Look to the Wolves

by Look to the Wolves (retail) (epub)

  On the surface, that mightn’t be too difficult. And if one slurred the words a bit, distorted the vowel sounds – and confined one’s conversation as far as possible to grunts and monosyllables… Wearing a full beard had its advantages too, facially one wouldn’t give much away.

  In about mid-morning there was a branch off to the right – to Karlovka, the map suggested. They’d held straight on, on what was then more of a track than a road but had been used very recently, cut up by horses’ hooves and with fresh droppings here and there. Cavalry for sure – probably from Karlovka or that direction, would have turned east on to this track at the fork. The dung was soon not only fresh but steaming, and rounding a bend into a long, straight stretch with a farmstead on the left and open fields both sides, sure enough there was the tail-end of a body of horsemen climbing a rise and then diminishing as they passed over it and into the dip beyond.

  ‘Better slow down.’ Schelokov glanced back over his shoulder, signalling to Ibraim with one hand while he pulled his horse back into a walk with the other. They still had saddles on all the horses – not having come across any suitable dumping-ground yet – and there was no point in arousing other cavalrymen’s curiosity when you didn’t have to. Although you wouldn’t want to be slowed down like this for long, either. Every mile counted, every hour. It was going to take the best part of a week, this trip, and the longer it took the less likely it was that Taganrog would still be in White hands when you got there.

  Then beyond Taganrog, Rostov. Rostov-on-Don being the gateway to the Caucasus and to Novorossisk, as far as anyone coming from this direction was concerned. If Rostov did fall—

  Well. You’d be really up against it, then. Discover for sure whether or not you did give a damn about personal survival.

  Denikin would surely hold on there, though. If he didn’t, he’d be finished. He’d probably hold Taganrog as well. If he had any troops left to hold it with.

  That cavalry squadron was swinging off to the left, northward. Making for Zmuyev, perhaps. There was nothing much else up that way, between here and Kharkov – not that the map showed, anyway. It was a rotten map, gave hardly any detail. But they had turned off. Schelokov grunted, pushed his horse into a trot again.

  The track beyond the point where that outfit had left it hadn’t been used in recent days by anything except carts. Farmers’ fourgons from and between the farms they’d been passing, no doubt. And there’d be a village ahead there somewhere, Bob guessed. There’d been none since Valki, which was now a long way behind them. Virgin snowfields, meanwhile, on both sides of the track, and woodland a few miles distant backing the undulating whiteness on the left. Clouds pressing lower than they had been, and a darker grey now, passing over swiftly on a wind that had veered from north-west to north. Snow would be coming before long, for sure. And whereas on the way up they’d prayed for it, to cover the dvukolki’s tracks, now it would not be welcome at all – could only make the going harder, slow one down.

  It was early afternoon when they found a place to dump the saddles. Pine-woods close to the road flanked a valley with a stream in it which the road crossed by a timber bridge. Up among the trees, undergrowth crowded down on both steep banks, ravine-like, and the saddles went in there – out of sight from the road and into a mass of briars. The three of them changed to fresh horses, at this point, saving time by ditching the saddles they’d been using, having only to tighten three other girths and transfer the saddle-packs and blanket-rolls. They also divided the riderless animals between them, as Schelokov had proposed earlier. The whole business took only about fifteen minutes. They’d made tracks between the road and the wood, of course, but you could reckon on their being snowed-over soon enough.

  On again. Conscious of being well into the second half of the daylight hours now, and that before dark they’d need to find some place to stop where there’d be fodder for the horses. Ideally a farm with a barn or stables they could sleep in. It was a matter of some concern, with no certainty about it – for instance, no way of knowing how many scavenging units of Budyonny’s cavalry might have passed this way before them. On the other hand you didn’t want to start prospecting for a place too early, wasting time. Schelokov said finally, ‘Have to chance it, Bob. When the light’s beginning to fade, time enough…’

  * * *

  They were lucky, that first night. Hardly realizing at the time how lucky. For one thing that the snow had held off until about the last half-hour that they were on the road – and even then was only light stuff flying on the wind – and more importantly that the first farm they stopped at was exactly what they’d been looking for. The farmer was a man in his sixties with a crutch and a wooden stump in place of his left leg, his wife an enormous creature who groaned as she heaved herself along, seemingly had something wrong with her vast hips. There was a big shed, and hay in it. The man told them, ‘They took my cows, to feed the Army. I’ve one horse, that’s all, pulls the cart, and he won’t outlive me, poor old devil. Leave us enough hay to keep him until the spring, that’s all.’

