Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

The first trap was empty. Only a missing bait, spots of blood on the snow, and a piece of skin showed that someone must have emptied the trap before them. The priest pointed quietly to footprints in the snow.

“Two men,” said Geľo.

“Junjans,” said the priest, examining the footprints. “Look at the shambling walk.”

Geľo took his glove off and touched the side of the footprint.

“Fresh,” he said. “The edges are still powdery.”

He got up and put his gloves on. His eyes behind the slit in his mask burned with righteous anger.

“Let’s go to the next trap,” he ordered.

It didn’t take long to see that the unknown thieves were travelling ahead of them in the same direction. Geľo stubbornly urged the dogs on and the sledge flew over the shining snow. Every now and again, Geľo stopped to examine the tracks ahead of them.

Each time he came back, he was calmer. His anger was turning into icy vengefulness.

“There’s just the two,” he said to the priest. “And they have only ten dogs, at most. We’ll catch them. Today’s not their lucky day,” he added.

The priest nodded.

Geľo drove the dogs like a madman.

“Mush! Mush!” he shouted.

They found the second trap emptied, too. They just flew by the third one. Geľo didn’t even give it a glance. Obviously, all the pelts were on the thieves’ sledge. They had just saved him work. His eyes were glued to the two glistening tracks vanishing into the distance ahead.

Finally, after many hours, they spotted a far-off black dot. Geľo whipped his dogs and sped up. The sledge flew over the icy snow.

“They’re heading for a Junjan settlement, for Gargâ,” said the priest.

“I knew they were Junjans,” Geľo shouted, to drown out the swish of the runners. “A Slovak would never do that. We have to get them.”

The dogs flew like a gale. Despite all his rage, a good feeling came over Geľo: he had the fastest team on the north coast.

The thieves were speeding, too, but their dogs could not cope. The dogs in the Junjan team were stolen, badly fed and often abused.

The pursuers got so close that they could see the two men on the sledge. Suddenly, one of them picked up a rifle and took aim.

“Watch out!” the priest, who had the best view from his high seat, yelled just in time.

There was a shot and Jurko’s fur hat flew off.

“Ouch!” he shouted and ripped off his mask. Drops of blood were running down his face.

“It’s only a scratch!” he said. “My mask’s saved me!”

Geľo was livid with anger.

“Mush!” he shouted and began to whip his dogs furiously. The sledge sped up. Geľo reached for his rifle. He aimed carefully and fired. One Junjan spread his arms, dropped his rifle and fell off into the snow; soon he was far behind his sledge.

Geľo’s sledge caught up with the Junjan’s, and rode alongside it.

“Take out the lead dog!” he ordered Jurko.

Jurko aimed and fired. The first dog in the Junjan team howled, kicked up its legs and fell down. The other dogs dragged it for a while, but then slowed down and finally stopped.

Geľo stopped his dogs with a stern command. He got up and, rifle in hand, approached the Junjan. The Junjan was shaking with fear and raised his hands. It was Özgett from the Glebąâr officials’ clan. Geľo knew him from the collective farm. The man he’d shot must have been his brother Ötögögonn. They were an inseparable pair of thieves.

“ Mokasündryjje ! Mercy!” shouted the arrested thief.

Geľo silently knocked him down with his rifle butt and grabbed the package of frozen fox pelts.

“Look, priest!” he shouted at the priest. “Look, my pelts!”

However, the priest was far away, bending over Ötögögonn’s body.

Geľo stubbornly counted the pelts and took them to his sledge. Then he started shooting the Junjan’s dogs. His face was stony and inexorable. Silently, he fired, then loaded, fired and loaded. He aimed well; each dog fell with a sinister howl. When he’d done the dirty work, he sighed.

Meanwhile, Özgett had recovered consciousness. One eye, struck by the rifle butt, was ringed with blood. He sat on the snow, trembling and mumbling something in his native Junjan. He thought that he was next.

“Shut up!” Geľo screamed and hit him once more with the butt. The thief collapsed by his sledge. He said something in Junjan. It sounded like a complaint, or a plea for mercy.

“I’ve not finished with you yet, by any means,” Geľo shouted at him. “So shut up, or speak Slovak!”

The priest returned.

“He was alive,” he announced. “So I baptized him. I’ll baptize this one, too.”

On hearing that, Özgett stopped pretending not to understand Slovak. After all, in all those years of cheating Slovaks in the hunters’ collective Üngütür ököltott (Glorious Dawn), he must have learned something.

“Mercy! Mercy!” he began to shout, wringing his hands. “No baptize! Our spirits will have terrible revenge on me!”

“Shut up!” Geľo shouted at him and hit him with the butt a third time. The Junjan collapsed into the snow.

“Oh, sorry, Father!” he said to the priest. “Can you baptize him if he’s unconscious?”

“Makes no difference,” said the priest. “He doesn’t need to know about it. Little children don’t know they’re being baptized, either.”

The priest went on with his work.

When Özgett recovered consciousness, he was a Roman Catholic Christian. He was shaking all over, trying to slither away. Only the noise of Geľo reloading his rifle stopped him.

“You deserve death, really,” said Geľo. “But I’m a Christian and so are you now, basically. I’ll let you live.”

The priest nodded.

“That’s right and proper, Geľo!” he said.

“But I’ll take your sledge in compensation,” Geľo went on. “You stole it somewhere, anyway. And my son is a grown man now. He’ll be needing a sledge of his own. I can see you stole it recently. It’s still in good condition.”

“That’s right, too,” said the priest. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as is written in the Holy Scripture.”

“Does it really say that?” asked Geľo happily.

“And what’s going to happen to me?” Özgett asked.

“You can go where you like,” said Geľo. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get back to your people. If not, then you won’t. You’ll freeze and the bears will eat you. Or the snow monster will. Let’s go.”

Geľo attached the Junjan’s sledge to his own.

“Let’s get a move on!” he shouted.

The team started to run over the snowy plain. The Junjan ran behind them for a while and shouted that he’d rather be shot.

“Waste of a bullet!” Geľo yelled back. “You’ll croak here anyway.”

The priest was content.

“Two new souls saved in one day!” he congratulated himself. “That doesn’t happen so often. Oh, it’s good to snatch the people from hell!”

They spent the next night on a plain with a gorgeous view of the ice fields and the sea with far-off ice floes. And over all that, against a dark sky, the Sandy River constellation shimmered as if at arm’s reach.

The next day they set out early in the morning. Again, the wind kept blowing and in the afternoon a blizzard struck. The journey to the asphalt lake took a little longer. Soon our travellers noticed the horrid wooden and stone totems that lined the way to the lake.

When they reached it, Geľo took out a Russian-made hand pump and filled the barrel with a stinking black liquid that oozed from many holes in the ground and spread far and wide.

“If anyone set fire to this lake,” he said, “the whole globe would catch fire from inside.”