After about a week of travel we began to sort ourselves out. The two regular soldiers, Makowski and Paluchowicz, kept close together. Marchinkovas, reserved and serious, but with an occasional unexpected dry wit, was befriended by Kolemenos. Smith, now completely accepted as a kind of elder counsellor of the party, was my own particular companion. The buoyant, funloving Zaro, was impartially friendly with everyone and moved happily from group to group. A rare fellow, this Zaro. I saw him, at the end of a gruelling day when we had to flog our aching muscles for the energy to build the night’s hide-out, mocking at his own and our weariness by squatting down in the snow, hands on hips, and giving us a lively version of a Russian dance until Kolemenos was bellowing with laughter, tears running down into his beard. Nothing could ever daunt Zaro. Of all the gallant jokers I had met, Zaro was undoubtedly the greatest. He taught us all that the grimmest twists of life were not entirely humourless.
On this race to the Lena we had our first and minor hunting success. We caught and killed a sable which was floundering in the snow. About the size and general appearance of a weasel, it made great efforts to get away as we ringed it, each of us armed with a birch club. It may have been injured. I don’t know. But one thud of Makowski’s club and it was dead. We skinned it but had not yet reached the stage of hunger when we could bring ourselves to eat it.
On the eighth or ninth day the going was unmistakably easier. The ground was falling away in a long, gradual slope southwards. The bare earth between the trees began to show tufts of the typical tough, rustling Siberian grass, there was more moss on the tree trunks. In the early afternoon the forest suddenly thinned out and we saw the Lena, ice-sheathed and well over half-a-mile wide, at this point already a mighty waterway with still some 1,500 miles to run to its many-mouthed outlet into the Arctic Ocean. We stood, partially under cover, in an extended line, listening and watching. The day was clear and sounds would have carried well, but all was silent, nothing moved. We were then about a mile from the nearest bank of the river on low-lying land which looked as if it might be marshy when the ice broke up.
The American walked quietly over to me. ‘We’d better stay this side tonight,’ he suggested, ‘and cross over at first light tomorrow.’ I agreed. ‘We’ll turn back and get well under cover.’ I signalled the others, jerking my arm back in the direction from which we had come. We all turned and started back, retracing our steps for about twenty minutes of brisk walking. We built a shelter and, as darkness came on, we lit our first fire, setting it off with gubka moss and small dry twigs which we had carried for days inside our jackets against our fur waistcoats.
The distance already travelled was not, in relation to what lay ahead, very great, but it represented to us a considerable early success, with the Lena as our first objective. Quietly, as the wood smoke curled up into the upper branches of the trees and disappeared into the night, we celebrated with a hot dinner – a steaming kasha, or gruel, of water, pearl barley and flour, flavoured with salt. Our only cooking pot was an aluminium mug of about one-pint capacity. We had a couple of crudely-made wooden spoons and the mug was passed around the circle, each taking a couple of spoonsful at a time. When the first lot disappeared – and it went very quickly – we melted some more snow and made a fresh mugful. The Sergeant was allowed to soak his bread in the gruel and we all congratulated ourselves on a magnificent meal. All night long we kept the fire going, the man on watch acting as stoker.
And so, in the half-light of the day’s beginning we silently crossed the Lena, mightiest river in this country of many great rivers, and came to the steep bank on the far side. There for some minutes we stood, looking back across the ice. Some of the tension of the past weeks was already falling away from us. In all our minds had been the idea we might never reach the Lena, but here we were, safe and unmolested. We could face the next stage with fresh confidence.
Inconsequentially someone started to talk about fish. It set me on a train of thought and memory. I told the others that in winter in Poland it was possible to catch fish by hammering a hole through the ice.
‘And having made the hole,’ interjected Zaro, ‘what do we do next – whistle them up?’ No, I explained, the fish, stunned by the hammering, will be forced out through the change of air pressure when the ice is broken through. The others laughed and bantered, congratulating me on my ability as a teller of tall tales. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘let’s try it.’ Kolemenos went off and returned with a solid baulk of timber and we walked out about twenty yards on to the river ice. Kolemenos wrapped his arms around the timber, Zaro and I took hold near the bottom to direct the business end and we started thumping away with pile-driver blows. Eventually we broke through. The water gushed up like a geyser, swirling icily round our feet. And yes! There were fish – four of them, about the size of herrings. We swooped on them and picked them up. We were as excited as schoolboys. The others crowded round me, slapping my back, and Zaro made a little speech of apology for having doubted my word. Then Smith, looking anxiously around, said we had better not play our luck too hard and should get moving under cover again. We had a drink of the cold, clean Lena water and moved off.
