Last of the Breed: Chapters 5–13

He could only go across and downstream, and the log offered scant cover.

He might even surmise where he was going and be there waiting when Joe Mack arrived.

He, Joe Mack, had no friends in Siberia. Or none that he knew of. He supposed there were dissidents.

There were also many people in Siberia who longed for freer and less stringent ways, but that did not mean they would be disloyal to their government.

Most of that time he had been cold and hungry, barely subsisting on the food he could find.

He also needed sinews to make a bowstring. In the old days these had been made from sinews taken from a buffalo’s shoulder or just below it.

From the hidden side of one of them he cut a limb he believed might make a good bow, then worked his way by a devious route to his cave.

He did not pause to hunt or to rest, but continued to move, keeping under cover of the forest and among the rocky crags.

Finding a shelter in a thick stand of stone pine, he went to work on the sheep’s hide to make it into a vest, using rawhide for a lacing. It was slow, painstaking work, but from where he sat he had a good view of the mountainside, and he could work and keep a good lookout, too.

Stepping around the tree, he saw a man asleep against a rock, a man emaciated and worn.

There, artfully concealed, Yakov had a canoe.

Now he must survive, and that night by the campfire he worked at his bow, tapering it slightly, testing it from time to time by bending it over his knee.

If tonight he should die, who would remember? Who would inter his body? Burn his flesh? He would be left to the wolves and the gluttons, to the vultures and the ants.

He was, because of his extensive reading and his grandfather’s guidance, an apt and ready pupil.

He felt no enmity toward the white man. They had superior weapons and better strategy, and he recognized that fact. The white man occupied the land, but the Sioux had taken the Black Hills from the Kiowa, and they in turn had taken it from others.

If he died or was killed before returning to America, his victory would be only half won. If he escaped Russia and survived he would count it a complete victory and a real coup.

There was driftwood everywhere, but most of it too light to be of use, except for a few gigantic old floaters that had buried themselves in the mud, their roots splayed out like immense black spiders.

The man stood listening; then he admonished the dog in a softer tone and went back inside.

One hand on the heavy plank, Joe Mack swam across the current, but inexorably he was moved down toward the spying, examining light.

He looked at himself wryly in the mirror and said in his mind, Don't be a fool.

“The new one? She is attractive.”
His eyes were cold. “Perhaps. She is also astute. I have work for her.”

There was a trough behind it into which water ran, water from a spring. He could see and hear the water falling from the pipe into the trough. As he watched, a deer came down from the trees opposite and drank at the trough.

The bear’s efforts seemed to weaken. It dropped back on its haunches and then reared again as Joe Mack moved.

The land about was bleak and harsh.

From under straggling birches he gathered dry sticks and built a small fire, concealed by the trees around.

Firelight flickered on the pines and the stark, bare branches of the birch.

Still he shied from the refugees of whom he had heard. How could they exist free of the law? How support themselves? How remain undiscovered? Was there official connivance?

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 taken two ermine, five squirrels, and four blue foxes.

He was a powerfully built man with thick eyebrows and rather protuberant eyes.

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.

Zamatev ignored the trappings and the benefits.

Every job given to him was done with speed and finesse.

She quite understood what was in his mind, but she also knew that if she wished to reach the higher echelons of government he was her ticket.

Zamatev was too sharp, too hard to deal with. Or perhaps the trouble was that he would not deal at all. If he failed to recapture this American, he might be with them always. That in itself was incentive enough.

He would do what was expedient for Wulff.

He was a surly brute who kept much to himself and was notoriously cruel.