We were surrounded by the dogs. They were ragged, half-starved beasts that looked like anything would do for a meal, including us. Georgi clung to me. I was sure the villagers would hear the commotion and investigate. Hastily I emptied the bag of bones, scattering them on the ground. While the dogs lunged at them, we made our escape.
The road began to climb. Georgi begged, “Marya, I’m tired. Let’s stop and rest.”
“We can’t, Georgi. We have to get as far from the village as we can. Besides, if we don’t walk fifteen miles each day, we won’t reach Mama until after the winter starts and we’ll freeze to death.”
The idea of freezing to death did not quiet him for long. “I don’t care if I freeze to death. You can just melt me when the summer comes.”
“Don’t joke about something so serious, Georgi.” I tried again to tell him how cold it would be when summer ended. When I saw he wouldn’t listen, I said, “Georgi, you know all the famous explorers Papa taught us about? Genghis Khan and Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus and all the rest?”
Georgi nodded his head, more interested in the explorers than in talk of his freezing to death.
“Remember, Georgi, what hardships they had? Did they complain?”
Georgi shook his head.
“Well, we are explorers. We will have all kinds of stories of our adventures to tell Mama when we see her.”
Georgi looked at me from the corner of his eye. He half believed that we were to be explorers and he half believed I was telling him a tale. At last the wish to be an explorer won, and he trudged after me, complaining about his knapsack and the little black flies, so small you did not know they were there until they bit you. The only comfort we had was the company of the river, which by now was an old friend, tagging along with us wherever we went. The ribbon of water was the color of strong tea and sometimes so wide you could hardly see across it.
When fishermen or barges passed, we were careful to hide behind the trees. When we could walk no longer, we settled down on a sandy bank. I snapped off a branch and fashioned a fishing pole. Georgi eagerly turned over logs and stones and at last held up two fat worms. I was about to fasten them to the hook, but Georgi took the pole from me.
“No. I do the fishing.” Much to my horror, he bit one of the worms in half and threaded one half onto the hook.
“Georgi! That’s disgusting!”
Seeing how upset I was, he looked very pleased with himself. “Old Savoff taught me how to do that.”
This time Georgi was successful, though the two trout he caught were small. He could hardly bear to part with his fish. While he danced around holding a wriggling fish in each hand, I gathered an armful of twigs for a fire. I knew that the trout must be cleaned, but how that was done I had no idea. In the city the few fish we could buy were ready for the pan.
“You have to get to their insides and take them out,” Georgi said. “Only I think you should kill them first.”
We whopped the fish against a stone, and I made a long cut in each one’s belly. Gritting my teeth, I reached into the fish and pulled out whatever would come out. I whittled points on two green branches and stuck the fish on the points, and Georgi and I held the branches over the fire.
The fish were very tasty and the fire cheerful. I began to think that the journey would be possible after all. I fell asleep at once, only to be awakened by Georgi shaking me.
“There’s something there,” he whispered.
I thought of the great Siberian mammoth Papa had showed us in the Leningrad museum. Might there be such animals still on the earth? Then I remembered that mammoths ate buttercups, and I felt better.
There were scampering, rustling sounds and then nothing. It must have been after midnight, though it was light as day out. I sat up and looked around, but there was nothing to see. I didn’t have the courage to climb out of my blanket. It was a long time before we fell asleep again, and then we woke at every noise. In the morning we found tracks circling the place where I had left the fish’s insides. The prints were small, so the animal was not worth worrying about.
After a quick breakfast of bread and cheese, and a reminder to Georgi that we were explorers who did not complain, we started out. I had no idea how much ground we were covering, but I thought if we walked for two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and two hours in the early evening, we would have walked fifteen miles a day. Since Old Savoff’s boat had already carried us a hundred miles, by the summer’s end we should have traveled the thousand miles to Dudinka and our mother.
The first three days went very well. The path followed along the river, so we had the river’s company, water to drink, water to bathe our feet, and ducks, boats, and barges to watch. We saw no more barges carrying prisoners.
