Andrei and the Snow Walker

by Larry Warwaruk

  They say this on the run, as if they’ve practiced, twirling in a circle around Andrei.

  “What kind of names are those?” They keep circling. Their mother must have placed a bowl on their heads to cut their hair. Each haircut is the same, a ball cut in half above the ears. Each boy looks the same, button nose, bare feet, baggy trousers cut off at the knees.

  “Horses’ names,” one boy says.

  “Our dad was a groom in the army,” another says.

  “What army?” Andrei asks. “Cossacks?”

  “The Austrian army,” the second boy says.

  “Was he in the cavalry?” Andrei asks.

  “He was a groom,” the third boy says. “A groom brushes horses. Our dad knows horses.”

  “Andrei!” someone yells from the yard.

  “We better go see what they want us to do,” Andrei says. “Let’s race.” They take off in a scramble, but Andrei wins without even having to run that hard.

  •••

  The bush rings with the chopping of trees. The boys are everywhere trimming branches, and men drag and carry trees to the yard. Wood chips fly from broadaxes squaring the logs. Tato waves to a man with an ox dragging a stoneboat. They lift off rocks and lay them flat at four corners. A first row of logs forms the rectangle of the house.

  Mr. Kuzyk dovetails the ends of the logs. Another man drills with an auger and pounds wooden pegs into the holes. The walls rise one row of logs at a time. The neighbours come five days in a row, taking time away from their own work. Thank goodness most of the haying is done in the district, and the wheat is not quite ripe enough yet to cut and stook. “God finds us time,” Mama says.

  “Cut willows,” Tato tells the boys.

  Saplings for laths run diagonally up the walls, inside and out. The boys tramp bare feet in the clay pit. Marie carries buckets from the well and pours water into the pit. A roof beam supports log rafters leaning up to it. Poles are laid side by side, crosswise, for the ceiling. Tato and Mr. Kuzyk, at opposite ends of a saw, cut out a doorway and three window openings. Buckets and shovels full of clay are carried from the pit, and women plaster the inside walls and ceiling. Others start on the outside. Tall grass is bundled and carried up on ladders to the roof.

  Every day Mama makes soup with early potatoes, onions, and beet greens from the garden, and she stirs it in a huge black pot set on the iron ring over the cooking fire. People have to eat, and those who came from far stay here all five days and sleep under the spruce trees.

  On the fifth day at dusk the job is finished. A perfect house. The entrance faces south, opening to a storeroom in the middle of the building. To the left is the kitchen and sleeping room. To the right the special room faces east. It’s here where the Holy pictures will be hung, where meals will be served on Holy Days, the room used when visitors come. Mama will finish building the clay oven in the kitchen and sleeping room. Tato says that after harvest he will buy a proper iron heater for the east room. The house smells of new wood and the clean and tangy smell of lime and wet clay.

  The workers collect as a group, facing the house. Andrei’s off to the side with the Smuk boys watching. Mama and Tato stand in the doorway sheltered under the full width of the thatch overhang. Mr. Kuzyk’s cantor voice leads in a peoples’ blessing that has for centuries stirred the Ukrainian soul. May you live many, many years. For your health and your blessing, may you live many, many, years. Mr. Kuzyk stands out as solemn and dignified as a priest. Over and over Andrei hears his bass voice leading in the singing of the refrain: May you live many many years. Mama goes to her knees, and three times crosses herself. She wipes her eyes with a corner of her apron. Tato also prays on his knees. The tears fall from their faces. Everyone prays. Our Father, who art in Heaven...

  •••

  The next morning Dido ties Frank to a tree in order to trim his hooves. Andrei sits on a stump watching.

  Dido swings his arm through the air and the horse flinches. “Hand me the rasp, Andrei. Easy, easy,” he says to the horse, patting his flank in the process of lifting a back foot. Andrei leans forward, reaching out with the rasp, his other hand shielding his head.

  “You think he will kick?” Dido says. “Not Frank. He likes me, and maybe he’s also too lazy to kick.” He trims with a knife, then files back and forth on the hoof. “Hetman Bayda raised the world’s finest horses. He raced them over the steppes.”

  “What is a Hetman?”

  “The head man,” Dido says. “Your ancestor Bayda-Vyshnevetsky!”