We turned south again, climbed the river bank to the higher ground beyond and headed on the next leg of the journey with Lake Baikal as the immediate objective. The nature of the country ahead was familiar, much like that through which we had marched to the westward to the logging camp. Here there were no great forests such as the one in which we had worked to the north, although trees grew hardily at intervals and crowned the succession of rearing mounds and hill ridges. Stunted bushes and scrub defied the assault of winter and in most places the characteristic brown-green sighing grass flourished almost luxuriously, dancing to the moaning whistle of the Siberian wind.
That first night across the river we spent the night in a copse of trees on a low hillock and lightly grilled our fish spitted through the gills on a skewer-pointed twig, ate sumptuously of this our first fresh food, and finished up with more gruel.
In the morning Marchinkovas, who had gone off to relieve himself a little distance from the camp, came back and beckoned us to follow him. We trailed along at his heels wondering what it was all about. He led us to a small clearing. He said nothing, just pointed. In the shade of a tree stood a stout oaken cross, some four feet high. We crowded round. I rubbed at the mould and green moss and found my fingers following the outlines of an inscription. We scraped away and uncovered the Russian letters for V P, a customary abbreviation of the phrase vechnaya pamyat (in ever-lasting memory), three initials of a name, and the date 1846. We made sure that the wood of the cross was indeed oak and fell to speculating how it could have got here, because all the trees around us were coniferous.
‘You know,’ said Marchinkovas, ‘we are probably the first men to see this cross since the day it was planted here.’ Sergeant Paluchowicz put his hand up to his fur helmet, slowly removed it and sank his bearded chin down on his chest. We looked at him and each other. All our caps came off. We bent our heads and stood silent. I said a little prayer to myself for the one who had died and for our own deliverance.
By now the Irkutsk issue of rubber boots had been discarded as worn out. Our feet were still wrapped in the only article of clothing handed out in the camp, the long strips of thick linen. All were now wearing moccasins with skin gaiters wound round with straps of hide. Movement south was at the steady rate of about thirty miles a day and we kept going for a full ten hours daily. Although there had been no sight or sign of other men we rigidly maintained the extended line of advance with the practical idea that if one or two ran into trouble the main party could still press forward. Relations between us were generally more relaxed, we talked more freely and during the nightly halts Smith was often plied with questions about America. From his answers we gathered he had travelled extensively through the States and I remember our being impressed with his description of Mexico and how he had bought there a magnificent, silver-ornamented saddl
e.
He told us, too, that when he worked in the Soviet mines in the Urals he had met another American he had known in Moscow and so gathered he had not been the only one of the American colony to have been under N.K.V.D. surveillance.
A lucky throw with a cudgel and a feverish scramble in a bank of powdery snow earned us a luxury meal of Siberian hare and added a fine white skin to our reserve store.
The party’s hunting successes were accidents. Armed with only one knife, an axe and an assortment of clubs, we were ill-equipped for finding and killing our own meat. It would have been comparatively easy to set simple and efficient fall-down traps such as the camp guards had laid, but the necessity for constant movement left no time for watching and tending traps. There was the consolation that while our bread, flour and barley lasted, the extra good fortune of a few fresh fish and a squatting hare that left its bolt for freedom too late elevated our diet far above the bare existence level of the camp. On a number of occasions we saw the suslik, the little Siberian marmot, popping an inquisitive head from the opening to his burrow, but we never caught one. Zaro would make faces at them and whistle.
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.
Somewh
ere 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.
Zaro was first out in the morning after taking the last guard shift. He burst back into the hut. ‘Somebody’s playing the violin out there,’ he shouted. We roared with laughter and asked Zaro what new trick he was up to. He was trying to be serious but suffering from his reputation as a humorist. ‘I tell you somebody out there is trying to play the violin,’ he insisted. We went on laughing. Mr. Smith suggested Zaro might do a Russian dance to the music. Zaro stood his ground. ‘Come outside and listen,’ he invited. The Sergeant, eyeing him for a sign of a smile, got up to go out with him. We followed. About twenty yards back of the hut Zaro held up his hand for silence. We stood with our heads cocked.