Last of the Breed (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  “A little. There were Lithuanian miners who lived in the town where I first went to school. Often I visited in the home of one of my friends at school. His father was forever reciting the poetry of Martin Lap.”

  “Of course. He was one of our best-known poets.” He shook his head. “Amazing! To hear his name from an American!” He paused. “I was a teacher, you know. A professor in a university, but the Russians only remembered that I was one of those who went to the forest to live as a guerrilla.”

  “You fought the Germans?”

  “I did, but the Russians only remember that I fought, that I resisted. All such are suspect for fear we might do so again, against the Russians. I fear I am past all that. Now all I wish is peace and to return to my home.”

  “Will it be there? Will anything be the same?”

  The older man shook his head. “Very little, I am afraid. It would be home, however, our own country. I wish Talya to know it.”

  “This,” Joe Mack gestured, “is your home? Your home now?”

  “Oh, no!” he smiled. “This is an old stable that was fixed up as a place to sleep for workmen. We use it from time to time when traveling. Nobody lives here.”

  He tasted the meat Talya served and then ate with relish. “It is good.” He glanced up again. “You killed a bear? With that?” He indicated the bow.

  “Why not? My people knew nothing else until the white man came. We killed even larger beasts with it, although,” he added, “this was a large bear.”

  The wind blew down the narrow valley, whining around the eaves and rustling the branches of the evergreens. They told him of their life and of the risks they ran and that despite the various prisons of one kind or another, all Siberia was considered a prison. “Many of those sent here in exile did not wish to leave, even when they could. They stayed on, and many have raised families here.

  “Many of us prefer the deep woods. We are not bothered here. As I have said, some know we are here, but not exactly where, and we bother no one. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying is.”

  He got to his feet. “Come! It is time to go. We will share your burdens.”

  It was cold in the outer air. Joe Mack shivered and looked along the icy gorge. Then he followed Natalya and her father. His name, he had said, was Stephan Baronas. Leaving the canyon, they took a dim trail up through the trees. It was sheltered from the wind, so though it was cold, there was less wind chill.

  The village, when they came to it, was a mere cluster of huts in the deep forest. No effort having been made to establish a clearing, there were just the huts, some of them mere dugouts faced with logs, scarcely to be seen until within a few feet, for trees and brush masked their faces.

  “This Wulff you spoke of, is he a district official of some kind? Is he close by?”

  “He is miles from here, in Aldan. One of us was caught selling furs. Now if we deliver furs to him he says nothing. It is a trouble to meet his demands.”

  The place they stopped at was a dugout faced with logs. It was tight, warm, and almost impossible to see. They had hidden themselves well.

  “But how do you live?”

  “We hunt and gather. Here and there in the woods we have patches of corn. We grow vegetables and barley, always far from here. It is very difficult, but we manage. Actually,” he added, “we live better than many of the people in the villages.”

  “Share meat with the others,” Joe Mack suggested. “In the morning I will hunt again.”

  “That is good of you. Will you spend the night with us?”

  “The night, but then I must find my own place. I would not intrude,” he added.

  The night was very still, yet he slept badly. He had become accustomed to the open air and the sounds of the trees, of animals moving. Here it was too still, too comfortable.

  Did they have another way out? He knew better than to ask, but was restless at not knowing. To be caught in such a place…it was a trap. Or could be.

  He found that he liked Stephan Baronas. He was a quiet, pleasant man, yet he seemed to have strength of character. As for Talya, she was quietly beautiful.

  Both moved well in the forest. They were learning to live with it, he decided, learning to move with the wind, to accept the wilderness and not fight it. And that was the key to survival.

  At last he slept, and when dawn came Talya’s moving about awakened him. He sat up quickly. “I was tired,” he said. “I did not realize how tired.”

  Coffee was on, and it tasted good. He sipped the coffee and tried not to watch Talya as she moved about. Her father joined them.

  “I shall find a place,” Joe Mack said, “but first I will set out a line of traps. Snares and deadfalls,” he added, at their questioning looks. “I trapped to pay my way at school,” he explained. “In the mountains of America there are many wild animals.”

  It was pleasant not to have to think about moving on, and for the moment not to worry about being discovered. Baronas talked well, and as he talked his English returned to him. He spoke, he said, Polish, French, and German, as well as Russian. “The language of the Lithuanians is closer to Sanskrit than to any other, and we were an Indo-European people. Most of us were Protestants, Lutherans, or Calvinists.”

  “It would help,” Joe Mack suggested, “if I could speak Russian.”

  “We will teach you,” Baronas replied, “if there is time.”

  Joe Mack found his own place in a thick stand of birch mingled with aspen. Here and there were clusters of larch and pine. As usual in aspen forests the deadfalls were many, but as he worked his way deeper into the forest, planning to build a shelter from the dead timber, he found a crack in the rock of the cliff that lay behind the aspen. It was scarcely wide enough to edge through, but he had long since learned never to trust first appearances. He had edged back about eight feet when he stopped in midstep. Before him there was an ominous black hole that seemed to extend on into the mountain. Tossing a piece of rock, he heard it bound from side to side and finally end, far below, in a splash. He was starting to edge back when he noticed a shelf of rock going off to his left. It was all of four feet wide and ended in a much wider shelf.