  He had pigs, in another outhouse. Bob had found them when he’d been nosing around, before they’d started out again at first light. The snow had been coming down more heavily by then. The farmer had asked him not to mention the existence of the pigs to anyone else… ‘Or they’ll come and take them. Give us paper money that’s not worth – well…’ A gesture, wiping his behind. ‘That’s what it’s good for, eh? Folk here say they’ll be taking our land too, once it’s over…’ Small, sharp eyes suddenly worried, then, and a hand on Bob’s arm: ‘Mind you – there’s plenty that cries out to be put right, I’m not one to stand in the way of progress…’

  The second night was adequate – fodder plentiful, but shelter for men and horses worse than at that last place – but nearing the end of the third long day’s march – snowing hard, horses and men plastered with it and visibility down to a hundred yards or less even before the light had begun to fade – after drawing blank at the first two places they’d tried there was a sense of real desperation. At the first one an old woman had told them there was no fodder in the place at all; soldiers of one kind or another had stripped the place bare, and if they chose not to believe her they could search… At the second – where there seemed to be no barn anyway – nobody answered the door although the cottage was certainly inhabited – tracks in the snow, and a strong scent of woodsmoke.

  They rode on to the next. Schelokov muttering, ‘If we’d been real Bolsheviks we’d have smashed the door in. Stabled the nags there in the house.’

  It was getting dark by this time, and they mightn’t have seen the next farm if it hadn’t been for a glow of light in a window, an oil-lamp flickering through failing light and driving snow.

  ‘Third time lucky – please God.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Wheeling in. The horses were very noticeably flagging; they’d been driven hard all day, and the going had been rough. Bob added, ‘Even just shelter. Then we could find food for them in the morning.’ He and Ibraim reined in, Ibraim having already taken over Schelokov’s spare horses to free him for knocking on doors. They’d come up fifty yards of track between lines of fence-posts whose tops were only a foot or so clear of the snow, and into the yard where there was some shelter, partly from trees planted to form a windbreak. The light still burned: it looked as if a curtain had partly collapsed inside that window, or they’d covered it inadequately with a blanket. Yellowish light seeped out across trampled snow. There was a well to the left of the house – roofed, on timber piles – and the dark loom of a barn behind it. Schelokov rode into the pool of light – in the lee of the house, where only a few snowflakes blew around – then slid down and approached the door.

  ‘Hello!’ He tried knocking, then stooped for a piece of firewood from a pile there, used it as a hammer. ‘Hello, there – if you please!’

  A shadow crossed swiftly between the light and the window.

  Silence.

  ‘H
ello, inside there! D’you want me to freeze out here?’

  Sounds of bolts being pulled back: then the door inched open. Light was visible in the slit which expanded into a pale rectangle. Widening: then a dark figure filling it, blocking most of the light. Schelokov began in his quiet, persuasive tone, ‘We’re in search of shelter, and fodder for our horses. Only three of us, batushka, but we’ve a dozen horses—’

  ‘Fodder–’ an old man’s voice, raised in protest – ‘for twelve?’

  ‘Thirteen, to be exact. But if you have any—’

  ‘No. No – truly, captain—’

  ‘Sergeant, batuskha. Or just “comrade” would do. Was that your son, by the way?’

  ‘Son? Where? No – no, I’m on my own here, I swear—’

  ‘I’ll believe you. Even it if means I have to disbelieve my own eyes. But our horses need something in their bellies, d’you see – and shelter for the night.’

  ‘Shelter, you can have. In the barn here. Only don’t touch my fowls or the goats. I beg you. Fodder – well, there’s a little, it’s not good and it’s all I have for the goats. They took all my good hay – and the cow, they—’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. But this is extremely kind—’

  ‘No food in the house, mark you!’