  “Did you know Hetman Bayda?”

  “Not exactly. It was three hundred years ago when he ruled.”

  Dido Danylo sits on the ground and packs tobacco into his long-stemmed pipe. He lights it and Andrei smells the sweet aroma.

  “Did you have a sabre like the Hetman Bayda?”

  “Not exactly.” Dido Danylo stands up. He leads the horse to the well and draws water to pour into the rough plank trough. “But if I had lived three hundred years ago, I would have had a sabre.”

  When Frank drinks his fill, Dido stands on the well and climbs up on the horse.

  “Get on,” he says to Andrei. Dido makes a clicking sound with his tongue, but the horse doesn’t move. He jabs his heels at Frank’s ribs and slaps the leather lines on his rump. Frank breaks into a walk.

  The morning started with a clear blue sky, and with Dido playing a merry tune of the Hetman Bayda on his flute. But now black clouds rumble in the west, and Dido no longer brags of Cossacks. The air is absolutely still, the only sound a faint rumble of thunder. Dido doesn’t say a word, doesn’t look around, only straight ahead as if he knows exactly where he’s going. His silence is out of the ordinary for Dido. Usually he would have brought along his flute. He should be sitting up proudly on Frank playing the song of Hetman Bayda. Today instead, something wears on Dido’s mind. Andrei guesses that Dido is taking him to the rock. He should have told Dido about Snow Walker.

  •••

  “I was not to tell a soul,” Dido says. “But I can now that we are finally settled. You must be shown, Andrei. The Holy one told me that perils and destruction were coming to the lands of Ukraine. He said that some of the people should leave, that I, Danylo Skomar, with my grandson, Andrei, should take the goatskin bag and leave. What can be more homely than goatskin? But what golden secrets does it have inside? The Holy one vowed that in the bag are the keys to the future. You acted strangely when you saw the cup.”

  “It showed me its golden halo,” Andrei says. “I believe it wants to take me places.”

  “Who knows what it can or cannot do?” Dido says. “The Holy one told of our Skomar ancestor and a Gypsy fortune teller...in the same breath as pledging homage to the Hetman Bayda-Vyshnevetsky.” Dido leans over on the horse and spits on the ground. Under his breath he mumbles, “Maybe it is Uncle Skomar who tempts us all the way from Ukraine.” He turns his head around and stares at Andrei. Dido’s eyes seem far away, and his topknot hangs over the corner of his mouth, as if he’s disturbed in his thoughts.

  Andrei sees the large rock jutting up from out of its depression in the hillside. They dismount and, Dido leading the horse, the boy and his grandfather walk down the hill.

  “I’m an old man already,” Dido says, and he swats a mosquito full of blood, leaving a red stain on his forehead.

  Andrei hasn’t heard Dido talk like this before. Usually he’s singing of some merry new adventure. Today it’s like he’s planning his own funeral.

  “Old like Frank.” Dido stops walking and hands the reins to Andrei. His long braid lifts, with his hand shading his brow as he looks in every direction. Three or four crows fly from one clump of trees to another. The clouds churn overhead.

  “We will see what it shows us,” Dido says.

  “Maybe it can tell us the future.”

  “Yes. Yes. I don’t want to go to my grave without knowing.”

  “You’re not ready to go to the grave yet, Dido.”

  The overcas
t sky blots out the sun. Far to the west, lightning flashes. The air is thick and heavy, with an added tinge of the smell of sulphur.

  “Everybody goes to the grave,” Dido says. “Some before others. Usually the old before the young. Me before you, Andrei. The Holy man directed that we pass the secrets of the past, the secrets of the old world, to the new generation in the new world. You are the new generation, Andrei. Yet I wish to know before I die.”

  Why doesn’t Dido tell this to Tato? Does Andrei want the responsibility of carrying the Holy fool’s magic? It’s here on this hillside, the place on their way back from Batoche where he saw the golden fire in tangles snaking from the rock’s mouth, back and forth with the fire from Raven’s nose. Fire changed to horses in the sky when he saw Snow Walker standing on the broad hump of the rock’s shoulders.

  “What has it shown you already, Dido? What did the cup tell you that day at the homestead?”

  “Nothing,” Dido says. “Remember at the Cossack burial mound? The Holy man took me away? He said to take the charm to safety, that it may guide our people in the new world, that it may bring riches.”

