil and damp moss then burnt the skin on the bonfire, dousing it with petrol which the herders kept in a small plastic bottle.
«If they found us, it means others will too,» Savage told Salmon fatalistically when he joined her at the camp. «We've got to get out of here!»
The girl shook her head.
«No, no-one else is going to come.»
She recalled the cruel face that looked as if it were carved out of rock and thought that only the one-eyed hunter could go so far into the taiga. Salmon had visited him in his home that reeked of sour cabbage soup and the oil he used to grease his gun. When Saam was settling up with the hunter, the girl would hover in the corridor, and when the old man gave her sweets, she would blush and hide them in her pocket only to throw them away later on. Saam laughed at her but to her the hunter's sweets were as bitter as the smirk fixed on his lips.
The old Saami woman, who resembled Beaivi, the goddess of legend, hid the one-eyed hunter's gun in her tent and forbade the Saami to go anywhere near it. She scattered grass over the place where the runt had bitten through the hunter's neck, spattering the mossy stones with blood, and gave an order that all that had happened that day should be forgotten.
Gathered round the bonfire in the evening and serving up platefuls of meat stew, the Saami counted their herd on their fingers and, snorting like reindeer, talked about autumn that was already hard on the heels of summer: before you knew it would be winter, white as doe's milk.
Salmon was snuggled in a mangy pelt that smelt of dogs. As she listened to the Saami, she wandered in memory, going back to the children's home where the nanny with her cracked dry hands had sung her to sleep in her arms. Savage smoothed out the poster the runt had been carrying and tried to imagine what his daughter was doing right then.
«People are unhappy and that's why they're bad,» Salmon said, taking the poster from him.
«People are bad and that's why they're unhappy,» said Savage with a shake of his head.
«Are you going to kill Saam?» the girl suddenly asked. Savely hugged her and kissed her on the temple.
The old dog raced around the herders' encampment for a long time, catching its dragging lead on snags. Salmon slipped him food, saving up leftovers but the old Saami woman cursed him, throwing stones at him in the belief that his owner's wicked soul had taken up residence in the dog.
The pictures on the hotel walls showed the green hills that huddled around the town, the smoking factory chimneys, and reindeer teams bogged down in snow as thick as cream. Since Karimov could see all this from his car window every day, he first hung the pictures upside down, then turned them to the wall. He hated the long, dark winters, the damp marsh air and the polar sun that crept under the blankets at night. But like the chalked outline of a magic circle, the Arctic Circle wouldn't let him go.