  ‘No, no… We have food for ourselves. Only the horses—’

  ‘Nothing like enough for that many. It’s rubbish anyway – mildewed, and—’

  ‘Anything’s better than nothing, batushka. We won’t lay a finger on your livestock, don’t worry. And whether or not that lad’s your son – nephew, grandson – your business, I never saw him. Oh – we can draw water from the well here, can we? But one thing – if you’d be so kind as to put a pot on your stove – if I knock on the door in an hour’s time, say, a jug of hot water for our tea?’

  There was a yoke lying near the well, with two large buckets, and a trough in the barn which Ibraim filled. Schelokov told Bob when they were inside, out of the wind and snow, ‘There was a lad in the room with him, where the light is. Nineteen, twenty – military age, anyway. Ten to one he’s a deserter. Ran into the other room where it’s dark, when I knocked. The old boy knew I’d seen him. Hence this—’ he glanced round – ‘abundance…’

  The barn was in good repair but it wasn’t very large and it was now crowded. The chickens had taken to the rafters, there were five goats and now thirteen horses and three men. The fodder, which as the old man had said was rubbish, was in a boarded-off corner where the goats couldn’t get at it. Bob and Schelokov distributed it as fairly as possible among the horses while Ibraim took their bridles off and unsaddled the three they’d been riding.

  ‘Bloody stiff…’

  Hobbling, in fact. Schelokov nodded. ‘Two long days – when you’re not used to it.’ He shrugged. ‘Quite a few more to come, mind you.’ He was opening tins – Red Army rations. These contained salami, and they’d be sharing a loaf of black bread between the three of them. He added, ‘Without fail, we must give these animals a proper feed tomorrow. I’ll tell you – give you some idea of what they need – horse rations in my own regiment were nine pounds of oats and nine of hay per horse per day. On top of that they had all the black bread our soldiers couldn’t eat. Our hussars had enormous rations, there was always a lot left over.’

  ‘Those were the days, eh?’

  ‘You could say so.’ A shrug. ‘Just seemed normal at the time. One of a lot of things that would go on for ever.’

  * * *

  It was like sleeping – or trying to – in Noah’s Ark…

  Dead tired, certainly, but also stiff and sore, which the barn’s hard earth floor didn’t exactly help. One good thing was that although the back of his head was still sensitive – he couldn’t even think of lying on his back, for instance – the throbbing had stopped, if he didn’t touch it it didn’t hurt. Another was that the body-heat of thirteen horses and five goats kept the place fairly warm.

  The horses were restive, probably from hunger. And this was only the third night of the long journey. From here to Taganrog would still be the best part of two hundred miles. Thirty miles a day, Schelokov had said, would be very good going for horses that were well fed and rested – and in good conditions, not deep snow and a blizzard such as was blowing out there now.

  18

  It had been snowing all night and still was, swirling thick and heavy in a gusting wind from the north as they walked the horses south-eastward, two hours after daybreak. Horses’ heads hanging, the men peering forward under whitened brows, seeing sometimes as far as thirty yards ahead, often less. Caps, coats and horses plastered white, horses’ rumps and left sides more so than the rest. Ice-crystals formed quickly – especially in beards, tails and manes.

  He’d dreamed that Nadia was with them, dressed like them as a cavalryman except that her dark hair had been flying free. He’d remonstrated with her about this, and she’d told him that it was how Nikki liked it. Evidently they hadn’t told her that he’d been killed, and she’d believed she was on her way to join him in some base area, Bob acting only as her escort. It had been intensely worrying to him that he hadn’t been able to break through to her with the truth, which was that Nick Solovyev had been half-eaten by wolves; this was the condition in which they were going to find him, but Bob couldn’t tell her, warn her. He’d woken in a sweat and with a scrawny chicken pecking at his sleeve, which had horse-dung on it. Full consciousness had come with recognition of the farmyard stink, Ibraim’s snores and the stark reality of the situation like a kick in the head: Two hundred miles to go, and no feed for the horses…

  Schelokov dropped back to ride beside him. Bob and Ibraim each had five unsaddled horses behind their own, leaving Schelokov free to prospect farms as they came to them. They’d been on the march about an hour now and passed only one, which had been no use. Their host of last night had told them they hadn’t a hope of finding any supply of fodder within a day’s ride, at least.

