Zoo

Kiril had not woken up early to take a piss and seen them in the distance, loping up the mountainside like lava flowing in reverse, they might already be dead.

Prokopovich rests the sight on the rattletrap rail bridge that spans the ravine they crossed earlier. The abandoned rail line was built by gulag prisoners in the 1950s, when Inta’s network of government labor camps was still running. Their plan had been to head up the mountain across the dilapidated old bridge. They thought the wolves would be unable or too afraid to cross it. Up in the tree, he spies the bridge through the rifle scope, waits, and watches.

Prokopovich is thinking about his wife when the wolves break cover from the tree line en masse and head for the ravine.

“’Tchyo za ga’lima,” Prokopovich mutters to himself as the animals head straight for the bridge.

He watches as they begin to fastidiously work their way across, gingerly picking over the decrepit wooden ties and iron beams, one by one, paw by nimble paw.

“Blya!” Prokopovich says to the sky. “Vse zayebalo!”

Whore!

Fuck it all!

Chapter 65

SPITTING OUT A sticky pine needle, Prokopovich rivets his eyes on the approaching wolves. They are moving fast, but he tries to count them. Soon, the task of counting them becomes overwhelming. He can’t. There are too many. What he sees is impossible. He has heard of packs of ten, maybe fifteen. Surely there must be fifty wolves spilling out of the trees, funneling over the bridge after them.

Prokopovich straps the rifle on his back and hurries down the tree.

“What now, hunter man?” Kiril says, soothing his nerves with a swig of vodka from his canteen.

Kiril’s face is cauliflowered and enflamed with rosacea. His eyes are like raisins.

Prokopovich pauses for a moment, frowning. It is not Sasha, who still plays hockey, or his cousin Jirg, the weight lifter, whom he is worried about; it is the largest of the men, his best friend, Kiril, who causes him concern. The big, boisterous fool is squatting against the trunk of a tree, wheezing like a concertina from the exertion of the morning’s uphill march. Kiril is fat as a swine and smokes like a broken truck, and is as slow-moving as sap in January.

Dead weight, Prokopovich thinks grimly, looking at his friend.

“Blya! We run, you drunken pig. We run for our lives!”

The wolves are a swarm of gray dots down in the distant valley, slaloming between trees up the mountain. They make no noise. No barking, no howling. Only silent running.

“Hurry! Run, if you want to live!”

The men have one last chance. There is another bridge over the ravine, a little less than a kilometer farther north. It is in even worse shape than the first one, a mere skeleton of a bridge, with no ties at all. They will have to scale the outside of its rusted latticework frame. An almost suicidal enterprise, especially for poor fat Kiril. But there is no other choice. At least there is no way the four-footed wolves will be able to cross that. The problem is getting there in time.

They are within sight of the bridge when Kiril drops. He looks terrible. He huffs at the air like a fish out of water, hacks into a fist. His face is swollen, the color of borscht.

“Bol’she—nyet!” he says between gasps. “No. More. Can’t. Not…one…more… step.”

“Damn you!” Prokopovich gives him a savage kick. For all the good it does, he may as well have kicked a tire. “Mudak! Get up, you son of a whore.”

“Blya, blya,” Jirg adds. “My wife isn’t going to be a widow because you’re a fat fuck.”

“Pojdite! Go! Both of you!” Prokopovich says as his knees crunch in the pine needles beside Kiril. “Kiril just needs to catch his breath. We will catch up with you at the bridge.”

Sasha and Jirg do not need to be told twice. In a breath, they are gone.

Prokopovich holds Kiril’s heaving shoulder and gazes forlornly through the trees at the distant Ural Mountains, looming to the east.

“Go, Cheslav,” Kiril pants. “Don’t do this.” His beady eyes look defeated and miserable. “Jirg is right. I am fat and useless. I am too weak. Always have been.”

Kiril is a clumsy, bumbling fool, laughed at by one and all. What redeems him, what has always made him Cheslav’s best friend, is that Kiril himself is always the one who laughs the hardest.

Prokopovich checks the ammo in his rifle as he sees the wolves beginning to race through the trees.

“I’m sorry,” Kiril says as the panting of the wolves becomes audible now. Kiril is weeping. His voice is cracked and whimpery. “I always loved these hunts. You are my great friend, Cheslav. I never became a millionaire, but I am rich to have had you for a friend.”

“Zatk’nis!” Prokopovich hocks a dismissive dollop of spit in the pine needles. “Shut up, you poof, and take up your gun. We are going to live.”

As the wolves approach, Prokopovich looks down the valley. It is crisply sunny at this elevation, but the plain beyond the bridge, where the village is located, is overcast, bathed in a dark purple-red glow, as if lit by a black light.

So this is where I die, Prokopovich thinks.

Then the first wolf, a male with eyes as yellow as the moon, steps into the clearing.

It is a monster of a thing, fifty kilos at least. When he was a child on a hunt with his father, Cheslav saw a wolf smaller than the one now before him take down a bull elk.

Too bad I am not a bull elk, Cheslav thinks.

“Stand up, you fool,” he says to Kiril.

Kiril heaves himself to his feet.

Together, they stand back-to-back, with their guns facing out.

Prokopovich knows what to do with wolves. Stand your ground. You stay put, they respect you, you live. You run, you die.

The wolves begin to gather around them. More and more come. The groups of wolves begin to mingle, merge, intermesh. Snarling, growling, teeth snapping, staccato bursts of threat-barks. The wolves form a circle around them. They advance, they retreat. The air is filled with a cacophony of barking.

Prokopovich can feel Kiril quaking against his back.

“Stand still, mudak,” he grumbles at Kiril, behind him. “We stand our ground, we live. We run, we die. They smell your fear.”

“Eto piz’dets, eto piz’dets,” Kiril is half whining, half mumbling. “This is so fucked up, this is so fucked up.”

Kiril squeezes the trigger of his gun and a shot goes off, from the hip, aimed almost at random into the crowd of wolves. Cheslav feels the gun crack against his elbow. A jet of blood leaps into the air, like a squirt of bright dark berry juice, and there’s a whimpering howl.

“Kiril!” Prokopovich shouts. “No!”

He hears Kiril pull the trigger again. Another howl and a spurt of blood.

A wave of fresh agitation moves throughout the circle, a swell of freshly crazed barking.

Whatever, Cheslav thinks. Fuck it. And he, too, fires a shot into the crowd.

They kill about seven of them. More keep coming.

Then Kiril decides to run. He leaves their post in the middle of the circle and tries to bolt. A moment after he does—just a fraction of a moment later, a sliver of time so thin an eye blink does not describe it—the circle of wolves rushes in to close. Their bodies become a whirlpool of fur, roaring throats, thrashing legs, ripping jaws, all