Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [99]
It was a bear. He stopped in his tracks. It was quite large. It was also very old. It was moving with great difficulty across the path ten yards in front of him. The bear saw him, but seemed uninterested. It was moving very stiffly.
And then he realized: the bear was going to die. It was only searching for a final resting place.
Cautiously he went foward.
‘Well, my Misha,’ he murmured, ‘what use can you be to me?’
The bear gave him a baleful look, but was too weary to threaten him. How old, sad and bedraggled the animal looked. The rain had soaked it; the bear’s coat was caked with mud and smelt dank. Moving closer, Yanka’s father drew his long hunting knife. A good idea had just occurred to him.
He would give Yanka a fur coat for the winter. That would please her. Not every man could say: ‘I have killed a bear for you.’
It required great skill to kill a bear. Even though it had almost collapsed, an instant’s revival, one swipe from those mighty arms, and he would be done for. But he thought he could do it.
He edged behind, paused, then suddenly leaped on to the creature’s huge back.
The bear started, began to stand up; and he ripped his long, sharp blade right across its throat.
The bear rose fully, with the man on its back, and tried to get at him. Again Yanka’s father plunged his knife into the throat, attacking the windpipe and searching for the huge veins. After a moment, he was sure he had succeeded, and leaped down into the mud, before running behind a tree.
He heard the bear gurgle. Then it came down heavily on its front legs again. Blood was pouring from its throat. The bear seemed to see him, but it did not move. It stood there miserably, knowing this was the end, and, for some strange reason, blinking uselessly. Then it crashed into the bushes and he heard it coughing.
An hour later, he had skinned it.
Yanka found the muddy season depressing. It was made worse by her decision, on a day when the rains had stopped, to go down to the nearby village of Dirty Place.
What a dreary spot it was. Half a dozen huts clustered by the river bank. The land there was Black Land, like the northern territory, so that the peasants there were, in practice, free. Better than that, the village’s land lay directly on the chernozem.
Yet still it was dismal. The river bank was very low. The ground immediately to the south was waterlogged and smelt of marsh. And when Yanka spoke to some of the village women, she found that four out of the six she met suffered from some strange affliction that made the skin on their head spongy to the touch and their hair perpetually oily and matted.
Instinctively, she drew away from them.
She was glad to get back, to put wood in the stove and feel her own hair, soft and light, as she ran her hand through it for reassurance.
It was that very evening that her father came in with a wonderful coat, made by one of the Mordvinian women from a bear he had killed for her himself. He had kept the incident a secret from her. Now he handed it to her with a smile.
‘You killed a bear? For me?’ She was half delighted, yet half terrified. ‘You might have been killed.’
He laughed. ‘It will keep you warm up here in the north.’
She kissed him. He smiled, but said nothing more.
Three days later the snows came. It was very cold; though one was perfectly warm inside. Yet once winter had sealed the little village she could not escape the sad fact: it was boring.
She had no friends. The village, it seemed to her, was quiet as a tomb. They did not mix much with their neighbours and, though they were only yards apart, days might pass without her speaking to another soul. There was not even a church to draw them together.
To pass the time, she began to make a large embroidered cloth. It had a white background, and on to this she sewed, in bright red, the striking, geometric birds that the village woman had taught her when she was a child.
So, in this remote northern hamlet, appeared a design drawn directly from ancient,