  “Is it safe here?”

  “It seems almost a sacred place,” Dido says.

  “Where is it buried?” Andrei descends into the depression to the rock’s face. He stares at the head, the mouth, the crack where he found the brass button. He walks behind the rock and watches, Dido on his knees, digging at the base of the rock.

  “Don’t go on your knees, Dido.”

  “What are you saying? How else am I to dig?”

  With his knife he lifts up the sod. At ground level the rock is layered with cracks. Dido pulls pieces of shale from the rock, from down and in, many pieces, as if from a puzzle. Then he reaches, groping for the bag inside. He pulls it out and places it on the rock, draws out the lacquered box with its stars and crescent moons carved into the wood.

  “Inside is the secret,” Dido says. He takes on the appearance of a boy whispering to a boy. Instead of the sound of a grandfather’s wise counsel, Dido’s voice quavers with awe. He and Andrei are about to witness the unknown, and Dido’s age counts for nothing.

  “The Holy fool told me,” Dido says, “that the talisman fascinates anyone who beholds it. The very limits of human thought, it contains. It knows the intimate secrets of men and women. It captures souls. Yet he warned that the cup can sometimes give you back only your own thoughts, only your own dreams and nightmares, that you imagine predict the future.” As Dido says these words, he peers every which way, eyes like buttons shutting secrets away from intruders.

  Andrei doesn’t want Dido to open the box. Can it be that once the secret is out it can’t be put back in? That it will fly away with the crows? Dido lifts the brass clasp and opens the lid. He takes out the cup wrapped in black cloth and sets it on the ground, opening the wrap.

  Frank neighs and paws at the ground, his ears flat against his head, stepping back, his reins dragging in the grass.

  An explosion of light forks down from the sky, claps of thunder shaking the ground. Then all around the landscape darkens. Water droplets splatter. Andrei’s attention is drawn to the cup on the black cloth. The ruby pulses with the pulling force of a magnet. The muscles in Andrei’s neck tighten. His eyes water and burn. It’s as if the stars in the sky tumble into a cavity the size of the ocean, funnelling deep into its depths, a pulsing swirl of the halo and the circle of the heads of horses.

  The longer Andrei stares, the more his head swims. A forest grows in this universe, images coming together in the cup. The visions appear to him as clear and real as a boy’s dream, where anything is possible, everything believed. He sees a thick clump of willows. Ghosts weave through the branches, parts of bodies, a patch here and a patch there, like a puzzle, separating and coming together. The horses race around the rim. The mounted Cossacks on the grassy meadow. The dancing girls in a circle. His old dog Brovko howls, “Come back home, Andrei.”

  The dream continues, on and on, in splashes of warm colours and comfort, a world as Andrei would wish it, and as tantalizing as a fairy tale with pots of gold. Are the riders Cossacks racing at Batoche? A Gypsy woman sits in the entry of her tent beckoning for Andrei to have his fortune told. The horses gallop in the vision...those of the cup, or are they Kuzyk’s? Yet in the vision, Gabriel rides black Raven, the horse leaping and fire blazing from his nostrils.

  All at once Andrei’s sense of well-being in his sleep-world disappears. The horse Frank stumbles riderless, yellow eyes staring through straggles of hair. But Kuzyk’s bay colt races. Petrus Shumka dances a wedding dance. Andrei’s temple throbs as he flies twirling in his rainbow world.

  Andrei doesn’t remember returning home, but he does remember bits and pieces of his visions. On the one hand he saw riches, yet on the other, his path is strewn with dangers. When he questions Dido, all that his grandfather will tell him is that he passed out in a fit. To get Andrei home, Dido had to lift him, and lay him like a sack of oats across the horse’s back.

  August

  Chapter 12

  This morning before the mosquitoes got too bad, Mr. Kuzyk, his mother, Andrei’s mother, and Marie picked chokecherries. By nine o’clock Mr. Kuzyk’s mother insisted that Mama and Marie join them on a trip to Rosthern, to help choose a new suit for Mr. Kuzyk. Tato and Dido have gone again to the Klassen farm, and Andrei’s alone where Mr. Kuzyk’s left him to plough a field. He wants to earn enough money to buy the colt, but it may take more than this summer’s work. Mr. Kuzyk says that horses are very expensive in Canada, just like in the Old Country. The colt is from a fine line of horses. Its mother is Mr. Kuzyk’s pet. If he weren’t training a pair of two-year-olds for the buggy, he would have taken his favourite, the bay mare, to Rosthern today.

