It was not long after midnight when Zoya was woken by Laryssa’s hand shaking her shoulder. And as she opened her eyes she saw that Laryssa was sitting up. Her face was in darkness but something about her conveyed immediately tension and fear.
Zoya was about to speak when Laryssa put her hand over her mouth and with the other hand pulled her up into a sitting position. Closer to her face now Zoya could see that her eyes were wide with fear.
“Listen…” Laryssa whispered.
Zoya sat rigid, terror communicated by her friend’s eyes and by the compulsive grip on her arm. Then she heard it. Incalculably distant or near, she had no way of telling, but the wolf’s howl rose and fell on the wind.
It was taken up by others. Again it was impossible to tell how far away, or even for certain, from which direction.
“We must light a fire,” Zoya said. “Quickly.”
She got up and started snapping the young pine branches from the trees, shaking snow off and throwing them down in a heap. Laryssa had withdrawn one of the precious sheets of newspaper from inside her shirt, and lighting it, thrust it under the pile of pine fronds.
The resinous greenery caught almost immediately and flames leapt upward casting frightening shadows into the forest.
It was an unbearably long night. Throughout it they kept the fire burning, but each trip for new branches now meant straying a few steps further into the forest and away from the comforting light of the fire.
All night the wolves howled, mocking it seemed sometimes, threatening always. But as the first light began to reveal the shape of the trees, the howling died away leaving the two trembling, exhausted girls staring dark-eyed at each other over the embers of the fire.
They finished the little vodka they had left and each broke off a branch to use as a staff. As they scrambled down now onto the track, there was no remnant left of their confidence of yesterday. Before them stretched a wearying day’s march and after that the terrors of another night.
The weather had changed, too. It was not as cold, but the light was strangely uncertain as if a full dawn was reluctant to break. The wind which had arisen in the night to carry the keening of the wolves now blew harder, but sporadically, gusting for a few moments and then dying away to little or nothing. Despite their time in a northern camp, neither girl recognized the telltale signs of a rising blizzard, the terrifying Siberian purga.
They were making much slower progress now as the red-and-white markers showed. Once, in midmorning, they both stopped in horror as the howling of the wolves was carried on a gust of wind. As they trudged on they watched the forested banks on either side of the track, both convinced, though neither prepared to say it, that the pack was following, waiting only for the night.
By midday there was some change in the terrain. No longer was it possible to see the line of a perfectly flat track or (when the banks on either side were low) across an infinity of snowfields and woods. The ground now rose and fell gently. On either side the forest seemed to close in on the railway, sometimes rising steeply, hemming in the narrow track, sometimes falling away below them.
It was early afternoon when they heard the wolves again and this time there was no doubt about the direction of the dreadful keening. The light was fading and the slight rise before them made it in any case impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. But the howling came from there, from between the banks of snow and rising forest, from somewhere on the track itself, directly ahead.
With that single-minded instinct for flight they both looked back along the track from where they had come. Two lines of footprints leading back into the gloom showed the melancholic hopelessness of retreat. Yet the answering howls as wolf called to wolf were a presage of the terrors ahead.
Then they heard the woman’s scream. Carried on or away by the wind, it was faint, uncertain and charged with fear.
They stood together trembling in the middle of the track.
“We must go,” Zoya said.
Laryssa nodded, unable to speak.
“We’ve got sticks. Wolves can be frightened, too.”
Again the woman’s scream, nearer it seemed now and harsh with blind panic. The two girls began to stumble forward toward the rise in the track ahead.
The top of the slope was no more than a hundred yards away, but by the time they reached it the woman’s screams were shrill in their ears. Their hearts were beating wildly and a fearful excitement knotted their legs.
At the top of the rise they stopped. Below them, not 20 yards away, Anna Maccari flailed her arms against the surrounding wolves. One, two, three at a time they leapt forward, snarling and snapping, tearing at her long coat, dragging her to her knees, before she stumbled up again screaming wildly, running, stopping, staggering forward as a lean gray shape hurled itself at her back.
The two women had no thoughts and perhaps no fear. Running forward they shouted and screamed, waving the sticks in the air.
The wolves pulled back, hesitant. The nearest to the approaching girls snarled and retreated and turned again. The whole pack of perhaps fifteen wolves stood for a moment, stock still, the breath pluming from their nostrils. Then they turned, as if directed, and raced silently across the snowbank for the forest beyond.
Anna fell to her knees, her head hanging. As they ran forward they could see the shuddering movements of her body. But the sobbing gave off no sound.
She was bleeding from a dozen places. Below her knees her work trousers hung in strips of bloody cloth, her shin bones visible through the torn flesh. Worst was the gash in her neck where the blood pumped into her matted hair and soaked the shoulder of her quilted coat.
Zoya had seen enough accidents at Panaka to know that there was little to be done out there in the wilds. She bound the wounds as well as she could, tearing strips from her shirt, but at Anna’s neck the blood continued to pump through.
They laid her down beside the track on a bed of fir branches and lit a fire beside her. It was dark now but neither Zoya nor Laryssa gave any thoughts to the wolves. It was a fear they had conquered, a fear replaced by another, that Anna Maccari would not survive the night.
At first she did little more than mumble and sometimes pray. Then as she grew weaker she became strangely more coherent. She knew she was dying.
“In the cattle car,” she murmured, “I lost my reason. I screamed and shouted and bit at each of the men that came down on me. When I was no more use to them they threw me out into the snow…” For a few minutes she was silent, breathing heavily and occasionally smiling vacantly up at them. Then she began to speak. “I walked… I walked all night away from the train. And in the early morning the wolves came. I could see them sometimes, waiting up on the hillside. I climbed up away from them on the other side of the banking. That’s when I saw lights, I think I saw lights, a cottage, a house…” Her head turned toward the east. “Not far…”
Energized by hope they tore branches from the fir trees and laced and wove them into a rough stretcher. Placing Anna upon it they started off at midnight dragging the stretcher through the trackless forest in the direction of lights that may have only existed in Anna’s imagination.
At about two o’clock the purga struck. It came at first with a gentle snowfall, heavy flakes drifting down as they emerged from a wooded hill. Anna was unconscious now, the snow behind them spotted by the continuous dripping of her blood. But the light was there. One solitary firefly glowing distantly through the falling snow.