On the other side of the path was a forest, a little too dark and too crowded with huge trees to be a friend. Sometimes we sensed movement in the woods, so we knew we had invisible animals for company, but they kept to themselves. Once, when the trees gave way to a meadow, we found a field of wild strawberries. We spent a whole precious hour on our hands and knees gently twisting the strawberries, like tiny red rubies, from their delicate stems. All the while we picked, beetles and ants climbed over our sticky fingers. At last we fell back onto the ground, our mouths stained red and our bellies full.
By eating mostly fish, we saved what little food we had. Georgi was becoming a good fisherman, even throwing back into the river fish he pronounced too small. After we lost a chunk of bread to a thieving wolverine, we learned to hang our knapsacks from tree branches. Since it never got dark, it was hard to tell when night came and went, but when we were too full of fish and too tired to walk any farther, we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep until the early-morning birdsong awoke us. Georgi was eagerly playing the part of explorer. He would dash into the woods after “lions” and “tigers,” returning minutes later to announce he had frightened away the wild beasts.
At the end of our first week Georgi caught a large fish. While I was cleaning it, Georgi wandered into the woods. I thought nothing of it when he ran out of the woods shouting, “It’s a bear and it’s got two Russes with it!”
I was sure it was part of his game. “Georgi,” I said, “stop running into the woods. No wonder you get so tired. Stay on the path.”
“Marya, there’s a bear coming!” Georgi grabbed me around the waist and hung on. I could feel his heart pounding against me. I looked up to see a brown bear with two cubs. In that huge body the bear’s eyes looked very tiny and very angry. Her lip was drawn, showing her sharp teeth. The bear lumbered toward us. When the cubs followed their mother, she slapped them so that they tumbled onto their backs. I knew what that huge paw, as large as a dinner plate, could do to us. A tree, I thought; but no, bears climbed trees. Run? Bears were fast runners. Then it came to me: the dogs and the bones! I scooped up the fish, tossing it in front of the bear. At my quick movement, the bear rose up on her hind feet. She looked huge. A moment later she was nosing the fish, and then, seated on her rump, she began tearing it apart.
I grabbed Georgi, and we ran along the river path as fast as we could, never looking back. We must have run a half mile when we finally stopped on a hill overlooking the river.
“Let’s keep going,” Georgi pleaded.
“We can’t. We have to go back for our knapsacks.” I was panting so hard, I had trouble getting the words out.
“They’ll eat us if we go back.”
“We must wait until they’re gone.”
We sat very close together on the hill and looked out at the river. There were no boats or barges to be seen, just the brown river and two ducks looking unprotected as they swam alone on the wide stretch of water. The two ducks suddenly shot up into the air. Downstream the mother bear and the cubs were frolicking in the water, splashing one another. After a few minutes of play the mother and the cubs swam across the river and, climbing out on the other side, loped away.
I am not sure why,
but I began to cry. Georgi patted my shoulder. “They’ve gone away now, Marya. You don’t have to be scared.”
I knew now how many dangers the woods held. I did not see how we would ever reach Mama. That was not all. Though I couldn’t tell Georgi, seeing the mother watching over and playing with her two cubs made me miss Mama more than ever. I was tired of being brave and tired of being in charge. I didn’t believe we could make such a long journey. I wanted to lie down in the woods and never get up again.
Georgi was watching me.
“Come on, Marya,” he said. “I’ll show you the way back to the knapsacks.”
I made myself get up and follow him.
We found our knapsacks broken open and our belongings scattered everywhere. Our last bit of food had been eaten. I began to think even an orphanage would have been better than starving in the woods.
The next day there were no bears, but there was rain—not a gentle rain, but a downpour. It felt like someone had turned on a faucet and we were standing under the stream of water. The path turned to mud. Our clothes clung to us as if we had been wrapped in wet sheets.