  ‘Thinking, Bob – we mustn’t be put off too easily. Farmers are living on something, they have carts, must have horses to pull them, horses don’t live on air. So, they’ve got it hidden. And if it’s a case of them or us – well, just their bad luck, eh?’

  Alone again – thinking about that, with the phrase in mind When the devil drives… Schelokov had dropped back to talk to Ibraim. Morale-building exercise: last night and this morning the Tartar had barely said a word, seemed totally self-contained behind that mask-like, slant-eyed face of his. He talked to his horse occasionally, but that was about all. He rode slumped, long-legged, boots dangling, his feet rarely in the stirrups, and he was answering Schelokov’s chat now with no more than grunts.

  Bob watched the sides of the track for farm entrances. It wouldn’t be difficult to pass one without seeing it, under all this snow, and with Schelokov preoccupied back there he probably wasn’t keeping much of a look-out himself. Bob consequently wasn’t looking ahead much, as he had been before, and with the depth of snow underfoot and its blanketing effect on sound generally as well as vision, he’d had no inkling that there might be even a single horseman on the road ahead of them, until suddenly – as it were, out of nowhere – there were shouts, dark forms looming, horses back on their haunches and whinnying, others swerving aside…

  The impression was of fifty or a hundred of them, in those first seconds of surprise. In fact it was a platoon of thirty-six.

  ‘Hey there, comrades!’

  Another yelling back over his shoulder, ‘Lieutenant! Comrade Leitnant!’

  ‘Zdrastye, tovarischi!’

  ‘Zdrastvuite!’

  A few had unslung their rifles, or begun to, had then recognized fellow-cavalrymen and were re-slinging them on their backs. Well-fed, fit-looking horses quietening too, after the brief flurry of excitement… Schelokov spurring forward: ‘Hello there, comrades!’ Their horses filled the narrow road, jostling each other now as a small man on a big grey pushed up through the middle of them: ‘W
hat’s this bloody circus?’

  ‘Comrade, you the leader here?’

  ‘Shikhin – lieutenant. You?’

  ‘Sergeant Krotov, comrade. With remounts I’m supposed to be taking to Taganrog or thereabouts. But tovarisch Leitnant, perhaps you could advise me. In a bit of a fix, you see – reckoned on getting fodder for these nags along the way, but no such fornicating luck – and they’re bloody starving – farmers say they don’t have any hay, oats, any damn thing at all, so—’

  ‘Where’re you from, comrade? Damn it, Taganrog – that’s a hell of a long ride, my friend! Not ours yet, either – far as I know…’

  Schelokov gave him the story. Horses from the veterinary establishment at Kursk: had to wait weeks instead of days, out of touch, consequently, but orders were orders and nobody’d changed them, consequently he was proceeding with these remounts towards Taganrog, come hell or high water. He’d little doubt he’d locate the regiment somewhere down in that area, anyway. But dead or lamed horses wouldn’t be worth delivering, and if the comrade lieutenant could tell him where he might get the poor brutes a decent feed and a day’s rest, in this benighted wilderness…

  ‘My advice is to ride to where we’ve just come from, comrade. Provisional headquarters of this region. If you’re taking ’em along slow – well, you’ll make it in six hours, I’d say. Six or eight.’ He was running his eye over the horses. ‘They’ve enough left in ’em for that, I’d say?’

  ‘Have to. But where—’

  ‘You’ll cross a railway line in – well, walking pace, say two hours. Then take a fork due east. That’s turning off your route for Taganrog, but – on that road there’s nothing… Left fork, soon after the railway. The land’s all fenced there, you’ll see it all right. Heading east then, see. And you’ve got the Donets river ahead then – I don’t mean close, but you’re getting into the Donets basin, coal country, that’s what’s important to us, why we’re going to hold on to it now no matter what, d’you see.’