Peter Higgins - Wolfhound Century

Once more she followed the smell of burnt wood and bone and wool to the remains of the isba. Much of the whalebone framework had fallen, but a few blackened lengths stuck upwards out of the mess. Heaps of rug and fur still smouldered, clotted and blackened and ruinous. The smell of it caught at the back of her throat. The iron stove was canted sideways, heat-seared and filthy with ash and soot. Some of its tiles had fallen away. It looked diminished and pathetic. Everything looked smaller now. There had been so much room inside the isba when she was in it, but the burnt scar it had left on the ground seemed too small to have contained so much space. Maroussia had seen plots like this in Mirgorod, sites where condemned houses had been cleared away and new ones not yet built. The gaps they left always seemed too small. All interior spaces were bigger than their exterior. Living inside them made it so.

The Sib was still tied to the little jetty on the creek at the edge of the clearing where Aino-Suvantamoinen had brought it the day after they arrived, while Lom had lain lost in his fever and she had sat with him. She considered untying the skiff, climbing in and drifting away. But Lom was out there somewhere in the woods. Perhaps not dead. Perhaps the mudjhik had not found him.

What would the hunter do? Come here of course. Check the isba. Check the Sib . Maybe he was watching her now from the trees. Maybe the mudjhik was there. No. Not that. They would not wait. They would attack immediately. They were not here yet. But they would come.

Think.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

The hunter would come here. He would walk where she had walked. Cross the ground that she had crossed. Stand on the jetty where she had stood, to look down into the boat. Sooner or later, he must do that. How much time did she have? Perhaps hours. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps none.

Near the isba was a neat stack of Aino-Suvantamoinen’s fishing gear, untouched by the fire. A hauled-out salmon trap. A mud-sled. Leather buckets for cockles. And, leaning neatly against a stack of firewood, a shaft of wood thicker than her arm and as long as she was tall, with a flat metal blade like a long, narrow spade, lashed firmly to one end. She tested the blade edge. It was sharp on both sides and at the end. She had seen implements like this before, in the whalers’ harbour. Flensing tools, used to slice long ribbons of flesh from porpoises and small whales as they hung from hooks. This was the same, but bigger, of a thickness and weight for the giant to heft. Unwieldy for her. But it was all she had.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

There was a little inlet by the jetty, where a stream flowed into the creek. The ground all around it was flat, grassy, empty but for a few saplings all the way back to the isba and the wood’s edge. But the bank of the inlet was undercut by the stream, creating an overhanging ledge a couple of feet above a small expanse of soft, grey, semi-liquid mud. Maroussia threw a stone out onto the mud and watched it slowly settle for half its depth into the slobs.

She threw the heavy flensing blade after the stone, marking its position by a large bluish tussock of rough grass. Then she took off her clothes. All of them. They would be useless for what she intended; they would only hamper her movements. Slow her down.

She shivered. The touch of the wintry morning raised tiny bumps on her skin. She would be colder soon, much colder, but that was nothing. She could ignore it. Rolling her clothes into a bundle she dropped them into the bottom of the boat and threw a tarpaulin over them. Then she went back to the overhanging bank and slipped carefully down onto the mud within reach of where the blade had sunk almost out of sight. She pressed it down with her foot until the mud closed over it.

Maroussia knelt on the mud. Her knees sank immediately into the chilly ooze. Its touch was soft and slightly gritty against her skin. She began to scoop out a narrow channel the length of her body, plastering the mud over herself. Water began to puddle in the bottom of the shallow trench. But she couldn’t cover herself entirely with the mud. She couldn’t reach her back. There was no time. She lay down in the hollow she had made and rolled, covering every inch of her pale skin with the cold grey mud. Rubbing it into her hair and over her face. She lay flat, trying to wriggle her body down into it as much as she could, until she was firmly bedded in. Lying still, she could feel herself sinking slowly deeper as the mud opened to take her down. Gradually she felt the cold softness rising higher. She had chosen a place where a notch in the bank gave her a view of the jetty ten feet away. It would have to do. She waited. The hunter would come.

Time passed. Maroussia felt her body stiffening in the cold. She felt the tiny movements of the soft mud oozing against her. Water puddling underneath. The mud on her back began to dry and itch. She closed her mind against it. Do not move. Slowly the terrain closed in about her, absorbing her presence until she was part of it. Scarcely there. A heron flapped along the creek on loose flaggy wings and alighted close by. She watched it stand motionless, a slender sentry, probing the water with its intent yellow gaze, oblivious of her only a few feet away. She could not let it stay. If she startled it later, when the time came, it would alert him .

‘Go!’ she hissed. ‘Move it! Shift!’

The heron didn’t react. She risked moving a hand. Flexing her fingers out of the mud. The heron’s yellow eye swivelled towards the movement instantly, alert for the chance of a vole or a frog. Their gazes met. For a moment they stared at each other. Then the heron lifted itself slowly away to find a more private post.

Some time later — how long, she had no idea — an otter came browsing along the creek and passed near her face. It had no idea she was there.

And then the hunter came.

She didn’t hear him until he was almost on her. He was good. He was taking care. She heard his boots in the grass when he was ten steps away. He was standing where she had known he would stand. Checking out the Sib as she had known he would. Holding the gun cradled and ready, as she had pictured him doing. With his back towards her.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

She took a firm grip on the heavy shaft of the flensing blade that lay alongside her in the mud. Now was the time.

She was certain that the sounds of the river masked the sound of her rising out of the mud — a thing of mud herself — and the tread of her bare muddy feet on the grass, but some peripheral sense must have alerted him He was turning towards her and raising the muzzle of the gun when she swung the blunt end of the flensing tool at his head. It caught him across the side of his face. The momentum of the blow knocked him sideways and his booted feet slid from under him on the wet planking of the jetty. He went down heavily, losing his grip on the gun, and ended up on his back, looking up at her, blankly surprised.

Afterwards she wondered whether it had been her startling appearance, naked and plastered with mud, her face distorted with effort and hate, that slowed his reaction, as much as the mis-hit blow and the awkward fall. But whatever the cause, he was too slow, and she had played this scene through in her imagination a thousand times while she waited, anticipating every variation, every way it might go. Without stopping to think, she reversed the tool in her grip, set the vicious leading edge of the blade against his neck between sternum and chin, and shoved it downwards with all her weight, as if she were digging a spade into heavy ground. It sliced into his neck with a gristly crunch. She felt it parting the flesh and lodging against his vertebrae. He tried to scream but could manage only a wheezing, frothing gargle. She pulled back an inch or two and thrust again. The shaft was at an angle now, and she leaned the whole of her weight onto it. She felt the blade find its way between two vertebrae. It was sharp. She pushed again. His head came clean off and rolled a few feet across the planking, leaving a mess of flesh and tubes and gleaming white glimpses of bone between the man’s shoulders. A widening pool of purple blood.