Georgi said, “Marya, it’s raining so hard, I can’t keep my eyes open.”
We tried to find shelter under the branches of the trees, but the wind blew the rain across us as well as over us. Georgi and I broke off branches from the pine trees, weaving them back and forth among the boughs of a tree until we had a shelter. The drops still found their way to us, but we weren’t being drowned anymore.
We sat all day under the tree while I worried that no miles would be covered. When Georgi became restless, I told him Pushkin’s story of poor Yevgeny. The great Russian poet Pushkin described how terrible rains came to St. Petersburg until the Neva River burst her banks and flooded the whole city. “Smashing and slaying, destroying and pillaging,” Pushkin wrote. When poor Yevgeny found that his sweetheart was drowned, he became a madman, wandering the city day after day and night after night. One night in his misery Yevgeny cursed the great bronze statue of Peter the Great on his horse. The bronze statue came to life and began to ride after Yevgeny, chasing him through the city until the terrified man fell exhausted and died. Georgi loved the story, for Mama had often taken us to see the statue of the bronze horseman.
“It won’t rain so hard that the Yenesey will flood like the Neva did?” Georgi asked.
I promised it wouldn’t, but it was still raining when evening came. We had no fish and no fire. Curling up on the wet ground on wet blankets, we tried to sleep. Early in the morning the rain turned into a thunderstorm. With the first bolt of lightning I pulled Georgi away from our shelter under the tree and out into the open.
“What are you doing, Marya? You are getting us all wet again.”
“We can’t sit under the tree, because we might get struck by lightning.”
We were standing in a clearing. The pale sky that never darkened was dark now with storm clouds. The river seethed and roiled.
“If we keep standing here, Marya,” Georgi whined, “the lightning will find us.” Georgi started back toward the shelter of the tree.
There was a terrible crack, as if the whole world were splitting in two. Only a few feet from us a huge tree branch crashed to the ground. After that we did not dare go into the woods.
As suddenly as it began, the storm ended. In an hour’s time a pale morning sun shone, warming the ground so curls of steam rose all around us. We wrung out our clothes and hung them on branches. While we waited for them to dry, we saw a marten poke its head out of a hole in the branch that had split from the tree. It had a baby marten in its mouth. The animal made its way to the ground and then up a nearby tree. It disappeared into a hole and then, without the baby, scampered back to the first hole to collect a second and then a third and a fourth baby to carry back to its new nest. To make its way from its old nest to the new one, the marten had to cross just in front of us. We kept very still. Each time, the marten paused, looked our way, seemed to decide we were not dangerous, and hurried by us.
The marten cheered us. The sun was hot now, and our clothes dried quickly. The river settled down. Georgi caught a large fish with pink flesh that was very tasty. We set out in a good mood, walking most of the day to make up for the day we had lost. After that we made good time each day, and though we never went hungry, we grew very tired of fish twice a day.
We passed two small villages, but I thought in a town where everyone would be known, we would stand out. At last we came to a larger town. We washed well, combed our hair, and cleaned our clothes as best we could, and holding my breath, I took Georgi’s hand. We made our way into the town searching for a store where I thought no questions would be asked. We came upon an outdoor market where people appeared to have come from all around the countryside. Georgi and I mixed easily with the crowds. I spent precious kopecks on cheese, bread, and plump raspberries. We hurried away before anyone could ask questions. That evening we had a feast.
Twice we came to large rivers that flowed into the Yenisey. Each time we found a fisherman willing to ferry us across the river for a ruble. “The crossing of the river with this east wind will be hard work,” the first fisherman said. “Just see those clouds shaped like a blacksmith’s anvil,” the second fisherman said. “A storm is on the way.”
The fishermen asked no questions of us. They knew that in Siberia everyone had secrets. Only the talk of weather was safe, for the weather had no secrets and was there for everyone to see.
