The farther they moved away from Toklat, the more agitated Nik became. Light began to ebb in the subarctic afternoon. They needed to make camp soon. Maybe tomorrow they’d try to make camp in the dark.
Grisha skied to the bottom of the ridge trail and shouted, “Nik! Hey, Nik!”
Working doggedly sixty meters higher, Nik hesitated and then stopped, looked back.
“You ruined my momentum. What do you want?”
“Are you in that big a hurry to get back to Cora?” Grisha manufactured a grin. “We can go a little slower. Besides, it’s gonna be dark soon, we need to make camp.”
“Already?” He glared at the sky as if to intimidate it. “Okay. We’ll camp on the other side of the ridge.”
“Agreed.” Grisha started awkwardly up the hill. After flailing about on the skis for a few steps he stopped and took them off. The wind-packed snow easily supported his booted feet.
They were excellent boots. The Russian Army captain from whose corpse he had removed them had possessed excellent taste. The Russian Army did not issue hand-made boots to anyone below the rank of colonel.
Life is strange.
Nik beat him to the top and glided off into the trees. Grisha plodded along until he found his companion’s skis jammed down into the snow. The tall Russian was scrounging wood for a fire.
Grisha checked the sky. Royal blue sliding into purple, no clouds. Tonight the temperature could drop again, but probably no wind. He pulled the shelter half out of his pack and rigged it to reflect the fire’s warmth onto his back.
After stowing his gear, he went looking for firewood. No matter how much they collected, it would not be enough to last the night. In this part of Alaska the temperature dropped to minus sixty Celsius in the winter and climbed to plus forty Celsius in the summer. The extreme temperatures dried wood to tinder. In Southeast Alaska wood never dried, it rotted.
The Dená Republic is an extreme place, he thought, and so are the people. Other than his military service, being treated as an equal had not been a part of his life in Russian Amerika. A few Russians paid lip service to the Czar’s equality ukase, but only the priests took it seriously.
In the Dená Republic he not only commanded equal status, he was prized, needed; all due to reasons for which the Czar’s government had thrown him away. He stuffed one more fragment of tree limb into the wad of branches clutched in his left arm.
But I still want my boat back. I want my life back—I know how to live it now.
He struggled back to the campsite, where a light plume of smoke already drifted above Nik’s head. He dropped the load next to the strange, educated, taciturn man who had become his friend. Grabbing his hatchet, he cut fir boughs to put under their sleeping bags for insulation.
Nik rigged a holder and hung a pot of water up to boil. Tea would warm them up. As soon as he pissed, Grisha would turn in for the night. After putting down two layers of boughs he rolled out his sleeping bag, sat down carefully, and sighed.
“Starting out late today was a good thing,” he said with a yawn.
“Tomorrow it won’t be as hard to get started as it would have been after a full day.” He stared at the back of Nik, who prodded at an already blazing fire.
“What are you scared of?” Grisha asked in a vague tone designed to suggest indifference.
Nik stopped poking the fire. He didn’t move. Grisha pulled out a piece of squaw candy and chewed the lightly smoked strand of salmon. He could live on this stuff.
Nik moved over to his pile of fir boughs and began to weave them into a mattress. He didn’t speak or look at Grisha.
“I wasn’t trying to be insulting,” Grisha said. “You’re getting me worried. You’ve gotten stranger and stranger since you took up with Cora.”
Nik looked across at him, his eyes dancing through the curtain of heat.
“Don’t you understand that this is a real war?” His voice rang hollow, as if bouncing off a rock wall. “People out there want to kill us, and we want to kill them.”
“I don’t particularly want to kill anybody,” Grisha said.
“But you’re expected to kill. Sabotage, prison breaks, raids on warehouses, and attacking Cossacks all lead inevitably to killing or being killed.” Nik’s face became more distorted through the rising heat.
Grisha stared back in consternation.
“Well, of course people are going to get killed. But if we do it right most of them will be Russians.”
“Exactly. And then they will retaliate and slaughter a village or two and everything will be over. Hundreds of Russians and Dená dead for what, a principle? An impossible idea?”
“I don’t think it’s impossible,” Grisha said staunchly.
“That’s because you’re a Creole.”
Grisha’s confusion instantly condensed into anger.
“And white Russians know more than everybody else!”
“No,” Nik said, nearly moaning. “We’re just more treacherous. They’re all going to die, you know.”
“Who, the Russians?”
“No, the Dená. Once their camp is identified with cadre training, they’re doomed.”
“The Russians don’t even come into Dená country, especially in the winter.”
“Grisha, the goddamned RustyCan runs right through the Dená country!”
“So what? That means the Russians own a three-hundred-meter-wide ribbon across a country that they couldn’t hold if anyone tried to take it away from them.”
“Not all their planes are helicopters. They have Yak fighters, too.”
“Nik, the Indians own the forest.”
“For the time being, yes.” Nik crawled into his sleeping bag and turned his back to the fire.
Grisha fed the fire, deep in thought. The subarctic night settled. The temperature dropped, and the aurora borealis flickered teasingly before scrolling across the sky from horizon to horizon. The lights fascinated him.
The northern lights were not unknown in Akku. But the phenomena in southeast skies, when the clouds cleared, were usually subdued compared to this, even at their best. Above him they bent and circled in scrolls that had to be a thousand kilometers high. Bands of light winked on, broadening from a pinpoint to a swath of unimaginable width in the space of three breaths. Great sections of sky would suddenly present a mist of pink, green, or even yellow.
He wondered about Nik. What ate at the man so voraciously? What aspect of their current life could cripple him like that?
“You must be livin’ a different life than me,” Grisha mumbled through the flames at the sleeping form. “I really don’t think it’s so bad.”
They’re all going to die, you know.
That tone wasn’t what Nik called rhetorical. He said it like he knew it for fact. Grisha frowned, tried to remember how the other guards had treated Nik.
They had left him alone. But to be fair, he was always reading and writing in little notebooks; maybe the other soldiers just thought Nik pretentious and avoided him, most of them couldn’t read anyway. Grisha scratched his head and yawned.
He pushed himself up with a grunt and walked to the edge of the camp before urinating. The temperature had dropped for sure; his urine froze with a crackle in the air before hitting the snow with soft thuds. After piling more wood on the fire, leaving some for the morning, he crawled into his bag and closed the heavy zipper.
Moments later someone shook his shoulder, hard. He pried open one eye and peered at Nik’s face.
“Let me sleep, okay?”