uncomplainingly. The midday May sun was pleasantly warm, helping, with the heat of our exertions, to dry out our clothes. We must have covered thirty miles north-east away from Lake Baikal by nightfall and we slept easier for being back among tall timber.
On the third day after leaving the lakeside, I judged we were in a position for turning south on a route which would take us down to the border, with Baikal lying some fifty miles to our right. It was guesswork, but I don’t think the estimate was far out, although it would have been impossible to maintain a truly parallel course. The country was hilly and well wooded and our progress was a series of stiffish climbs, with scrambles down into steep-sided valleys carrying small rivers and streams down to the lake. The valleys ran almost uniformly south- west. Many of the streams were fordable, although the current, swollen by the break-up of the ice, was strong. Kolemenos led the way across these, prodding ahead of him with a long sounding pole.
I marvelled at the way the girl stood it all. I fear we all still had misgivings about her frailty and I am sure she was aware of them. In these early days she never once held us up. She was even gay and happy when we were soured and foot-weary after a particularly trying march. She treated us like a crowd of big brothers — all except Mister Smith. Between those two there grew almost a father-and-daughter relationship. Often in the night shelter she would get him to tell her about America and on more than one occasion I heard him tell her that when this was all over she should come to the States with him. He would gently tease her about her big Russian boots and then say, ‘Never mind, Kristina, in America I will buy you some beautiful dresses and elegant high-heeled shoes.’ And Kristina would laugh with the wonder and promise of it.
She grew on us until there was not one of the bunch who would not cheerfully have died to protect her. She would wake in the morning, look at the unhandsome collection around her and say ‘It is wonderful to see you all. You make me feel so safe.’ On the march she loved to get Zaro up to his funny business. Even Zaro sometimes was glum, but Kristina never failed to chaff him back to his normal sparkling humour. Zaro, spurred on by her interest, would effervesce with fun. Sometimes as I watched them together, I found it hard to realize we were on a desperate mission, half-starved and with the worst of the journey yet to come. Most reserved of the party was the Lithuanian, Marchinkovas. He talked little and generally only gave his advice when he was asked for it. Kristina would walk alongside him for miles, talking softly and seriously, and then there would be the phenomenon of Marchinkovas smiling, even laughing out loud.
Now, too, the party had a nurse. Kolemenos began limping with sore toes. Kristina bathed his feet for him, tore strips off her petticoat and bound up the raw places between his toes. When my leg wound opened up, she dressed that. A cut or an abrasion was her immediate concern. When the bandages were finished with she washed them through in stream water, dried them and put them away for further use.
Approaching what was probably the Bargusin River, about halfway down the lake, Kristina was herself a casualty. She began to drop behind and I saw she was hobbling. I stopped the others and went back to her. ‘My boots are hurting me a little,’ she said. I took them off. The soles and backs of the heels were raw where blisters had formed and burst. She must have had hours of agony. The boots had been too heavy and big for her. All seven men fussed about her while she insisted that she was quite well enough to continue. I bandaged her feet with some of her own linen and then persuaded her to let us cut off the long felt tops of the boots to see if she could get on more easily with the reduced weight. Off came the felt and was stowed away to be used later inside moccasins. But an hour later she was hobbling as badly as ever and we decided to throw the boots away and make her some moccasins.
So I made Kristina a pair of moccasins. I lavished on them all the care and artistry of which I was capable with the materials at hand. The others sat round and watched every cut of the knife and every stitch of the leather thonging. I doubled the soles so that they would be stiff and long-wearing and I lined them with sable. Everybody congratulated me on my handiwork and Kristina planted an impulsive kiss right in the centre of my forehead.
We began to feel the girl was good luck to us. We suffered no real slow-down until we reached, at night, only five days after turning south at the lake tip, the Bargusin River. The trouble with all the bigger waterways was that we had to spend extra time reconnoitring for the best position to attempt a crossing. We discovered the next day there were three fair-sized rivers in our path. Having crossed the first we encountered the second after only an hour’s march. The third, and biggest, held us up three hours later and we wasted hours surveying it and eventually negotiating it. We guessed that all three rivers must join to the westward to enter the Baikal Lake as the main Bargusin River. We climbed a hill on the far bank of the third river and lit a fire to dry ourselves out. We were all dog tired and very hungry.
About this hunger business, I found that the real pangs did not hit me for about eight days. All the others would in the meantime have been suffering badly. But when I was attacked by the pains of starvation I was worse affected than any. We made a little
Kristina was fast asleep even while we were talking.
The Sergeant looked down on her. ‘Let us sleep. I think she will bring us luck tomorrow.’
‘Let us hope so,’ said his friend Makowski.
13.
THE BARGUSIN crossing took place at the end of May and was the last of the major water hazards. On the south bank the Siberian summer seemed to be waiting for us. From the northern tip of Baikal we had been favoured by exceptionally mild spring weather, dry and quite rainless. Now the sun beat down on us, all was green, there were flowers and the birds were back from their distant migrations. In six weeks we had walked out of the bitter tail-end of Central Siberian winter into the warm embrace of the Southern summer, where village orchards in the distance were gay and beautiful with blossoming cherry and apricot trees. Sleeping out became less of an ordeal even when it was considered prudent not to risk lighting a fire. During the day we were forced to discard our fur waistcoats but we put them on again after sunset to protect us against the night’s chill.
For a full two days after the Bargusin we ate nothing and the thought of food obsessed all minds. Then it was that we saw the horse through the trees betraying its presence with restless movement in the shafts of a crude sledge. It had scented our approach and obviously did not like what it smelt. Zaro and I went forward for a close look. The horse turned the whites of its eyes over its shoulder towards us. It had every reason to suspect our intentions. We were quite ready to eat horsemeat.
Zaro and I saw it at the same time — an old single-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, stock and barrel held together by windings of copper wire. It lay across the sledge alongside a little leather pouch which we guessed to be for the ammunition. The thought struck me hard. We must get that gun before the owner can reach it. I ran forward with Zaro and whipped it quickly under my arm, barrel pointing down. I waved the others forward. Kristina, with Mister Smith’s arm protectively about her shoulder, stood well back as the rest of the party came up to Zaro and I. Kolemenos went towards the horse to talk to it and to try to quieten its restiveness, but the animal shied from him.
The man must have been quite near, near enough to hear the nervous movements of his horse. We faced him in a tense bunch. He was about sixty, a solid, broad-shouldered woodcutter, his big axe held on his right shoulder. He was heavily bearded but both his beard and long hair were neatly trimmed. His approach impressed me. He saw us but his slow, deliberate walk did not falter. His eyes looked steadily ahead and took in the fact that I held his gun under my arm. He gave no sign of fear or alarm. He went to the horse’s head, ran his hand through the mane, turned aside and swung the blade of his axe into the bole of a tree, where he left it.
He looked at me and beyond me to where the girl stood with the American. ‘Who are you?’
Smith answered, moving forward as he did so. ‘We are prisoners escaping. We shall not harm you. We only want food.’
‘Times have changed,’ said the man. ‘At one time you would have found food waiting for you, and no questions asked.’
