The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [18]
I told him I understood, and that we should take the ram back to the camp, reprovision ourselves, and try again in another place.
“Jozef, don’t you see?” His eyes flashed, lightless as it was, and I don’t think he had slept at all. That lion had picked through the best of the flock, he said, not the weak and the lame, but the strong, and she was going to keep on hunting for one better prize after another. “And all we’ve done is wait for her, and fired into the air at her shadow. But if we could find her, without her seeing us, while she stalks, we just might be able to kill her. There’s no other way.”
We tethered the ram to a stake at the mouth of a thrum-cap overhang. Then, our packs empty, we set off for the valley where my father said that he was taking the sheep for some protection until we returned, a day’s hike from there.
It was dusk when we arrived. I still remember looking down on him from the brow of a hill we had just come over. He was scanning the perimeter of those same hills rising out of the valley in which he and his sheep had lain down for the night, but he didn’t see us, just turned his back and set to the chores of the evening, slowly and with a break every now and then when he’d sit and stare at the ground, not, it seemed, because he was tired but, rather, as though he had forgotten what it was he needed to do next. I felt the wind coming up out of the mountains from the northeast.
We had approached on purpose in a long sweep from the west. I carried the Krag, while Zlee scouted ahead and found a group of large boulders midway up the hill, and we nestled in behind them. They covered our backs and gave us a good view of the surrounding terrain. I had watched my father from a distance before and he had always somehow seen me without my knowing. Now, with no idea that Zlee and I were there, he seemed fragile and alone as he finished setting up his small tent, built a fire, and warmed his soup. I felt alone, too. I wanted to go to him, listen to him talk as he stirred what would be our supper, or hear him read, and be a boy again there in the mountains.
Zlee and I hadn’t eaten all day, but we didn’t speak of food. We communicated in signs and short sentences, the last of which was when he shook me awake before dawn, held a finger to his lips for silence and handed me the field glasses.
“Four hundred yards,” he whispered, and I saw the brown-and-silvery figure threading past makeshift pens of sleeping sheep. How was it that nothing stirred? By some power or invisibility, the lion stalked along steadily, and I could tell that she was through with killing sheep. It crossed my mind, briefly, to ask Zlee if he wanted to take the shot, but the movement involved in the very act of turning and questioning might be discernible to the cat. So I settled into my breathing, and the only other words Zlee spoke were a short comment on the growing light, and wind, which I took to mean that I hadn’t much time.
I thought of my father, who was sleeping soundly below, not knowing what lay in store for him if I missed. He would be rising soon, and I suspect the cat was waiting for when her prey would emerge from the tent and move away from the protective cover of canvas. I had one shot. The sky was brightening in that way morning seems to come on all at once in the summer, and I waited, holding the animal’s haunch in my sight. I eased the barrel slightly right, took one full breath and could smell the faint musk of the well-oiled gun stock mingling with my own unbathed stench, and almost sighed as I pulled the trigger. The shot’s echo seemed to crack open the valley, and the cat, as though powering in that direction, slumped to one side.
WHEN WE WENT BACK DOWN TO PASTVINA FOR THE WINTER in 1914, all we heard was talk of the war. Boys a few years older than I wore their cadet uniforms daily, and men from our village marched off to the conscription office in Eperjes to join the fight against the Russians on the eastern