Russian Amerika: Chapter Seventeen

17 - Tetlin Redoubt

    Wolverine White, his skinning knife jutting from his gory throat, slapped Bear Crepov on the shoulder and demanded, "Where is their blood? You vowed to avenge me!" He slapped Bear a second time. "Where?" his voice gurgled with blood.

    Again his shoulder jerked, more from the psychic blow than the physical one. The fourth blow made him dimly aware that it wasn't Wolverine speaking from the grave.

    "Bear! There is someone for you," Katti said, slapping his beefy shoulder again.

    "'Nuf, you can stop punching around on me now," he mumbled. "Who wants ta see me?" He opened his eyes slowly, knew the vodka hangover needed only movement to explode behind his eyes and take his scalp off.

    "A cossack," she said, and he finally heard the fear.

    "A cossack wants to see me?" He sat up in the stained bed and dumbly endured the painful hammering in his head. "What for?"

    "I don't know. But he knows you're here." Katti's chubby face usually maintained a shade of pink. Now the pink mixed with apprehensive gray and her wide eyes remained nailed to his face.

    "Don't worry about it, Kat. He's just a damned messenger boy."

    "For you, maybe. But for me he can be big trouble when you're not around."

    Bear yawned and scratched his hairy belly before pulling on the soiled cotton trousers constituting his uniform. He carefully rose and shuffled to the cabin door and opened it. The cossack stood outside in the minus 30 degree weather.

    "What do you want?" The cold air invaded the mat of hair on his chest and hardened his nipples. His bare toes tried to curl away from the cold but he wouldn't allow them to move.

    "The colonel wants to see you, now."

    "I'll be there as soon as I get dressed." Bear shut the door in the man's face.

    Now what do they want?

    He pulled on his clothes while Katti hovered, looking anxious in her ragged dressing gown. He'd taken her out of an arriving coffle two years before. She would allow him to do anything he wished to her to keep from facing the cossacks again.

    She'd gotten fat, he decided. She really looked like a peasant now. Her eyes begged for answers, but he ignored her. Keep 'em off balance, that was the way. He pulled on his heavy socks and boots.

    The cold bright daylight became knives, which attacked his squinted eyes. He wanted a drink of vodka to numb the pain, but he'd emptied his last bottle the night before. Maybe the colonel would have some.

    Despite his heavy coat, chill permeated him by the time the heavy barracks door shut behind him. He pushed into the colonel's office, leaving the door open, and dropped his bulk onto the wooden bench. The colonel looked up from the papers on his desk.

    "What's the big hurry? I was in bed with my woman."

    The colonel kept his face neutral and nodded toward the door. "The captain here wished to see you as soon as possible."

    The door slowly swung shut to reveal a woman of medium size, a bit too much on the thin side to suit him, but not hard to look at. Her dark blonde hair molded tightly around a face composed of angles and planes.

    Her mouth was too wide for her face, he thought, and the dark eyes held more intelligence than he cared to deal with in a woman. He sat up straight.

    "Well," he said, "now she's seen me."

    "This man," she said holding out the photograph he'd seen in this office before. "You have seen him?"

    "Da. I almost killed him in the bush."

    "How fortunate for all of us that you did not," she said dryly. "Can you take me to the place where you last saw him?"

    "Yes. Or I could show you on a map."

    She pointed to a large wall map. "Do so."

    He moved over and traced their trail with a dirty fingernail.

    "This is where the construction site was attacked and destroyed. They went this way, along the Tanana River, there's a very old trail. They camped here the first night and our party stopped here."

    "Didn't you check the construction site first?" she asked.

    "I sent in one volunteer, a cossack, to look for fool traps."

    "And?"

    "He found one. He exploded with the rest of the camp. Everything burned."

    Something moved in her eyes and she nearly smiled.

    "So you sent in a fool to start with."

    Bear stifled a retort about all cossacks being fools.

    "Da, Captain. I did just that." He turned back to the map. "We caught an Indian the next morning, but couldn't get him to talk before he died."

    "There are techniques," she began.

    "He threw himself on my knife when I began skinning him."

    "Oh. Please continue."

    "That's when they discovered we were on their trail and they split up their party. We did the same. I followed the group with your friend in it."

    "He's not my friend," she said in a flat voice.

    "They set up an ambush here at the trail junction, right where I thought they would. We flanked them and moved in. Again I had a cossack volunteer who agreed to be first into the open."

    Bear licked his lips and continued. "When nobody shot at him, he thought we'd been wrong. He walked up through the meadow toward the junction.

    "But I had spotted the convict in the photograph. He also spotted me, so I pretended not to see him. When I wished to move, I stared at a tree behind him. As soon as he looked away in curiosity, I ran behind him and fired."

    "How is it that you missed?"

    "When he looked back and I wasn't there, he had the presence of mind to drop to the ground. My shot went over him. I fired a second time but he had already rolled clear, down the slope away from me."

    "Hmm, perhaps his old training has resurfaced after all."

    "He was scared pissless and reacting to the moment. Then much shooting happened and the cossack dropped. I slipped into an old wolf den and waited with my knife and rifle for them to discover me."

    "You were out-numbered, weren't you?"

    "I would not have died alone."

    "They obviously didn't discover you."

    "No. After they left I found my dead friend and then I returned here."

    "How many were in their party?"

    "Four."

    "How many were in your party?"

    "Four."

    "How many of your party came back?"

    "Only me. What are you trying to say?"

    "I thought you promyshlenniks were the best woodsmen in Alaska."

    "We are," he said with a growl.

    "After the Indians it would seem."

    Bear glared at her but didn't respond. Her words hit too close to thoughts he himself had endured.

    "You can show me this place?" she said.

    "Of course. But there is no reason."

    "Why not?"

    "I heard them say they had far to go. They are probably in winter camp on the Yukon or lower Tanana."

    "Actually," she said, "we know exactly where they are."

    "Where?"

    "Right here," her shellacked fingernail tapped the map once, "on the Toklat River at a village of the same name."

    "If you knew this before you came, why do you ask me where I last saw the man?"

    "I wanted to hear your story, first hand accounts are always revealing. Besides, we need qualified people in on this, and between your experience in the bush and your raging animosity toward our quarry, you fit right in. You begin collecting field pay as of now."

    "What do you plan to do about the traitor's camp?"

    "Actually, it depends on the traitors." Her smile lacked warmth.