The Siberian Incident

by Andrew Gille

  The backpack contained some kind of dried food pack for camping, a multi-tool, a hunting knife, my water bottle, a tarp, and a mummy bag. There was nothing I could use to build a fire right now and even if I had a flint or matches, the wood was all soaked from the spring thaw, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a fire with whatever it was out there that I ran into. I had everything I needed to spend the night in the woods and survive. It wouldn’t even be below zero tonight, so I wasn’t worried about freezing to death, now that my clothes would be moderately dry. I was concerned about attracting the wrong kind of attention and being eaten in my sleep, however.

  I sat down to open the snack pack. I opened the package which was written in Russian expecting some fruit rollups and granola. However, it wasn’t just a snack pack. This was a bonafide Russian MRE. It was quite a lot like the American MRE’s I used to eat in the ’80s. It had a lot more than some dried fruit and Chex Mix. There were a bunch of tiny packages I could not read, four hexamine tablets that I would work as a stove, windproof matches and a bunch of crackers.

  I opened the tablets, and a star-shaped piece of thin metal dropped out. Even without being able to read the Russian instructions, I could tell how to fold it into a small stove on which you placed one of the tablets.

  I opened the other containers, one had some sort of beef in a broth, clearly, that needed to be cooked, there was a sort of potato salad and a tin of what Anatoly called kasha when he’d made it the other night. There was actually a kind of fruit roll-up type dried snack in there as well.

  I started the tablets on fire on the MRE’s stove and set the tins on it. The tins were made of very thin metal with a metal top that ripped off like a cat food container. The beef heated quickly on the burning tablet.

  I ate the beef while I cooked the potatoes and opened a package of the crackers. I was famished for some reason and preparing the food in the MRE was taking my mind off the situation I was in. I focused solely on trying to figure out what to do with the tiny packages whose contents were like a surprise since I could not read them. There were wet naps, which I didn’t really need right now, napkins, some salt, sugar and some other kind of tablets that might have been for water purification. I put those in my pocket, hoping that I would not have to use them since our water came from the well outside the cabins and so far I’d tolerated it.

  The whole unpacking, cooking, and eating of the MRE took perhaps 45 minutes to an hour, long enough that my clothes were no longer in the sun when I finished. The MRE had some strange Russian offerings, but it was satisfying, and I was not in a place to be picky right now. I needed the protein and sugar to stay warm and have the energy to get myself out of this situation.

  My thoughts now turned again towards my troubles. I still had not seen nor heard from Colin or Anatoly. I luckily had not had an encounter with the bear who were plentiful in this area either. I realized that the remnants of my MRE could attract them, so I attempted to bury them in the snow and decided that I needed to vacate the area.

  I took off the parka and snow pants and put the base layer and mid layers back on. They were now a bit damp but no longer soaking. If temperatures dropped too much, I could probably dry them by getting into the mummy bag. I quickly donned my parka and snow pants and began to walk again. The light was now becoming dim as the sun sank below the tips of the mountains turning the adjacent hills a brilliant amber color. It would have been something I took a moment to admire if I was not in such a dire situation and if there were not so many awful unknowns. Where were Colin and Anatoly? How had they disappeared so quickly? My voice should have carried through the entire valley, how was I not hearing anything from them nor seeing any sign of them. Footprints, refuse, anything. They had just disappeared like they’d been pulled into another dimension in the snowstorm. Right now I was wondering if that were a possibility, considering the other things I was now wondering if I really saw.

  Could it have been a yeti or one of these menk forest folk Anatoly spoke of at last night’s fire? No, the thought was absurd. Maybe it was a hermit, or Anatoly himself, full of snow and unrecognizable in the confusion. Perhaps a tiger? But the spear? I’d seen a spear. It was no wild animal.

  As my boots crunched into the soft, thick snow, that continued to melt in the mercifully mild evening, I began to think that maybe Anatoly and Colin's disappearance wasn’t an accident at all.

  Was Colin playing a joke on me? Could it be that he turned the conversation to yeti last night to foreshadow this bit of theater and then set him up? Was this like the movie “The Game” with Michael Douglas? Would I be set up on the ultimate survival journey and be taken to the absolute limits of what I could handle before being told at the end that it was all a set-up? An attempt to give me the ultimate experience? Were we even in Russia? This could be Montana for all I knew. Colin had made a point of telling me to leave his phone off and in the plane. Was it because I’d have the cell service necessary to call someone and spoil the ruse? It all made sense, Colin made a stupid shot at a bear to cause the diversion they needed to leave me here. It wasn’t even a very plausible situation, how would they not hear him in the valley like this and why would they just disappear into thin air?

  I was resigned to the fact that whatever happened from here on out was a fake. A billionaire’s set up, imagine the show you could put on with Colin's wealth. You could make someone believe anything. Well, I was going to play along, it was actually an excellent gift, and he’d obviously put a lot of effort into making this an unforgettable experience for me. Why not just enjoy it like you would a haunted house? You know it is fake, but it still seems real enough to give you the thrills and scares that would be debilitatingly terrifying if it were real.

