They started along the uphill path on their right. After a hundred yards, Pastor was sweating profusely. “Bombardone,” he muttered, “I’m telling you, just so’s you know, this is my very last hunt. You’ll never get me going up this damn mountain with you again.”
“You’ve said that before, and you were always right there with us next time. You love the hunt — admit it!”
“I hate it. Anyway, I’m retiring in six months’ time. You know I am. My wife and I are off to live in the south. You know what kind of pet we’ll keep then?”
“No.”
“A cat! A nice, big, neutered kitty-cat who’ll sit on my knee and purr. Ha, ha, ha!”
Three hundred yards lower down the mountain, Helen and Milos heard Pastor’s laughter ringing through the air, echoing back from the rocks. They stopped.
“If he laughs like that often enough, we’re in no danger of losing them!” said Helen.
It had been a hard night for them both. They had taken Emily’s advice to leave their school coats at her house and caught the same bus that Bart and Milena had taken a week before. They sat at the back to attract as little notice as possible. But there had been a terrifying moment as they left: a massively built man had stationed himself in the middle of the road to stop the driver, who opened the bus door. The huge man had gotten in, followed by the alarming pack of dog-men.
“Don’t be afraid, ladies and gentlemen,” Mills had boomed at the frightened passengers. “They won’t hurt you.”
“That’s right, don’t worry,” Pastor had added. “They obey my slightest word. In theory.”
And he had made his dog-men sit in the empty seats.
Two of them, addressed as Cheops and Teti by their master, sat down just in front of Helen and Milos. From behind they were an intriguing sight, with flat skulls that seemed to have no room in them for any brain.
Then the unhappy animals’ ordeal began. The stink of their vomit, the constant stops, and the icy air coming in through the windows had made the journey seem endless, but Milos had a chance to notice something that he thought could come in very useful later. Apart from the dog-man sleeping against Mills’s shoulder, the others seemed to obey only one man: their master, the handler whom Mills called Pastor. The police chief had been obliged to use him as a go-between several times when he wanted the pack to do something: tell them this, make them do that, and so on.
“If I could just manage to — how can I put it? — overpower him,” Milos had whispered.
“Overpower him?” Helen had replied. “You think you’re on a wrestling mat or something?”
For the rest of the night, the two fugitives had kept quiet, sometimes dropping off to sleep for a few minutes, but always woken by the cold. Toward morning one of the two dog-men turned and looked at them for a long time, vacant-eyed. His pale, expressionless face looked as if he had just emerged from a nightmare. Helen almost screamed.
Now they themselves were hard on the heels of the pack, and the climb was beginning. Up above, the autumn sun was bathing the crest of the mountains in color.
“Nice day for an outing!” said Milos. “Know any good walking songs?”
Mills, Pastor, and their dogs went rapidly ahead for two days. It was a forced march, and they ran when the terrain was good enough. Whenever they could take a shortcut, Mills didn’t hesitate to lead his pack along steep or overgrown paths. They came to the mountain refuge on the second evening, scratched and grazed, exhausted, stupefied by the open air. Pastor could go no farther. The dogs were starving. As for Mills, he was in seventh heaven as he kicked the door of the refuge open and went in.
“Hey, take a look at this little love nest, will you? They went at it right here on this mattress! Bet you it’s still warm!”
“Could be,” grumbled Pastor. “But they’ve burned all the wood, the vandals! I’ll go and find some for the night. Ramses, Chephren, come and help me, you lazy brutes!”
The two dog-men followed him. The others lay down on the floor, waiting for their master’s next orders.
“Move over, will you?” Mills snapped at them. “I can’t get by.”
They looked at him as if he’d spoken in Hebrew.
“Move, I said! It’s not that difficult to understand!”
They didn’t budge. It made Mills feel vaguely uneasy, and he left the room until Pastor was back. Raising his eyes, he saw that the weather had changed within a few hours. Low gray clouds covered the sky.
That night snow began falling, heavily and steadily, and it didn’t stop. It wrapped the hut in silence, like cotton balls, and soon they felt a long way from civilization, as isolated as if they were in the middle of the ocean. From time to time Mills went out on the doorstep and came back at once, covered with snowflakes.
“We’ll leave tomorrow at dawn. Just think how infuriating it would be if they freeze to death before we catch up with them.”
They lit a fire, ate some bread, and drank a little of the spirits that Pastor had brought. The big dog-handler would have liked the snow to prevent them from going on at all the next day, but you couldn’t count on Mills agreeing to that. He would track his prey as far as hell itself, even at the risk of his own life. The two men lay down side by side on the mattress, fully dressed. Mills had merely hung his jacket on the hook behind the door. The dogs slept on the floor a little way off. Mykerinos seemed to be galloping in his dreams; under his jeans, his thin legs jerked convulsively.
For the first time since they had left, it occurred to Helen that she shouldn’t have gone with Milos. She had ventured on this crazy expedition, and now they were going to freeze to death a hundred yards from a refuge with a fire burning in it. A hundred yards from its door, and they couldn’t knock at it. She had lost all feeling in the fingers of her left hand. She’d blown on them, tucked them inside her shirt. Nothing helped. And now she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering. Milos, kneeling behind her, was holding her close and trying to warm her by rubbing her with his own large hands, but he wasn’t in a much better state himself. He was shivering all over too, and he didn’t know what to say to cheer her up.
They had approached the mountain refuge as night was falling, exhausted, and the smoke coming from the chimney told them that the hunters were already there. They had hidden behind rocks, then it began snowing. The cold, their discouragement . . . what could they do? Move away from the refuge and lose themselves in the night? That would mean certain death. Knock on the door and ask for shelter?
“Don’t expect them to feel sorry for us,” said Milos. “No chance. They’re barbarians, and don’t forget it.”
They had seen Mills appear in the doorway three times to breathe in the night air, and then go back to the fire that was keeping them all warm in there, men and dogs both.
“It’s the other one I need,” Milos said at last. “The other man, the dog-handler. He has to come out eventually.”
“Suppose he does? What will you do to him?”
“I’m not too sure. But it’s our last chance. I’m going to leave you alone for a few minutes. If I can’t manage anything, I’ll come back to you and then — well, too bad, we’ll knock at the door. OK?”
“OK,” said Helen. “But be careful. Promise!”
“I promise,” he said. He hugged her, dropped a kiss on her hair, and went toward the refuge, skirting it and going around behind the building.
Helen wondered what Milos was planning. In spite of the cold and her fear, she couldn’t help smiling when she saw him reappear on the roof three minutes later. Milos must have been a cat in a former life.
Pastor got up to throw a log on the fire and watched it burn, brooding, sometimes stirring the flames with the poker. All around him the room looked like a battlefield after a defeat. The sleeping dog-men lay about on the floor like corpses. He noticed, with amusement, that Ramses had moved close to Mills and laid his muzzle against his master’s hip. Pastor crossed the room, taking care not to tread on the bodies lying there, stepped over Amenophis, put on his sheepskin jacket, and opened the door. The cold hit him full on. Snow was still falling, though perhaps not quite as hard as at the beginning of the night. Good thing we brought snowshoes, he told himself, looking at the thick layer that had settled.