Chapter Thirteen
Big Storm
Four days had passed by and Deshavi was now walking on her own. She had been nothing, but a hassle! She wouldn’t talk and at first she had refused to eat, that is until Trent had threatened to hold her down and force feed her. From then on she had eaten regularly enough.
We weren’t the men, who had raped and mistreated her, but she treated us as such. Her treatment of me, however was mild in comparison to how she treated Trent. She wouldn’t let him within 10 feet of her. My patience was beginning to fray with her, but I continued to preach loving self reserve to myself, in my actions toward her.
Trent had withdrawn into a depressed reclusive state and he kept off to himself. I was the only one, who daily sought to engage either of them, often to no avail. As best as I could tell Deshavi was mending up well. She wouldn’t let me close enough to check on anything. Her fever seemed to be gone and that was what I took the most comfort in from a distance.
No fever meant no infections, at least on the surface. Inside she was a different story. As of yet she hadn’t proven suicidal, but I knew that she was contemplating it. I knew I would have been in her place, if I’d suffered what she had.
She’d only been walking for two days now and we had taken our trek south at a slower pace. Going slower had helped me have the time to augment our dwindling food supply along the way. It hadn’t been much. Some nuts and late-season berries was about it. I’d been lucky knocking a few squirrels loose from their perches with well thrown rocks. While I didn’t feel any pursuit of us was close at hand, I still wasn’t going to risk a rifle shot at any of the larger prey that we had seen, such as red deer or wild boar. The echo of a shot can carry a long distance. It would have been a different story, if I still had my pistol with the silencer on the end, but I had lost it in the escape, as Trent had his. All we had were our rifles, some grenades, and our knives. One thing was for sure, we were ill-prepared to spend the winter in Siberia.
I had already made up my mind that we were pressing on through. We might have to fight our way through some early snows, but there was no way we were going to stay held up here and outlast a long cold Russian winter.
I glanced up at the ominous cloudy sky. The problem in the whole situation though was that we might not have a choice in the matter. I quickened the pace, as I began to look for better shelter for the coming nightfall and what it might bring with it.
Chatta drew up and whistled for his fellow trackers to pull back in.
The hired guns looked among themselves uncertainly, “Why are we stopping? There are still several hours of daylight yet?”
Chatta’s stoic features took in the men assigned to him for the hunt, as he barely concealed his disgust for them. They had lived here in Siberia all of their lives and yet they were still unable to read the signs of nature or the story to be told in the clouds.
“Shelter is good here. We wait for big snow here.”
Dumbly the men looked up seeming to take in the serious turbulent war clouds overhead for the first time.
Chatta turned away and gazed off down the trail. The snow would wipe out what little trail the two men and the woman had left. He would have to track them with signs that couldn’t be seen from here on out. He would have to read the mind of the leader of the small band that they were chasing.
The man ahead of him intrigued him as few men did. To Chatta most men were an open book, but the man he had tracked for days had layers of depth to him. Chatta already keenly respected the skill with which his adversary had chosen his route and managed their retreat. Taking out the dogs and their handlers had been an act of carefully planned genius.
No doubt more such surprises existed within the mind of his adversary. He would have to be careful, even as he savored the chase of his adversary, in this game of death. Hard to kill men, who were knowledgeable of the ways of the land, were hard to find anymore. If he could arrange it, he would challenge this strange warrior and claim his strength, in a battle that he would win.
It was Trent that found the opening of the cave in the gathering darkness. Quickly we moved inside for shelter from the freezing wind that had begun to blow across the land outside. My hands guided by long practice soon had a fire made out of the fluffy punk of a rotted pine tree. I added wood to the little blaze and the cave lightened up.
There was an enraged squeal from further back in the cave. With a shriek Deshavi flattened back against the cave wall, as a full-grown boar hog along with her swine offspring came charging into the firelight.
The young pigs streaked past us out into the open, but the mother boar was having none of it. This was her cave and she was going to defend it as such. She came at me swinging her head left and right trying to gore me with her sharpened tusks, as her enraged squeals echoed deafeningly throughout the cave. Trent dove in and swiped her up along one flank with his hunting knife. Far from injuring her it only seemed to enrage her further. She turned on Trent with murder glaring balefully in her beady eyes and I saw my opportunity and took it.
I ducked in toward her and grabbed both back hind legs and hoisted her up so that it looked like I had a wheelbarrow. She was now helpless to defend against our advances and Trent quickly moved in with the killing swipe of his knife.
The hunger brought on by our rationing of our food would be ended tonight. This impromptu hunt, while it had been a dangerous experience, had been an extremely fortunate one for us.
With Trent’s help I pulled the boar outside and began to butcher it. So much of surviving in the wilderness was just the constant daily struggle to feed oneself. In modern societies it had been forgotten largely, as to what a struggle it could be, simply to eke out enough food to keep on going. Even the homeless in cities had soup kitchens and charities that they could go to. The vast stretches of Siberian wilderness knew nothing of soup kitchens and much less of any form of charity.
The world at large seemed to be unraveling so fast from its carefully constructed order these days. What would happen to the tens of millions of people unused to the rigors of simply surviving day-to-day on what food one could find, when their easy sources of food were taken away from them? It would be a catastrophe that few would emerge from unscathed and yet it seemed, because of the actions of a few the world was fast approaching such an outcome.
Later with a full belly I forced myself to get up, in order to investigate what other hidden dangers the cave may hold, before retiring for the night. Deshavi had eaten well despite herself and was already fast asleep. Trent looked sleepy, but resolutely he sat up awake with a rifle cradled in his arms, as he was on watch duty.
I pulled a burning torch out of the fire and headed off deeper into the cave. My sleepiness soon faded away as I took in the discovery of days gone by. There were cave drawings everywhere!
I looked about in open fascination at the artistic renderings of the ancient past. These drawings were of my people’s creation. They told the tale of not just their day-to-day war to survive, but also of their migration after the great beasts they hunted. What a time it must’ve been. Ted would’ve loved to have seen this place.
My torch, all but gone out, I left the artistry of my ancestors and went back out to the outer cave. I stepped past Trent into the tunnel entrance of the cave, until I stood outside. It was snowing. There were already several inches on the ground. How could something so pretty have such deadly consequences? I stepped back inside and Trent looked up noticing the snow laying on my head.
“You can go to sleep Trent. No one will be moving around in this storm.”
He nodded and slumped down onto his blanket, but he still cradled the rifle in his arms ready to blow a hole in anything that appeared unwanted in the cave.