  Andrei’s driving Mr. Kuzyk’s heavy horse team. The lines are tied, draped over his left shoulder, down across his back and looped around under his right arm. Both his hands are free to cling to the handles of the walking plough. Mosquitoes swarm around his head as he stumbles over the furrow. It seems almost a relief when one of the horses lifts its tail and releases droppings, as if the aroma kills mosquitoes. The plough snags on a root, the horses straining, jerking; and finally the root’s cut through. Relief comes only at every smouldering brush pile, the horses then reluctant to leave the smoke. Andrei urges them forward, and the hum of mosquitoes further drives the team onward to the next pile.

  Mr. Kuzyk chopped the trees out two winters ago. He pulled the stumps in the spring and stacked them in piles. Early this morning, he set them on fire. This afternoon a flame flickers only now and then, but the smoke rises in a steady drift.

  By late afternoon, when the mosquitoes are at their worst, the horses refuse to leave the smoke. Andrei wears trousers of coarse fabric, a shirt of Old Country heavy linen snug at his wrists and neck. Around his head he’s tied a scarf. The clothing’s soaked from his labours in the early August heat, but his discomfort concentrates only on mosquitoes. Mr. Kuzyk says it should be too late in the year for mosquitoes, but July has been hot and the bush seems always damp. He says that only a frost will finish them off, and that won’t be for at least another month. So far the nights have stayed warm.

  Today Andrei can work no longer, and that’s fine because the horses won’t either. He unhitches the team. They’re willing to move now, sensing that Andrei will drive them to the creek and a drink, and from there to the shelter of the barn.

  All Andrei hears is a snorting. He knows that the colt and its mother are pastured in the meadow where Mr. Kuzyk has finished the haying. The creek borders the south end of the meadow where the grass peters out, and the ground is sour, caked white where nothing grows. He hears more snorting. Far ahead he sees the colt running in small circles. It’s only then that Andrei spots the mare.

  She’s bogged in a soap hole of slippery white mud. The mosquitoes are less abundant here; the sour smell of the salty muck must keep them away. But it must have attracted the mare. She’s sunk
down past her knees. The more she squirms, the more her rump sinks down. Her head tosses, eyes white. Ears back. Her body is caked with the mud. She must have been rolling in it, crazy from mosquitoes. The colt flits nervously from one side of her to the other, edging closer into the muck, then backing away.

  Andrei wishes Gabriel were here; he’d know what to do. Or Dido. But neither are here, so it’s no use to wish. He has the team. Thank goodness he’s had the full day to practice. He knows how to turn the horses, how to back them, keep them from running away, but if they decided to run, how could he ever stop them? Do the horses let him handle them because they know he likes horses? He has to try and pull the mare out of the bog with the team.

  A rope is coiled around the hames of one of the horses.

  “Easy, girl. Easy.” He shouldn’t have to worry; she won’t be going anywhere the way she is now. He pats the mare on her neck, working his way with his hands along her back. He tries to step lightly in the muck so as not to sink himself. Mr. Kuzyk would sink for sure. He shoves down in the mud with the rope, trying to force it through under the mare’s belly. He thinks he should pull her from the rear. The pull might be too hard on her neck. It might choke her, or a sudden jerk might break her neck. But try as he might, the mare’s hind quarters are sunk too far in. He can’t get the rope around her. He tries around her chest just behind the front legs, and even there she’s sunk too deep. She’ll have to be pulled from the neck.

  But first he has to do something about the front feet. He looks about in the shrubs and finds a stout stick for digging in the mud. He breaks up clumps, lifting the wet muck out with his hands. He digs a hole all the way down to the mare’s front hooves. He finds more sticks and lays them in the hole, keeping the hooves free.

  The colt stands off ten feet away. If Andrei didn’t know better, he’d say that it knows the mare’s in trouble, and that Andrei’s trying to help. He secures the rope around the neck. The mare snorts and waves her head sideways and up and down. Andrei lays the rope out and goes for the team.