The first snow falls that evening and these aren’t the light grains that sprinkled down on them from the sky on the first day of their life on the riverbank, but the real thing – large, shaggy snowflakes. Frost hits during the night, ice glistens like fragile glass at the bottom of a bucket inadvertently left outside, and a thin hoarfrost nips at brush-like spruce boughs.
It’s impossible to observe the exiles leaving in the morning for work without laughing – they put on all the clothes they possess. The peasants wrap themselves in head scarves, pull on fur coats and sheepskin jerkins, and the city people wear once-dandified plaid coats, gloves and mufflers of delicate hues, extremely wrinkled kepis, and hats with broken brims. The heavyset Leila wears a pot-shaped hat embroidered with colored glass beads and burrows her nose in a matted boa that looks as if it’s been plucked. Konstantin Arnoldovich models a pie-shaped hat that’s slightly deformed from having been transported so long and is made of very smooth, extraordinarily fine fur the color of strong coffee with cream. Izabella discovers she’s lost her emerald-colored hat with the feather and this vexes her thoroughly because she has to cover her head using a shawl that already has holes worn in it in several places. They all carry identical one-handed saws in their hands.
One of the peasants has given Ignatov an old leather jacket that’s cracked at the elbows – it was left behind by his son, who escaped from the ill-fated eighth train car. The jacket’s a little narrow in the shoulders and Ignatov’s arms stick out of the sleeves quite a bit, but it warms him. Ignatov – who’s been openly freezing in recent days and had begun placing dried grass and leaves under his shirt in secret – did not refuse the gift.
That same day, while walking as usual through the taiga in search of prey, he has the idea of killing a bear. They could salt the meat and use the hide for clothing. The peasants have promised to handle it by fleshing, pickling, and tanning the hide nicely. An extra fur coat wouldn’t hurt in the winter. And if he comes across a large bear, they can even cut a couple of hats from the hide.
He has to act quickly because the animals could settle in for hibernation. For three days, Ignatov digs a pit in the taiga, until his palms are worn to bloody blisters. The peasant men offer help that he refuses (“Firewood, the firewood, who’s going to saw it?”). He covers the steep walls with smooth poles and pounds a sharpened stake into the middle. He places brushwood and boughs on top, and blankets it with grass. He begins waiting. No bear comes.
Ignatov tosses in bait a couple of times, either a squirrel he’s shot or half a grouse. There’s no bait to be found in the pit in the morning because lynxes or martens have dragged it off, scattering the brushwood Ignatov had placed so carefully. No bear ever visits. Ignatov stops by the pit to check from time to time but then he abandons it. He’s not sorry about his work, though he’s very sorry about the three days spent in vain.
At the end of October, snow falls in the taiga and stays for good. Winter has set in.
It’s decided to work in two shifts. One group leaves in the thick, dark blueness of early morning to saw wood, pulling on all the warm clothes they have in the underground house. They return a half-day later, hastily dry their wet, sweaty clothes, and give them to the second shift. They work until late, until the stars come out.
Ignatov orders those who sit at camp to weave baskets. The evening shift has things easier because people wake up to Ignatov’s never-changing alarm – his revolver on the bucket – and sit down to weave without leaving their bunks. The morning shift, though, works off five hours in the fresh air, comes back, collapses on the bunks from exhaustion, and falls asleep. Ignatov is usually foraging in the taiga during that time. He orders Gorelov to wake up the lie-abeds and deny supper to those who disobey. Supper is the only feeding in the camp, so large, medium, and small baskets soon fill the already crowded underground house. One day, when the exiles cautiously inquire of Ignatov if they might have enough baskets, he replies that they do, then instructs them to weave snowshoes and sleds for wood instead. In answer to their eloquent silence, he shouts, “Winter’s around the corner – how are you planning to go for firewood, you bastards?”
He’s ill-tempered, people whisper. They’ve resigned themselves to it.
Some get sick and burn with fever for a long time, coughing incessantly during the nights, keeping the others awake. Leibe gives them curative drinks with repulsively reeking herbs. Ignatov chases them back out to work, though, as soon as the patients’ eyes begin twinkling from feeling better, their foreheads are no longer covered in perspiration, and they can plod independently to the latrine installed in the underground house’s “entrance hall.”
“It’s ungodly,” Izabella says one morning after Ignatov has demanded Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s still bluish-white from the fever he’s recently endured, go with everyone else to cut wood in a forest seized by ringing hoarfrost. “You’ll kill us.”
“Fewer mouths to feed will make it easier for the rest,” says Ignatov, baring his teeth.
At times Ignatov reads something resembling meek hatred in the eyes of these elderly people exhausted and emaciated by hunger and suffering. If he hadn’t had a revolver, it’s possible they might have even attempted to kill him.
At the beginning of winter, Ignatov’s life grows complicated in a way he didn’t anticipate at all. He doesn’t go very far from camp that day. He inspects work in the clearing, where the exiles are laboring away felling trees and preparing logs that they drag to the camp on a sled, piling big branches into bundles, small kindling into large baskets, and birch bark, pine bark, pine cones, and pine needles into their own baskets – and then he heads off to his own work: hunting. The lumbermen’s voices, the screech of the one-handed saws, and the crack of felling timber are still audible and very close by, but then he hears a sudden rustling and quivering of branches in the juniper bushes. It sounds like a large animal.
Ignatov freezes and slowly, very slowly, reaches for his revolver. His fingers creep along the holster as noiselessly as shadows. The cold weight of the weapon is in Ignatov’s hand.
The bush is still quivering steadily, as if someone’s plucking at it from the other side. A branch crunches under a heavy paw. A bear? That means it’s come to visit. He prepared a pit and bait but it came on its own, uninvited, to feast on little juniper cones.
Shoot now, blindly? He might wound but not kill. The beast could either turn nasty and tear him the hell up, or get frightened and run away so Ignatov can’t catch up. He’ll have to wait until the animal shows its snout. Then he can shoot at a weak spot – its open jaws or an eye – to be absolutely sure.
The quivering in the bush moves closer. The bow-legged animal is walking right into his arms! Ignatov raises his revolver, places his second hand on top and prepares to cock it. He can’t now, though, because the bear would hear. As soon as the bear sticks its nose out, Ignatov will pull the trigger and fire into its snout, the snout!
His throat is dry and he struggles to swallow. When he does, the sound seems deafening. The bush shudders abruptly again and out walks Zuleikha. Ignatov mumbles angrily, then quickly lowers the revolver. For an instant, it’s as if he can’t get enough air.
“And what if I’d shot you down!”
A couple of frightened crows fly from a branch and dart behind the tops of spruce trees. Zuleikha is backing away, her hands covering her dress where it protrudes on her belly, and staring, frightened.
“And so out of consideration for you, we kept you in the kitchen to tend the fire. But here you are, strolling in the woods?”