In matters of woodcraft and hunter’s tricks, mine was the opinion always sought. The other six were all townsmen. My happy days as a youth in the Pripet Marshes were often now turned to practical account. I was confident that with an occasional glimpse of the sun and the signs of the trees I could maintain a fairly accurate course due south. I had in my mind, too, a quite clear picture in broad map form of southeast Siberia, dominated by the Lena and Lake Baikal. Let us but find the northern tip of the lake, I told the others, and its long eastern shore will lead us through Trans-Baikal and almost out of Siberia.
This thought of Baikal as a natural guide out of this country of bondage was the goad which kept us going fast and determinedly for the next few weeks.
11. Baikal and a Fugitive Girl
I FIND IT difficult to remember in sequence the many changes in the face of the country through which we passed. In my mind there are thrown up images, clearly detailed, of stretches of Siberian landscape highlighted and fixed by the memory of some extraordinary incident, like the scenic background to a moment of drama in a play.
From a tree-topped knoll we looked south and rolling away from us stretched twenty or thirty miles of openish country, sliced through by a broad river and melting away in the farthest distance to forested hills. Through scrub, dwarf trees and tufted grass we plodded cautiously for a whole day to reach the cover of the forest. Our way lay through the trees for some days. On about the third day we were enveloped in an early morning ground mist as we started out. We abandoned for once our practice of advance in extended line and pushed on through the mist in a bunch. Somebody hissed urgently for silence. We stopped dead and listened.
Ahead of us and quite near came a shuddering, deep-throated cough, a violent thumping on the ground and a succession of crashing noises as though some heavy body were hurling itself towards us through the undergrowth. We stood as still as a collection of statues. Then I reached down for the knife, Kolemenos swung his axe up to his shoulder and the others purposefully swung their cudgels. The furious commotion stopped. We waited a full minute, straining our ears. Faintly came the sound of choked, laboured breathing. Another minute went by. The uproar exploded again and we felt the vibrations as the earth was pounded. Kolemenos came up beside me. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘Must be an animal,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s not coming any nearer,’ said the big man. ‘Let’s go and look.’ We spread out and went forward.
Through the mist a few yards away I saw an animal bulk thrashing convulsively from side to side, its head down and hidden from me. I made the remaining short distance at a crouched run. The others came up fast behind me. There, kicking, snorting and struggling, its muzzle flecked with spume and its breath pumping out steamily to join the morning’s white mist, was a full-grown male deer. Its eyes as it took the fearful taint of our human scent, were wide with desperate fear, showing the whites. The flailing front legs had dug a small pit in the hard earth. But it was trapped and could not run. The fine spread of antlers was locked fast in the tangled roots of a fallen tree. From the chaos around, from the hard-beaten ground and the fact that the animal was almost spent with its efforts to break free, it seemed that it must have ensnared itself hours earlier. Flailing, kicking, grunting and slobbering, terror of our presence injected into its tiring muscles one last surge of strength. Then it quietened, nervously twitching the off front leg. We looked at Kolemenos and Kolemenos looked at the stricken beast, nodded and moved in.
Kolemenos walked softly round the deer. He stepped up on to the trunk of the fallen tree, balanced himself expertly and swung the shining axe blade down with a vicious swish. The edge struck home where the back joined the neck and the deer slumped, quite dead. Kolemenos jerked his axe free, wiped the blade on his leggings. We all ran forward and unitedly tried to get the head of the animal free. Kolemenos got his shoulders under the roots and heaved upwards, but even he could not release the antlers, and eventually he brought his axe out again and hacked the head from the body. We hauled the carcase into a clear space and I cut it open and carefully skinned it.
The thing had happened very quickly and in the flurry of killing and cutting up we had not spoken much, until Makowski, speaking to us in a general way, but with his eyes on Mr. Smith, said, ‘What are we going to do with this lot?’ My arms bloodied almost to the elbows, I stopped the work of carving one of the hindquarters and stood up. ‘We had better have a conference,’ said the American.
Mr. Smith opened the meeting with the statement that we could not carry all this meat and we could not afford to leave any behind. In all our minds was the idea that we had our scheduled twenty or thirty miles to do that day. We tried to estimate the maximum amount of meat we could carry, but it still seemed we could not take it all. Marchinkovas propounded the obvious solution. ‘We must not waste food,’ said the Lithuanian. ‘Therefore there is only one answer to our problem. We must stay here for twenty-four hours and eat as much meat as we can hold. What’s left we ought to be able to carry.’ Zaro, licking his lips, said he was quite sure he could help to lighten the load. ‘All agreed, gentlemen?’ asked Mr. Smith. There was a chorus of approval.
Paluchowicz busied himself gathering wood, laying and lighting a fire while the rest of us built a shelter and completed the butchering. Within an hour we had choice cuts of venison grilling on a wooden spit over the flame and the melted ice and barley gruel was steaming fragrantly with the addition of titbits of liver and tender meat. We could not wait for the joints to cook through; I kept hacking slices off and handing them round. It took a bit of chewing, but it was excellent meat. Paluchowicz borrowed my knife and cut his share into small pieces because of his lack of teeth and we let him later have the first go at the mug of gruel. We ate and ate, the fat of the meat running down into our beards, and we belched loudly and laughed, congratulating ourselves on our miraculous good fortune. We smoked and dozed in the shelter for an hour or two afterwards and then decided we must get to work on the skin.
The preparation of the skin took some time. We armed ourselves with pieces of wood and painstakingly scraped off the adhering lumps of fat. We found that the sandy soil churned up by the stag was also a help in this part of the operation. Faced always with the necessity of travelling light, the big stretch of hide presented its own portage problem. The answer was on the same lines as that for the disposal of the carcase. We made moccasins, fourteen pairs of them. We put one pair on over those we were wearing and packed the spare pair in our sacks. And there was still a piece of skin each left. I carried mine rolled on the top of my sack. We broke off from our shoemaking to cook and eat another great meal, and again at night we fed off venison until our bellies were blown out with food. Not quite so heartily, but still willingly, we ate meat again just before dawn and distributed the best of what was left among our packs.
Somewhere about halfway between the Lena and Baikal we had been making heavy going of hours of climbing towards the upper slopes of a range of hills and towards mid-afternoon entered the cover of woods. The day had been arduous and the widely-spaced trees caused us to wander on tiredly for a couple of hours looking for suitable shelter. At this higher altitude the wind was blowing a gale and it was imperative we got as much protection as possible from it. We found more than we had been hopefully seeking — a long-disused trapper’s hut of logs, the main roof timbers hanging down into the interior. We scouted carefully, but there was no need for caution. The place was derelict. Moss and fungus covered the earth floor. We set to work, roughly repaired the roof, got a fire going and slept, each man taking an hour’s guard duty.