Louis L'Amour: Last of the Breed

How long had he been driving? He did not know. Too long, probably. They would have helicopters looking for him again. Miles unrolled beneath him. He was not going fast; one could not over this road.

There was a river ahead. He could see moonlight on the ice. Stopping the car, he got out and went through it carefully. Emergency rations for two, two bottles of unopened vodka, and some further ammunition. He loaded his pockets, turned the car toward the river, and drove it under some overhanging willows. There he left it and turned eastward into the mountains.

He had to have rest. His legs, body, and head were badly bruised and beaten. Every step was sheer agony, but he pushed on. Snow was almost entirely absent, but the earth was frozen and rough. There were few trees. He was going to have trouble finding cover. He plodded on, stupid with pain and whatever had happened to his brain. A concussion, he told himself. He hoped that was all it was.

He should have taken a coat from one of the KGB men. It was cold, and all he had was a fur robe taken from the Volga. He drew it tight around him and hobbled on. Twice he fell, and each time it was a struggle to rise.

He was no longer thinking well. He was aware enough to realize that. He kept thinking of Talya, expecting to see her. But how could he see her here?

He no longer had a map. What river was that where he had left the Volga? It was a large river. It could have been the Omolon.

He fell, catching himself with his hands and lacerating the palms on the rough, frozen earth. He got up. He could go no farther. He looked at the cuffs. He had to get rid of them.

He stared around, blinking slowly. He did not know where he was. He knew what to do about the cuffs. He had a shim, a bit of wire.

East, he had to go east. He must go east. That was the way his ancestors had gone, the ancient ones who had followed the game to America in the years before there was a Bering Strait.

Bering Strait? What was that? Something to be needed, to be sought for. He stumbled on, then went down into a creek bed and found a place where a bank offered shelter from the wind.

He would build a fire. He needed a fire. He did not want to freeze. But a fire would attract attention. No, not if there was no smoke.

Dry wood. He needed dry wood. Fumbling, he got the wood together. He found some dry moss, gathered some dry brown grass and bundled it together. He built a cone of thin sticks over it and struck a match. Huddling close to the fire, he got out the thin strip of metal and went to work on the cuffs. They were old-fashioned cuffs, but his hands were bruised and clumsy. When he had them off, he put vodka on the cuts. He wiped it dry with a handkerchief and the fur of his robe. He capped the bottle and huddled under the bank and tried to sleep.

Three weeks later Joe Mack huddled in a cave above one of the minor tributaries of the Oklan River. The terrible beating he had taken had not sapped his courage, but something had. He was not even sure of what it was, except that he was very ill.

Day after day he had slogged along through storm and sun, working his way, mostly by night when there was any night, toward the east. He had camped in the cold, slept on boughs over icy ground. His feet were in terrible shape, and desperately he needed moccasins.

When the emergency rations taken from the Volga had given out, he had subsisted on marmots, even voles, and occasionally a ptarmigan.

Shortly after he abandoned the Volga, the country had been crisscrossed by helicopters and planes, and during most of that time he had huddled in a niche in a clay bank behind some dead poplars and a few straggling willows, a place planes flew over time and again, the searchers never imagining that even a marmot might conceal itself there. For three days he had had nothing to eat; then he caught some fish in a trap he had woven from plant fibers.

Spring was here, and the tundra was aglow with wildflowers. They were flowers found above timberline in his own country.

He made a new bow and arrows, as well as a sling, but it was the sling that served him best. He had found the cave by accident, while kneeling on an icy rock near a small stream. As he had started to rise he had seen the opening. It was not three feet wide and scarcely that in height. It was masked by some dwarfed stone pine, and when he examined it he found a spacious cave with a sandy floor.

He was not the first to use the cave. Someone else, long ago, had built fires here. He found the crack used for a chimney and gathered driftwood along the stream and broken branches from under the stone pine.

For the first time in days he was able to be warm, and in another gorge a half mile away he found some birch. He gathered bark to make a crude raincoat for himself and used some of the leaves to mix with vodka as a rubdown for his bruised legs.

Despite the fact that spring had come, the nights were piercingly cold, the skies very clear, and the stars unbelievably bright. He was always cold, huddling above his fire like some Stone Age creature. He made moccasins of the skins of marmots, but they wore through quickly, and he could find no larger animals. Occasionally he came upon the droppings of mountain goats, but saw none of them. Once he came on the sign of a very large bear, a huge beast, judging by the size of the tracks. He comforted himself with the thought that no bear of that size could get into this cave now, although once the opening had been considerably larger. Floods had piled up sand and rocks until much of the original opening had become covered.

He existed like an animal, and a poor creature at that, with little food and never enough of a fire to really become warm. Fuel was scarce, and soon he must move on.

Here and there on the smooth rocks he had seen scratches left by glaciers in the remote past, but there was no evidence of them in the low country. They seemed only to have affected the higher rock formations.

He must move on. He told himself this as he huddled, shivering over his small fire. He must move on, find another place, try to find some large animals that he might eat. How long since he had not starved? How long since he had anything but the most meager meal?

Yet it had been days now since he had seen a plane, days without seeing a helicopter. No doubt he had been given up for dead, and well he might be. He had been kicked and pounded, struck with clubs and doubled belts, but he knew that was nothing to what awaited him if he were recaptured. Such beatings were sheer brutality, not the refinements of torture that he could expect from Zamatev.

He dreaded the thought of moving. He dreaded the cold, the wind, the nights without a fire, the cold, icy rains.

It would be easier, far easier to just lie down here and die.

Why fight a losing battle? Even if he got to the coast, how could he ever get across the Bering Strait or the Chukchi Sea?

Yet when morning came he took up his bow and arrows and started once more. He had never gone back for the things he had cached. He had feared to lose the time, so he had driven the Volga until the gas was almost gone.

Had they found the car? No doubt, although he had left it hidden under the willows and standing on ice that by this time had melted.

He no longer thought of Alekhin or Zamatev. Nor did he even think of Natalya. All that was far away and in another world, a world of much meat and of at least a little warmth. For weeks now, he had been merely surviving, and for what? If found now he was in no shape to resist or even to try to escape.

He walked slowly up a shallow draw toward the crest of a low hill. He picked his way over bare rocks. Ice still lingered in shady places, and a small trickle of a stream found its way down a deep crack. From long habit, he approached the crest with infinite care and then peered over.