The ram brayed, tried to run, grazed on some lowgrowing thistle, and then slept. We spent the night listening and resting in shifts. I glassed the ridge at sunrise but didn’t see a thing. We watched all morning and into the afternoon, then left our cover and walked the ram back down into a meadow, clearing the air before we tried again the next night. Nothing. Three days we spent observing that ridge, until I woke up the next morning and saw Zlee standing to take in the view of the valley behind us and a slice of the distant range visible from our blind.
“Your father’s wrong,” he said. “That lion’s not here. And if she was, she’s not coming back here, at least not to hunt anything tied down.”
We had run out of food, so, disappointed as I was that we wouldn’t get the cat, I was glad we’d be heading back to our camp, and I said to Zlee, “Do you mean in the mountains, or not here on this ridge?”
“I mean not where we are,” he said. “If this lion’s hunting, why do we believe that we can leave some old animal in her path and expect her to show up for us? We’re not tracking a creature of habit. She’s stayed alive in these mountains for a long time by doing more than stalking sheep.”
I told him I understood, and that we should take the ram back to the camp, reprovision ourselves, and try again in another place.
“Jozef, don’t you see?” His eyes flashed, lightless as it was, and I don’t think he had slept at all. That lion had picked through the best of the flock, he said, not the weak and the lame, but the strong, and she was going to keep on hunting for one better prize after another. “And all we’ve done is wait for her, and fired into the air at her shadow. But if we could find her, without her seeing us, while she stalks, we just might be able to kill her. There’s no other way.”
We tethered the ram to a stake at the mouth of a thrum-cap overhang. Then, our packs empty, we set off for the valley where my father said that he was taking the sheep for some protection until we returned, a day’s hike from there.
It was dusk when we arrived. I still remember looking down on him from the brow of a hill we had just come over. He was scanning the perimeter of those same hills rising out of the valley in which he and his sheep had lain down for the night, but he didn’t see us, just turned his back and set to the chores of the evening, slowly and with a break every now and then when he’d sit and stare at the ground, not, it seemed, because he was tired but, rather, as though he had forgotten what it was he needed to do next. I felt the wind coming up out of the mountains from the northeast.
We had approached on purpose in a long sweep from the west. I carried the Krag, while Zlee scouted ahead and found a group of large boulders midway up the hill, and we nestled in behind them. They covered our backs and gave us a good view of the surrounding terrain. I had watched my father from a distance before and he had always somehow seen me without my knowing. Now, with no idea that Zlee and I were there, he seemed fragile and alone as he finished setting up his small tent, built a fire, and warmed his soup. I felt alone, too. I wanted to go to him, listen to him talk as he stirred what would be our supper, or hear him read, and be a boy again there in the mountains.
Zlee and I hadn’t eaten all day, but we didn’t speak of food. We communicated in signs and short sentences, the last of which was when he shook me awake before dawn, held a finger to his lips for silence and handed me the field glasses.
“Four hundred yards,” he whispered, and I saw the brown-and-silvery figure threading past makeshift pens of sleeping sheep. How was it that nothing stirred? By some power or invisibility, the lion stalked along steadily, and I could tell that she was through with killing sheep. It crossed my mind, briefly, to ask Zlee if he wanted to take the shot, but the movement involved in the very act of turning and questioning might be discernible to the cat. So I settled into my breathing, and the only other words Zlee spoke were a short comment on the growing light, and wind, which I took to mean that I hadn’t much time.
I thought of my father, who was sleeping soundly below, not knowing what lay in store for him if I missed. He would be rising soon, and I suspect the cat was waiting for when her prey would emerge from the tent and move away from the protective cover of canvas. I had one shot. The sky was brightening in that way morning seems to come on all at once in the summer, and I waited, holding the animal’s haunch in my sight. I eased the barrel slightly right, took one full breath and could smell the faint musk of the well-oiled gun stock mingling with my own unbathed stench, and almost sighed as I pulled the trigger. The shot’s echo seemed to crack open the valley, and the cat, as though powering in that direction, slumped to one side.
WHEN WE WENT BACK DOWN TO PASTVINA FOR THE WINTER in 1914, all we heard was talk of the war. Boys a few years older than I wore their cadet uniforms daily, and men from our village marched off to the conscription office in Eperjes to join the fight against the Russians on the eastern front. There was a fever rising, and not just for battle. Young men, as always, sensed a chance to leave the boredom of their villages and see to the borders of the empire and beyond, but this time their departure was imminent, and so they lived and worked and moved in a tension between excitement and rage. Or maybe I’m just remembering what the thoughts of war began to evoke in me.
I never felt at home there in the village, the closepacked houses, the lack of privacy, the sense, as I grew to be a young man, that my father was seen as a failure or a kind of fool. His wife, who must have sensed the man’s declining confidence, berated him endlessly about money, and his stepsons acted as though they were the men of the house, when they were nothing more than layabouts. I even saw it when we went to the shop along the main street of the village. No one greeted my father or asked him how the summer had treated him in the mountains. Not so much as “Dobr den•.” He was, indeed, a man who appeared as though he had come down off a mountain and yet seemed weaker, somehow less a man among other men as a result of it. And I wanted to grab those people and cuff them for their ignorance, hold them by the neck and make them kneel before my father, but when I turned to him, looking for and expecting to see in him — for my sake — something of the man I knew, who had shaped me, he seemed, year after year, to shrink before us all, as though somehow the streets and houses and villagers we walked among now reminded him of not just a humility but a weakness waiting to inhabit him, and it was his duty to relent.
My stepbrothers were doing their mandatory cadet service that year and were waiting to be conscripted into the Honvéd in the spring. By December, they moved about the house with a kind of recklessness. I saw it in others, too, just boys who knew there was something larger than they could imagine happening hundreds of miles to the east and west of us, something that in all likelihood, once they were a part of it, would destroy them. But my stepmother’s sons, who mistook her coddling for belief in their natural superiority, became nothing more than spoiled thugs. I despised them, especially Tibor. Both of them were bug-eyed and fleshy, which was a rare thing in that part of the world, because there wasn’t that much food or time to be idle. But their mother fed them constantly, as she had done from childhood, kept them from work, and filled their heads with the notion that they deserved more and would receive more once they found their opportunity to leave Pastvina and claim the greatness that was rightfully theirs.
That January, I was in the barn, replacing a board on an old cart we used for transporting the wooden boxes of bryndza. It was cold, but I had to saw and plane pinewood to shape and so I worked without a coat on. I heard someone come into the barn and I looked up, expecting to find Zlee, because I had asked him for help and was wondering why he had forgotten. Then I saw Tibor and Miro standing in front of me. It wasn’t quite noon, but they were drunk, and from that short distance I could smell on their breaths the homemade slivovica they had stolen from my father’s cellar.