  Preparing a torch, he edged back into the crack, and lighting the torch he saw a wide area of bare flat rock under an overhang higher than a man’s head. It was a cave-shelter, opening on that crevasse in which he had heard water, but the cave was partly sheltered by the rock wall and partly by a thick stand of larch. It was a fine hiding place, an excellent shelter, and it needed exploration.

  He spent the afternoon setting snares along some small creeks where he saw the tracks of small animals. The weather was cold and the water was icy. He worked along several small streams that flowed toward the river in an area where he saw no tracks or evidence of trapping by others.

  No matter how friendly Baronas and his daughter might be, Joe Mack knew there would be opposition from some of the community to his being included, even for a short time. Hence, he must prove his value to the group so they would accept him, no matter how reluctantly. He could live out the winter anywhere in this area, with or without them, but to finally escape he needed to know some Russian and he needed to get some rubles.

  Returning at night to the Baronases’, he secured his bearskin and the rest of his gear.

  “You needn’t go,” Baronas said. “We enjoy your company. It isn’t often we have visitors, and I haven’t talked to an American for nearly forty years. Not since the War.”

  “Tomorrow night,” he promised. “Tonight I have work.”

  Several people came to the doors of their lodges to watch him pass. He merely nodded and went on about his business. He knew that during his absence his presence would be discussed, and he did not wish to interfere by being anywhere about during the discussions.

  Returning to his cave, he packed firewood and stored it,
working hard, clearing some of the deadfalls from near the trail he would use. In the process he found another entry to the cave, well hidden behind the trunk of a huge old tree. He carried in spruce boughs for a bed and found a place for his fire where the smoke would be dissipated by the foliage.

  His cave was a mere overhang of rock, with the deep crevasse in front of it, half the front covered by the upthrust of rock through a crack of which he had first entered. The rest of the cave was hidden by the thick stand of tangled larch across the crevasse.

  He had shelter from overhead, shelter from the wind, and a hidden corner of the cave that a fire would heat. As time went on he could make it more secure against cold. Sooner or later his neighbors would know where he was living, but he did not intend to show them, except, perhaps, Stephan Baronas and Talya.

  Perhaps he could hide out the winter here, and in the spring, when the search for him had run its course, he might escape. On the third day he hunted.

  The vegetation here was a mixture of the Trans-Baikal through which he had traveled and the Far Eastern region, similar, he supposed, to what grew in Manchuria. Working his way up the low mountains, he sighted and stalked a goral, a small curly-haired antelope. Later, coming back into the larch, he killed three large grouse. In each case he made his kills with the sling, and the grouse, after he struck one down, seemed in no way frightened. He was able to kill two more before they flew away.

  He returned to the community under the trees and hung up the goral, keeping its hide. The grouse he took to the Baronases and ate with them.

  When he ran his trap line, he discovered that eleven of the more than thirty snares had paid off. He had taken two ermine, five squirrels, and four blue foxes. It was a good catch, but he reset the snares and deadfalls and then returned to his hideout, where he skinned out the hides and kept some of the flesh to bait his traps. That night he began his lessons in speaking Russian, learning the simplest things first, greetings and replies, and a number of terms: hot and cold, near and far, and high and low, and the terms for forest, swamp, river, lake, pool, house, and town.

  “Tomorrow,” Baronas commented, “I start for Aldan. I shall be gone several days. We are taking a bundle of furs for Wulff, and there is a man there who buys furs and does not ask questions.”

  “I have furs to contribute to Wulff and some to sell.”

  “Good! I thought as much. Bring them over very early, and we will see what we can do.”

  Next morning before dawn he brought the furs to Baronas. Handing them to him, he said, “Hurry back. I have much to learn.”

  Two others were going with Baronas, a short, heavyset man named Botev and his partner, Borowsky. When they had disappeared from sight, Talya said, “I’ve coffee on. Will you come in?”

  When he was seated with a cup in his hand, she said, “You have done well with the trapping.”

  “As a boy I knew little else. It was a way of my people.”

  “I do not know your people.”

  “We were a nation of warriors,” he said simply. “We had conquered more territory than Charlemagne. Perhaps, had the white man not come, we could have conquered it all.” He paused. “There were, of course, the Blackfeet. They were warriors, also.”

  “You were defeated by the white man?”

  “By our own ignorance and by our customs. The Indian thought of a battle as a war. He did not think in terms of campaigns. It was a handicap. Also, there was the matter of supplies. We had no extended plan. The white man thought in campaigns, of a series of battles until an enemy was defeated. He did not fight for glory, but for victory. The Indian could not adjust, not in time.

  “Nor was he accustomed to fight in winter. When the white man attacked his winter camps he was not prepared and was driven into the snow.”

  They were silent, and then she said, “And when spring comes, what will you do?”

  “Return to my country.”

  “It must be beautiful, your country. We hear much of it, and I would like to see it, but I would be afraid of the gangsters.”

