His mother had killed three wolves that morning, shooting a big gray female from a distance of well over two hundred meters as it bounded away. Malvina Zolner was without a doubt the best shot and the finest hunter in the village now that his father was away. She should have been hailed as a hero, but if anyone else thought so, they didn’t mention it to Feliks. They were jealous. That was it. She was beautiful and skilled. Feliks sensed that this combination was too much for some men to accept. Besides, they said, there were too many wolves for three to make a difference — and as the Pervak brothers pointed out, Malvina was only a woman. Instead of thanking her and seeing to it that she received the bounty for killing the wolves, they had insulted her in their drunken rage. Feliks had cried openly, earning contemptuous looks that gripped at his throat like a fist and made it hard for him to breath.
Even now, hours after the drunken taunts, his small face glowed red under the rough wool scarves.
“You must understand, my lapushka,” his mother said, her words short and panting in the bone-numbing cold. “These men are beside themselves with fear.” At seventy degrees below zero, the moisture in her breath froze the instant it left her beautiful mouth, forming ice crystals that tinkled to the ground. The old people called it “the whisper of angels.”
“I know we must kill the wolves, Mama,” Feliks said, jutting his chin to make room for his voice under the heavy scarf. “I do not hate wolves, but I hate those men.”
“Fear often makes men the more dangerous of the two,” Malvina said, patting him on the head. White crystals of frost lined her delicate eyelashes, reminding Feliks of a snow princess he’d seen in a book.
Gathering him in her arms for another moist tea-and-jam kiss, she wrapped a second wool scarf around her son’s neck and picked up her own gun with her gloved hand, leaving him to sit completely still on a thick pile of hay in the loft of their three-sided barn. The crude wooden loft was low, no more than six feet off the ground. It would be accessible even to the weakest of wolves if one wanted to jump up and eat him. But Feliks was not afraid. He had his gun, and he knew his mother would come back for him once it was too dark to shoot.
She always came back.
Feliks squeezed his rifle as he watched his mother trudge past the rough ball of hair that was their milking cow, and toward the shooting hide she’d built in a tall spruce tree two hundred paces away. Her reindeer skin boots left tiny tracks in the snow. Feliks stifled a laugh at the oblong shadow cast by her ratty fox fur hat. It made her look like she had a pumpkin on her shoulders. Her wool coat hung down past her knees, but Feliks could see she was shivering. The coat was much too thin to keep her warm in such bitter cold, and it would only get worse as darkness fell. She had two good scarves, but had given her second to him.
A wolf howled to the west, beyond the house, and was immediately answered by another somewhere in the endless expanse of trees behind Feliks. It was a foreign noise, chilling yet inviting and made Feliks want to join in with the howling. The boy kept his eyes fixed on his mother but imagined the magnificent animals loping silently through the birch forest, making no sound but for their mournful cries — and the crunch of teeth on bone.
Malvina stopped as she approached the homemade ladder at the base of her spruce tree and turned slowly to study the woods to her right. Felix held his breath. She must have seen something in the trees.
Feliks kept completely still, flicking his eyes sideways, following his mother’s gaze without moving his body. Why did she did not raise her gun if it was a wolf? Slowly, fluidly, so as not to draw attention to the loft, Felix brought his knees up. He crossed his ankles so he could rest his elbows on the muscles of his thigh and peer down the iron sights if his rifle. He scanned the woods beyond his mother, controlling his breath the way she’d taught him, keeping the front sight perfectly aligned with the notch in the laddered V at the rear.
Zolner was large for his age, but his mother made certain not to teach him bad habits by giving him a firearm fitted for a grown man. She’d sawed off the butt of her father’s Mosin-Nagant carbine and worked down the stock to fit Feliks’s shoulder and length of pull, carefully rasping down the wooden grip behind the action so his small hand could wrap around it when he placed his finger on the trigger. Malvina’s grandfather had been a student of the famed Soviet hero, Vasily Zayt-sev during the Battle for Stalingrad. He had survived, and taught Malvina how to shoot. She’d handed down this knowledge to Feliks, demonstrating proper breathing and trigger control. The more important aspects of shooting — the cold and calculating instincts that could not be taught — she had passed down to him with her blood.
A wolf howled again, and Felix shifted slightly, beginning to worry since his mother still stood at the bottom of her tree. She turned toward the woods and took a step away from the ladder. A lone man emerged from the forest, his hands raised as if to show he had no weapon. It was a curious thing that a full-grown man would stroll through the wolf-infested woods with no rifle at any time of the day. To do so in late evening was madness.
Feliks recognized the man by his lopsided sable hat and patched greatcoat as Stas, the larger of the Pervak brothers. Stas took a few steps toward Malvina Zolner gesturing wildly, pointing toward the trees. Malvina peered in the forest, rifle in hand. Feliks could not hear it, but he felt certain the man was speaking hateful words, as he’d done earlier in the day. Without thinking, the boy rested the post of his front sight on the man’s ear. His mother should not have to hear such words. Feliks had the power to stop them. The trigger broke cleanly. The rifle bucked in his small hands, but he kept his eye on the target, watching the lopsided fur hat fly off along with a piece of skull. Feliks grinned under his wool scarf, feeling a peculiar warmth he’d never felt before. Stas Pervak would speak no more words, hateful or otherwise.
Half his head gone, the remainder of Pervak’s body stood there for a moment, unaware that it was dead before collapsing into the snow in a heap of filthy rags. Malvina’s head snapped around at the sound of the shot. He waved. Certainly she would be proud of him. He had taken Stas in the head from well over three hundred paces. Malvina began to run toward him, flailing her arms, staggering to keep her footing on the frozen ground.
A moment later Vladik Pervak charged out of the trees another hundred meters beyond the house. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. The lead rope of a wooly pony draped over one arm. He stopped in his tracks when he saw his brother’s body and the spray of frozen carnage around it. The pony dropped its head, nibbling at the snow. Vladik began to scream. At that distance Feliks could not make out the words, but it did not matter. If a Pervak spoke, it was bound to be vile.
Feliks swung the cut-down Mosin-Nagant toward Vladik as he ran toward the body of his dead brother. He took a deep, calming breath estimating the distance at two hundred meters, and led the man like he would a running reindeer. He held a hair higher than he had on Stas, knowing the bullet would drop at least six inches in that distance.
Feliks exhaled slowly, pressing the Mosin-Nagant’s crisp trigger in the moment of respiratory pause at the bottom of his breath, where his body was completely still.