Dan Smith - The Child Thief

‘No one’s running into any bullets,’ I said. ‘And I’m not going back without Dariya. I promised Lara I’d bring her back, and that’s what I’m going to do. We need to take things one step at a time. Right now all we have to think about is getting away from here. If we stay here until dark, we’ll freeze to death.’

‘And if we try to move, we’ll be shot,’ said Viktor.

‘If he’s still waiting,’ I said. ‘And we don’t know that he is.’

‘We don’t know that he’s not.’

I turned over onto my back, immediately feeling the cold air on my damp stomach.

I looked back at the woods we’d come from. The trees were close, maybe twenty metres away, at the top of the ridge, but twenty metres might as well have been twenty kilometres if that scope was still sweeping the area, looking for us. I didn’t agree with Petro – I believed the man who had shot at us was a better marksman than I was, and I wondered if the child thief could still hit us at this range if we were moving. It would make it much harder for him, but he had shot Dimitri as good as dead with one bullet, and he had put holes in both Viktor and Petro’s hats with almost no time to make any calculation.

But we had the weather on our side. The grey clouds had been rolling in over the morning and now the wind came and the first flakes of snow began to fall. As I looked back at the dark trunks of the trees standing sentry in the snow, I watched the air fill with light flakes, drifting and turning as they floated from the sky.

‘Someone’s watching over us,’ I said. ‘We’ll let it build, and then we’ll move. Snow and wind will make it almost impossible for him to hit us.’

‘Are you sure?’ Viktor asked.

I took hold of my rifle and looked at my son. ‘Yes, Viktor. I’m sure.’

We waited for half an hour, maybe more, it was hard to tell. Immobile, lying prone, the minutes felt like hours. I lay on my stomach rather than expose the wet part of my clothing to the cold air. I tried to insulate myself against the ground, told my sons to do the same, but the snow was falling on our backs now, too. If we stayed there much longer we’d be buried beneath it, three unidentifiable shapes on the ground, hidden until the winter began to thaw.

Just a few metres away, Dimitri would be dead now, his unseeing eyes staring at nothing as his corpse lay in his own frozen blood. I imagined Svetlana’s tears and wondered what we’d tell her when we returned to the village without her husband.

We hardly spoke, but I could almost hear what my sons were thinking. I knew them well enough for that. Petro’s fear had subsided in the cold, probably replaced by an aching anger at the man we were following. But I knew there would be a quiet voice in his head telling him none of this would have happened if he had only brought Dariya home with him and Lara yesterday.

Viktor, on the other hand, would be thinking how it would feel to return to Vyriv as a hero. Like his brother, his fear had dulled, as fear does when it has been present long enough for it to become usual, and now he’d be picturing a scenario in his mind in which he was the one to take the final shot, to execute our prey and rescue the child.

That was the difference I saw in my sons.

My own thoughts took a contrasting course as I considered the way Dimitri had jerked and dropped at the sudden impact of the bullet. I tried to picture it again, to calculate how far away the shot had come from. Maybe six hundred metres. The person we were following had stopped, turned and waited with his sight trained on the place he had chosen for his killing ground. He had watched us discover the bloodstains, waited for us to line up along the ridge, silhouetting ourselves like dumb animals.

I speculated what kind of a man the child thief was. Perhaps he was a veteran like me – like the man Dimitri had hanged. War is an intense experience, and for some who fight long enough there’s no other way for them to live. I knew something about that. Maybe this man was disturbed, lost without the thrill and excitement of sanctioned murder, and this was the only way he could re-create it. I believed there were those for whom fighting became their nature, and I believed it because I’d sometimes felt it overcoming me. I understood that war can sit in a man’s heart and taint the blood that fills his body. For me, there had been nightmares, sleepless nights calmed only by Natalia’s presence. There had been other feelings too, more complex and harder to understand even though they ran through my own mind, and sometimes I needed to leave everything behind. Dimitri had been right about that. There were days when the life of a farmer was not enough, and I would leave the village to hunt, and for a while I would be free of everything. Perhaps this man’s need for release was more intense, and his response to it was darker. Perhaps he needed a different kind of hunt, so he would steal a child and wait for his pursuers. He was a man intent on provoking his own battles. And despite my misgivings, there was something in this situation that made me feel alive. Dimitri had been right: a small part of me was enjoying this. It was as if the child thief had challenged me personally, and I was torn between accepting his challenge and protecting my family.

‘It should be safe now,’ I said, lifting my head to see how the snow filled the air, the flakes swirling around us. ‘He won’t see us in this.’

‘What if he’s watching?’ Viktor asked.

‘We have to take the risk. This is our best chance. Right now. We’ll stand and move as quickly as we can. Bring your rifles if you think you can carry them. If not – leave them.’

‘I don’t think I can move my legs,’ Petro said. ‘They’re so cold.’

‘Then start moving them. Shake them. Rub them. Whatever it takes. Viktor, do the same.’ I didn’t want them to turn and run if their legs weren’t going to do what they expected of them.

So for a few minutes we rubbed our legs and shook the life back into them.

We ran like drunks running from a fight. Our legs wanting to seize and cramp, our cold bodies moving as if in slow motion. We zigzagged as I had instructed, but our progress was so slow it hardly made any difference. If the air had been clear, we would have been dead before we reached the treeline. We would have lived only as long as it would have taken Dimitri’s murderer to draw back the bolt of his rifle and squeeze the trigger with the tip of his finger.

But nature stayed with us and visibility was poor. We could barely see the trees just a few metres ahead of us, so it was impossible for our hunter to see us at all. Not even three dark streaks drifting backwards and forwards in the storm.

The wind rushed around us, pulling at the weaknesses in our clothing, freezing the dampness and probing any unprotected area. I carried only my satchel and my rifle, both of them banging against my back as I ran. And even under the cover of the storm, I found myself dreading the singular and unmistakable sound of a gunshot. But none came.

Petro was the first into the trees, just a smudge in the blizzard ahead of me and Viktor. His shape disappeared among the stumps, followed by that of his brother, and then we were all in safety, coming out of the worst of the weather and into the relative quiet of the woods.

We moved further in before I called to them to stop.

‘We’ll make a fire,’ I said. ‘Dry out.’ I put my hands on my knees, almost bent double, trying to catch my breath. There was pain in my legs and an ache in my hips, and I waited for it to ease.

‘Won’t he see?’

‘He won’t come out in this.’ My words were laboured, coming between breaths. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We need to get dry. It’s the most important thing.’