Makowski’s club and it was dead. We skinned it but had not yet reached the stage of hunger when we could bring ourselves to eat it.
On the eighth or ninth day the going was unmistakably easier. The ground was falling away in a long, gradual slope southwards. The bare earth between the trees began to show tufts of the typical tough, rustling Siberian grass, there was more moss on the tree trunks. In the early afternoon the forest suddenly thinned out and we saw the Lena, ice-sheathed and well over half-a-mile wide, at this point already a mighty waterway with still some 1,500 miles to run to its many-mouthed outlet into the Arctic Ocean. We stood, partially under cover, in an extended line, listening and watching. The day was clear and sounds would have carried well, but all was silent, nothing moved. We were then about a mile from the nearest bank of the river on low-lying land which looked as if it might be marshy when the ice broke up.
The American walked quietly over to me. ‘We’d better stay this side tonight,’ he suggested, ‘and cross over at first light tomorrow.’ I agreed. ‘We’ll turn back and get well under cover.’ I signalled the others, jerking my arm back in the direction from which we had come. We all turned and started back, retracing our steps for about twenty minutes of brisk walking. We built a shelter and, as darkness came on, we lit our first fire, setting it off with
The distance already travelled was not, in relation to what lay ahead, very great, but it represented to us a considerable early success, with the Lena as our first objective. Quietly, as the wood smoke curled up into the upper branches of the trees and disappeared into the night, we celebrated with a hot dinner — a steaming
And so, in the half-light of the day’s beginning we silently crossed the Lena, mightiest river in this country of many great rivers, and came to the steep bank on the far side. There for some minutes we stood, looking back across the ice. Some of the tension of the past weeks was already falling away from us. In all our minds had been the idea we might never reach the Lena, but here we were, safe and unmolested. We could face the next stage with fresh confidence.
Inconsequentially someone started to talk about fish. It set me on a train of thought and memory. I told the others that in winter in Poland it was possible to catch fish by hammering a hole through the ice.
‘And having made the hole,’ interjected Zaro, ‘what do we do next — whistle them up?’ No, I explained, the fish, stunned by the hammering, will be forced out through the change of air pressure when the ice is broken through. The others laughed and bantered, congratulating me on my ability as a teller of tall tales. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘let’s try it.’ Kolemenos went off and returned with a solid baulk of timber and we walked out about twenty yards on to the river ice. Kolemenos wrapped his arms around the timber, Zaro and I took hold near the bottom to direct the business end and we started thumping away with pile-driver blows. Eventually we broke through. The water gushed up like a geyser, swirling icily round our feet. And yes! There were fish — four of them, about the size of herrings. We swooped on them and picked them up. We were as excited as schoolboys. The others crowded round me, slapping my back, and Zaro made a little speech of apology for having doubted my word. Then Smith, looking anxiously around, said we had better not play our luck too hard and should get moving under cover again. We had a drink of the cold, clean Lena water and moved off.
We turned south again, climbed the river bank to the higher ground beyond and headed on the next leg of the journey with Lake Baikal as the immediate objective. The nature of the country ahead was familiar, much like that through which we had marched to the westward to the logging camp. Here there were no great forests such as the one in which we had worked to the north, although trees grew hardily at intervals and crowned the succession of rearing mounds and hill ridges. Stunted bushes and scrub defied the assault of winter and in most places the characteristic brown-green sighing grass flourished almost luxuriously, dancing to the moaning whistle of the Siberian wind.
That first night across the river we spent the night in a copse of trees on a low hillock and lightly grilled our fish spitted through the gills on a skewer-pointed twig, ate sumptuously of this our first fresh food, and finished up with more gruel.
In the morning Marchinkovas, who had gone off to relieve himself a little distance from the camp, came back and beckoned us to follow him. We trailed along at his heels wondering what it was all about. He led us to a small clearing. He said nothing, just pointed. In the shade of a tree stood a stout oaken cross, some four feet high. We crowded round. I rubbed at the mould and green moss and found my fingers following the outlines of an inscription. We scraped away and uncovered the Russian letters for V P, a customary abbreviation of the phrase
‘You know,’ said Marchinkovas, ‘we are probably the first men to see this cross since the day it was planted here.’ Sergeant Paluchowicz put his hand up to his fur helmet, slowly removed it and sank his bearded chin down on his chest. We looked at him and each other. All our caps came off. We bent our heads and stood silent. I said a little prayer to myself for the one who had died and for our own deliverance.
By now the Irkutsk issue of rubber boots had been discarded as worn out. Our feet were still wrapped in the only article of clothing handed out in the camp, the long strips of thick linen. All were now wearing moccasins with skin gaiters wound round with straps of hide. Movement south was at the steady rate of about thirty miles a day and we kept going for a full ten hours daily. Although there had been no sight or sign of other men we rigidly maintained the extended line of advance with the practical idea that if one or two ran into trouble the main party could still press forward. Relations between us were generally more relaxed, we talked more freely and during the nightly halts Smith was often plied with questions about America. From his answers we gathered he had travelled extensively through the States and I remember our being impressed with his description of Mexico and how he had bought there a magnificent, silver-ornamented saddle.
He told us, too, that when he worked in the Soviet mines in the Urals he had met another American he had known in Moscow and so gathered he had not been the only one of the American colony to have been under N.K.V.D. surveillance.
A lucky throw with a cudgel and a feverish scramble in a bank of powdery snow earned us a luxury meal of Siberian hare and added a fine white skin to our reserve store.
The party’s hunting successes were accidents. Armed with only one knife, an axe and an assortment of clubs, we were ill-equipped for finding and killing our own meat. It would have been comparatively easy to set simple and efficient fall-down traps such as the camp guards had laid, but the necessity for constant movement left no time for watching and tending traps. There was the consolation that while our bread, flour and barley lasted, the extra good fortune of a few fresh fish and a squatting hare that left its bolt for freedom too late elevated our diet far above the bare existence level of the camp. On a number of occasions we saw the
In matters of woodcraft and hunter’s tricks, mine was the opinion always sought. The other six were all townsmen. My happy days as a youth in the Pripet Marshes were often now turned to practical account. I was confident that with an occasional glimpse of the sun and the signs of the trees I could maintain a fairly accurate course due south. I had in my mind, too, a quite clear picture in broad map form of southeast Siberia, dominated by the Lena and Lake Baikal. Let us but find the northern tip of the lake, I told the others, and its long eastern shore will lead us through Trans-Baikal and almost out of Siberia.
This thought of Baikal as a natural guide out of this country of bondage was the goad which kept us going fast and determinedly for the next few weeks.
11.