  He chuckled. “I lived there many years and I never saw one. There are thieves, dope smugglers, the rats that always live on the fringes of what we wish to be a civilization. They are something that exists and must be coped with, just as you do here in Soviet Russia.”

  He paused. “My country is beautiful, much of it. We have our sore spots, as do all countries, but that is where I belong.”

  “Maybe I can go there sometime. I would like that.”

  He looked at her. “You could go. If you could leave Russia they would welcome you. Maybe Russians will be free to travel someday, too. All things change. We would welcome Russians as visitors. In the old days many Russians settled in America and became good farmers, good citizens.”

  He got up. “I have much to do. May I come for coffee again?”

  “When you wish.”

  At the door he paused. “It is better, I believe, if no one knows exactly where I live, except for you and your father, if you wish to know.”

  “Perhaps.”

  A rough voice interrupted. “So? You have a visitor!”

  It was the man Peshkov.

  “Yes,” Joe Mack said.

  Peshkov scowled. “I do not know you.”

  Joe Mack suddenly felt good. “Oh, but you will! You will!”

  THIRTEEN

  PESHKOV STARED AT Joe as he muttered a few words to Talya. He was a powerfully built man with thick eyebrows and rather protuberant eyes. He had a way of lowering his head and glaring from under his brows.

  Joe Mack understood the sense of the words and suddenly realized why the language had a familiar sound. Had those Lithuanian miners’ children he had known been speaking Russian? If so, he might recall a few words.

  Peshkov spoke to Talya, speaking rapidly, irritably. Her reply was quiet but firm. Of this exchange he understood nothing, but he knew trouble when he saw it, and he stood where he was, making no move to leave.

  Finally, obviously angry, Peshkov strode away, muttering.

  “Trouble?” Joe Mack asked.

  “He’s a disagreeable beast,” she said, “but we need him. He is one of our best hunters.”

  “He does not like me.”

  “He likes nobody. He would like to take command, but it is my father to whom the people look.”

  “And to you, I think.”

  She shrugged. “Peshkov wants to give the orders. He also wants me.”

  “I suspected as much.” Joe Mack turned to go. “If you have trouble I will handle it.”

  During the week that followed he saw nothing of Peshkov, but nothing of Talya, either. He killed a wapiti and brought in more than three hundred pounds of meat. His traps yielded well, and in his cave he made two packs, one for Wulff and the other to be sold for whatever the furs would bring. There was, he understood, a black market in furs.

  Now, with time in which to do so, he prepared his skins carefully, as he had been taught to do. Each time he met any of the people of the commune he tried his Russian upon them. It was true, as he soon became aware, that the miners’ children had been speaking Russian, and a few words came back to him now. Occasionally he would hear a word spoken by one of the village people that he recognized. In school the children had talked English, but among themselves they reverted to the tongue spoken at home.

  In the third week he left the stream where he had been trapping and went up the mountain to the north and set his snares in the headwaters of several small streams there. It was an area that did not seem to have been trapped, far from the village and where he found no tracks of men or any sign that anyone had ever been there before.

  His take was rich. From the first setting of the snares he had success. Squirrels, Baronas had told him, were much in demand, and he found them in numbers. He also caught ermine, blue fox, a
nd marmot, whose fur was much sought after. Several times he saw tracks of large bear; from their paw prints it was obvious they were some type of grizzly.

  Squatting beside a stream one late afternoon, he considered his position. If he could sell furs he might accumulate a little money to pay his way, if need be. He was progressing with his learning of Russian. Meanwhile he had learned that many of the aborigine population, and he might pass as one, spoke little if any Russian. The Koriak, Yakut, and Lamut peoples had only a smattering of the language. Before spring he must concoct a story he could tell, a cover story that would be plausible enough to be accepted. At least until they had time to think, and by that time he could be gone.

  * * *

  —

  KYRA LEBEDEV WAS a beautiful woman who made every effort to appear plain. She had discovered long ago that beautiful women did not advance as rapidly as the less beautiful. Good looks were an asset in a man’s march to success, but not so with a woman. Men suspected you had no brains, and other women were jealous. Success was important to her, and she had quickly taken the measure of Comrade Shepilov. He was an intelligent man, but he was lacking in energy. He wanted success and expected it to come to him. He advanced steadily until suddenly he found himself moving forward alongside Arkady Zamatev.

  From the first he recognized the threat. Shepilov was lazy, sometimes careless, an undeviating Party man but one who liked good living and made sure that it came his way.

  Zamatev ignored the trappings and the benefits. He did each job thoroughly and efficiently. His bureau functioned with fewer helpers than any other. Every job given to him was done with speed and finesse. There was less waste in his department than in any other in central Siberia, and he had carefully weeded out the alcoholics and the timeservers. Kyra Lebedev saw that Zamatev was going somewhere, and she determined to go along with him.

  Was she in love with him? Looking into the small mirror in her hotel room she smiled at that. She was not. Did she believe in love at all? She shrugged. She respected Zamatev, and she admired his cool, intelligent way of doing things. One always knew where one stood with Zamatev. Everything fitted; everything fell into place. He made no promises, and she knew she did not fit into his plans for the future. He did fit into hers.