  I marched maybe a mile back in the other direction, and I still saw no sign of the snowmobiles or the area we’d glassed the bear. Now it was beginning to get dark. I glassed up on the hill for anything moving and around my perimeter. Everything seemed still and quiet. There was a strange looking deer that wandered through the forest followed by another. I then remembered the reindeer, and I realized that we must not be in Montana. Either we really were in Russia, or he had taken me up to Alaska, or he’d imported exotic animals, maybe I was on some massive enclosed preserve that belonged to the Koch Brothers or some other billionaires from the west.

  Those things were laying doubt in my mind, but the fact that Colin's bodyguards always travel with him and would never just allow him to vanish like that as well as the ridiculous costumes of the people he got to play the yetis were convincing me that it was a ruse. I took the bullets out of the Savage 99. I examined them and tried to understand how they could possibly be blanks. What if I had shot one of these people. I decided to test fire a round to find out if it was a blank. I racked a cartridge into the chamber with the lever, aimed at a tree and fired.

  The shot echoed through the woods and if nothing else it should have alerted anyone in the area to my presence. I knew no one would come through. I was meant to be alone, and this was meant to be a test for me. In the dimming sunlight, I could see that the tree had a tiny hole where the bullet had entered, I walked around to the back, and a massive exit hole had been ripped into the tree. That shot my theory out the window. How had he ensured that no harm would come to the actors playing his yetis? Probably wasn’t something he thought of. Maybe this was a foreign country, and he’d signed up poor people to do it, I wouldn’t put it past him.

  Now it was getting too dark to see. I removed my pack and got out the tarp. It would make a nice makeshift shelter. I draped it over a tree branch, and it made a perfect tent when I staked it down using some small metal stakes that were included in the backpack. No need for a fire tonight, I removed the mummy bag and zipped myself inside.

  I got the distinct feeling that someone was watching me and I saw shadows that looked human in the trees. This would have terrified me if I didn’t know that these were Colin's men keeping an eye on me and probably reporting back to him on my
condition. He had perhaps helicoptered back to the mansion and was probably enjoying some vodka and a three-way with some models or a Russian pop star right now. I would have been worried about the bears in the area, but I was sure that whoever was watching me would not allow them to come near.

  I zipped myself into the mummy bag. I exhaled, I had ample shelter, I was full, and I was warm. There was really nothing else I needed. I should have slept well that night, but my mind would not let me doze off because I anticipated a middle of the night scare that he’d probably orchestrate to keep me on my toes. The startling event that I anticipated never arrived, but waiting for it to happen had kept me awake almost the entire night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Encounter

  I HAD HEARD strange sounds throughout the night, inhuman howls and shrieks. Right before I left the army in 1989, I had participated in Operation Just Cause in which we’d been dispatched to Panama to capture dictator Manuel Noriega.

  After Noriega escaped to the Vatican City Embassy, we’d used massive speakers to play a loud playlist of music that included AC/DC and Nazareth. That’s another story for another day, but I assumed that it was a lot easier to bring heavy PA equipment into remote locations and blast it through the forest for a very realistic effect and that this was what was happening. The only thing that made me wonder about this was the fact that the Vatican embassy was right in the middle of Panama City and we were in the middle of nowhere. Adding to that, these disconcerting sounds came from every direction. With enough money you could achieve this I thought, and that was one resource Colin had plenty of.

  Even with the dearth of sleep the previous night, I felt the energy and the motivation to get myself out of this situation. I was going to find the snowmobiles that day. I walked back to the ridge and ambled this time, conserving energy, keeping myself from sweating and looking for any signs of something familiar.

  The only things I noticed that were familiar were things I’d seen yesterday and had identified as places I hadn’t been with Colin and Anatoly. I began to analyze every tree and rock, looking for anything that reminded me of where we’d been when Colin shot that bear.

  I paused for a while, filled my cantine with snow and burned one of the hexamine tablets to melt it and fill my water reserve again. As I had plenty of the fuel tab left, I drank some of the lukewarm water and refilled the cantine again. I was feeling pretty well hydrated, and although I was hungry, I wasn’t going to starve any time soon.

  As I looked out onto the forest, I realized that I simply could not be in the same place we had been. I had to be on the other side of the hill on which Colin shot his bear. The mountains behind me had to be the mountains that were in front of me when we were looking up with our scopes.

  I decided that I’d walk to the end of the ridge where I thought the river came together and then attempt to continue and walk around to the other side of the hill. I figured I had two or three miles to hike but I felt that it was a better option than walking up the mountain since down here I could still look for familiar sights and walking up would use more energy and probably make me sweat.

