The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [16]
All of this played out on the level of the quotidian, imperceptible and harmless day after uneventful day, or so it seemed, until the pattern emerged.
Rather than being jostled awake in the morning (usually by Sawatch, sent to lick my face), I began rising before dawn to cook or begin the process of breaking camp, often finding Zlee already hard at it, while my father slept on and morning came and I had to strip him awake. In the daytime, as we moved from meadow to meadow, he left grazing decisions to me, which I took at first as a sign of confidence and still expected him to second-guess if there was something dangerous about the area that I couldn’t see, but then realized (when it was Zlee and Sawatch who brought a cadre of lambs back from a steep ridge obscured by scrub pine) that he might not have cared if I led an entire flock of sheep over a cliff, and so I began to scout our moves more cautiously.
And at night, when our supper was over and there was little light to do anything but talk into the shadows—or rather, listen to my father’s profile behind the candle while he gave the same tired ideas for problems universal and local—I thought nothing of the sweet plum smell of slivovica and the clear bottle that accompanied him on those evenings, until I started kicking empty ones at his bedside when it was time for all of us to be awake and moving.
The summer that I turned fifteen, my father returned from a trip to Kassa with extra rounds for the Krag, a .410 Hungarian-made shotgun, and a pair of Zeiss field glasses. We never wondered where he got the money to buy these things. They were tools, useful and necessary to us, like a sharp scythe necessary for harvest.
The .30-caliber rifle shells and nine-hundred-yard range of the Krag were too powerful for the rabbit and dove we ate plenty of in the mountains, but with the shotguns, Zlee and I not only kept up a steady supply of meat but also practiced our stalking skills, seeing how close we could get to unwary hares before we kicked up grass or tossed a stone to get them running, and then, after a head start, shot them with our Magyar blunderbuss.
Bullets for an American-made Krag were hard to come by in Europe, but my father didn’t seem to have any trouble getting them through a connection he had in Kassa. We had little reason to fire the Krag often—practice and conditioning mostly—so he made only one trip a year to the city (the cultural center of what would become eastern Czechoslovakia) and its marketplace, where more than farmers plied their wares. That summer, though, my father restocked because we had gotten word that a mountain lion was giving trouble to some of the shepherds east of us and we knew it was only a matter of time before the big cat showed up in the hills surrounding Pastvina.
Those were the days when the last of the lions and pumas still roamed the Tatras and Carpathians, and in late August we started to find fresh kills on the periphery of the herd, usually a lamb or two, but often enough one of the ewes. If that predator had only taken the weak and moved on, nature doing the culling we ourselves would have done, we’d have let her have her share. But she seemed to hunt with a bloodlust, and we couldn’t afford to lose the horse or mule, or, worse, find one of us face-toface with her as we came up a switchback.
My father began going down to Eperjes every other week then. In the town square, where the farmers set up stalls and sold their produce, there was talk of “levica,” the lioness, sometimes with awe, sometimes with contempt, as though she were goddess and succubus in one body, and my father would return and give us these reports, and at night, under the spell of his brandy, he began telling us more and more