Mosquitoes had been bothering us for days. Though we beat the air around us with a spray of leaves as we walked, our arms and legs were covered with red bumps. On a morning when the air was so still that not a leaf or a blade of grass stirred, the mosquitoes suddenly fell upon us like a plague, biting us everywhere. If we talked, mosquitoes got in our mouths. If we breathed, we breathed in mosquitoes. All the running and slapping and covering of our heads didn’t help. We were hurrying down the river path, flailing away with our arms, when Georgi called out, “Look, Marya, there are branches standing still in the river.”
While we tried to puzzle out why the branches didn’t float with the current, three reindeer heads emerged, dripping water. The reindeer were standing in the river, their branched racks poking out.
For a moment, in the magic of seeing the reindeer, we forgot the mosquitoes. I had learned in school that hundreds of thousands of reindeer roamed the plains of Siberia. Some of them would be gathered together in herds by the Samoyeds. Others, like these, migrated across the land.
“Why are they in the river?” Georgi asked. “Are they fishing?”
I knew that reindeer grazed on mosses and lichen and did not eat fish. As we swatted away the mosquitoes, I suddenly realized what the reindeer were doing in the river. They were escaping the mosquitoes. Minutes later the reindeer lifted their heads to see us slip into the water. Silently they swam away. For a glorious half hour we were free of the mosquitoes. The next morning a wind blew the mosquitoes away.
CHAPTER NINE
CARRIED AWAY
Each day I broke off a bit of twig and put it carefully in my pocket. In that way I kept track of the days. Each evening Georgi would ask for the little pieces and we would count them off. We had twenty-five pieces, but the journey seemed much longer. Each evening Georgi begged, “Marya, turn out your pocket. There have to be more pieces.”
With the hundred miles we had gained in Old Savoff’s boat, and allowing for days when it rained, I figured we must have traveled nearly five hundred miles, but that was not even halfway.
The river took care of us like a mother. Each day it fed us fish. It washed us and washed our clothes. It gave us water when we were thirsty. Always it ran ahead of us to show us the way. On the days that the path wandered into the woods and we lost sight of the river, we were sad and troubled. It was like losing Mama all over again.
There were barges and steamboats and the boats of fishermen on the river. Often the river had surprises for us: a busy muskrat or a slink
y mink swimming about, and strange, long-legged birds that stalked the shore for frogs. There were huge birds overhead, some with white heads and some with white bellies, that fished the river with their beaks and talons. Often, now, we saw reindeer. I thought how Old Savoff had talked of a roasted reindeer, but I did not see how we were to hunt one and I didn’t think I could get one to lie down and be roasted.
I was frightened to discover that the buying of bread and cheese to eat with our fish, and paying for being ferried, had used up all our rubles but one. I resolved not to spend that one, though Georgi begged me for bread, saying without it he would not eat another bite of fish.
“If I get a bone in my throat, Marya, we won’t have any bread to get it down and I’ll choke to death. Besides, you don’t cook the fish enough, and they taste slimy and they smell.”
I felt exactly like Georgi about the fish, but I couldn’t say so. Because Georgi liked to fish, and because he was hungry, I could still coax him to take a few bites, but it was hard to comfort Georgi when I was so discouraged myself.
It was a morning in July when Georgi said, “Marya, I won’t take another step. You said we would see Mama, but we don’t see anything but water and trees.”
For the thousandth time I took out the map, which was in shreds. Measuring from the last village we had passed, I saw the next village was miles away, much farther than I had thought. Even if we spent our last ruble in that village on food, the food would be gone long before we were anywhere near Dudinka. At the rate we were going, we would walk into winter before we walked into Dudinka.
Always before, I had been able to persuade Georgi. Always before, I had believed in our journey, but Georgi was only saying out loud what I had been thinking for days. I could not see how we could walk hundreds of miles with no food other than bony, slimy, evil-smelling fish. Our shoes were nearly worn though—each morning I had to pack them with grass. Our clothes were ripped and worn. Our faces were burned from the sun and our arms and legs were covered with bites.