  The sun began to rise higher in the sky, I felt the warmth on my face, and I thought that the temperature was now above freezing. Water again dripped off the branches of trees, and the river ran more quickly today. Every couple of minutes I stopped to take a look through my scope.

  As I was standing looking up onto the hill for any signs of movement, I became fixated on what looked like a squirrel with red fur and long tufts of hair for ears. It was kind of a cute looking creature, and it took my mind off the situation I was in for a while to watch it running around a distant tree and hopping from branch to branch.

  I was jolted out of this pleasant diversion when I heard the sound of distant automatic gunfire. It came from the opposite side of the hill. It did not sound like the “Tok-tok-tok” of a 7.62x39 round like you’d hear from an AK-47 but rather a deeper booming automatic gunfire noise. It had to be the 5.56x45 ammunition from Colin's gun.

  I picked up my pace, I heard a burst of gunfire again, and I ran toward the sound. Both because it meant that Colin might need my help and because if I located the person firing the gun I might not be alone anymore.

  I fired my gun up into the air twice, hoping that Colin was still alive and could recognize the loud, sustained blast of my 300 savage rounds. I shot twice then looked down at the round counter on the side of the gun. Colin had restored it beautifully, and it now read “3,” indicating the number of bullets I still had in the gun.

  I began to sweat again, and the air started to burn my lungs. I stopped. My excitement and over eagerness had caused me to make many mistakes in the past minute that could be fatal. I was now sweating again. I’d wasted two of the 10 bullets I carried, and I had given away my position to any threat in the area.

  I slowed my run to a walk and glassed the area. I saw nothing except a few birds and another of the strange red squirrels. I heard no more gunfire from the other side of the hill, but I now saw the end of this hill where two rivers met and obviously created a near mirror image of the other side which had tricked me for an entire day that I was where I had started.

  I rounded the corner of the hill looking through my scope at both the shore of the river and up the mountain. No threats. Now my heart was beating quickly, and I was beginning to soak in sweat. The sun beat down on me, I removed my hat and gloves to try to cool down putting them into the pockets of my parka.

  I decided to hide in a group of trees that gave good cover and both calm down and collect my thoughts for a bit. Laying against the incline gave me a relaxed position, almost like sitting in a recliner and I put the gun across myself wondering what I’d actually heard.

  Was it a test? If it were, I’d failed and done everything wrong. Or was Colin in real trouble, shooting his way out of a bad situation or freaking out about something and using his weapon to fire haphazardly at a threat. Whatever it was it was over an hour since I’d heard it and I’d probably traveled 2 miles since that time.

  Then I heard the crunching of footsteps on the snow. I couldn’t see the individual making the noise, but they ran for a short distance, stopped and then continued. I raised my scope in the direction of the footsteps.

  What I saw through my scope made me question my sanity. A long-haired man moved quickly, stopping every few steps to check his surroundings. He had some kind of hat or helmet from which two antlers jutted out the sides. He wore a necklace of teeth. However, his clothes were some kind of white fur suit. Maybe it was a ghillie suit? As he neared, I became aware of a spear he carried.

  I kept the crosshairs of my scope on his face. My finger rested to the side of the trigger, ready if necessary. Then his face came into focus, and it was like the face of the man I saw in the snowstorm. Thick brow ridge, massive jaw, fangs. His eyes darted around looking in all directions, then he ran purposefully and quickly through the snow. It was then that I noticed that his feet were bare.

  As he ran, turning his head away from me, I put down my rifle. He was only 15 to 20 yards from me now, and I smelled the distinct and strong odor I had smelled before, piss and wet fur. He scanned in my direction, and I was close enough to see his nostrils flare as he took in deep breaths of air smelling the air currents.

  My heart beat hard, out of my chest, surely at my maximum heart rate as he stood there silently listening and smelling his surroundings. A shock of gray, greasy hair, came down to his shoulders from under the antler cap on his skull. His face was square, massive and inhuman and his gait betrayed the fact that the way his joints and appendages were constructed did not allow him to move like a normal man. He was at least 8 feet tall. He stood there smelling the air. I didn’t know what he recognized in the air because I smelled nothing. It was then that I realized that something about me was emitting a smell he was recognizing.

  Then, without warning, shockingly fast, an expression of terror crossed his face and he ran up the hill, almos
t over the top of me. His speed and agility were incredible for such a large being. The snow he kicked up came down as a light frosty mist as he ascended up the mountain behind me. I stayed perfectly still and scanned the area for more creatures like the one I had just encountered. I waited for a good five minutes before I cautiously stood and looked around.

  The massive footprints of this beast were punched into the snow around me, I put my foot down into them, and they were at least twice as big as my size 11 boot. I took care to only walk in the man’s tracks and make none of my own. I took my gun off safety and held it at my hip scanning the area for any other threats. As I walked toward the path on which the man had emerged, a hare shot out from under the brush and I almost fired another round into the air which I felt at this point would be wasteful of yet another bullet and very dangerous as I could not afford to give away my position again.