Authors: Slavomir Rawicz
In the morning Marchinkovas, who had gone off to relieve himself a little distance from the camp, came back and beckoned us to follow him. We trailed along at his heels wondering what it was all
about. He led us to a small clearing. He said nothing, just pointed. In the shade of a tree stood a stout oaken cross, some four feet high. We crowded round. I rubbed at the mould and green moss
and found my fingers following the outlines of an inscription. We scraped away and uncovered the Russian letters for V P, a customary abbreviation of the phrase
vechnaya pamyat
(in
ever-lasting memory), three initials of a name, and the date 1846. We made sure that the wood of the cross was indeed oak and fell to speculating how it could have got here, because all the trees
around us were coniferous.
‘You know,’ said Marchinkovas, ‘we are probably the first men to see this cross since the day it was planted here.’ Sergeant Paluchowicz put his hand up to his fur
helmet, slowly removed it and sank his bearded chin down on his chest. We looked at him and each other. All our caps came off. We bent our heads and stood silent. I said a little prayer to myself
for the one who had died and for our own deliverance.
By now the Irkutsk issue of rubber boots had been discarded as worn out. Our feet were still wrapped in the only article of clothing handed out in the camp, the long strips of thick linen. All
were now wearing moccasins with skin gaiters wound round with straps of hide. Movement south was at the steady rate of about thirty miles a day and we kept going for a full ten hours daily.
Although there had been no sight or sign of other men we rigidly maintained the extended line of advance with the practical idea that if one or two ran into trouble the main party could still press
forward. Relations between us were generally more relaxed, we talked more freely and during the nightly halts Smith was often plied with questions about America. From his answers we gathered he had
travelled extensively through the States and I remember our being impressed with his description of Mexico and how he had bought there a magnificent, silver-ornamented saddle.
He told us, too, that when he worked in the Soviet mines in the Urals he had met another American he had known in Moscow and so gathered he had not been the only one of the American colony to
have been under N.K.V.D. surveillance.
A lucky throw with a cudgel and a feverish scramble in a bank of powdery snow earned us a luxury meal of Siberian hare and added a fine white skin to our reserve store.
The party’s hunting successes were accidents. Armed with only one knife, an axe and an assortment of clubs, we were ill-equipped for finding and killing our own meat. It would have been
comparatively easy to set simple and efficient fall-down traps such as the camp guards had laid, but the necessity for constant movement left no time for watching and tending traps. There was the
consolation that while our bread, flour and barley lasted, the extra good fortune of a few fresh fish and a squatting hare that left its bolt for freedom too late elevated our diet far above the
bare existence level of the camp. On a number of occasions we saw the
suslik,
the little Siberian marmot, popping an inquisitive head from the opening to his burrow, but we never caught one.
Zaro would make faces at them and whistle.
In matters of woodcraft and hunter’s tricks, mine was the opinion always sought. The other six were all townsmen. My happy days as a youth in the Pripet Marshes were often now turned to
practical account. I was confident that with an occasional glimpse of the sun and the signs of the trees I could maintain a fairly accurate course due south. I had in my mind, too, a quite clear
picture in broad map form of southeast Siberia, dominated by the Lena and Lake Baikal. Let us but find the northern tip of the lake, I told the others, and its long eastern shore will lead us
through Trans-Baikal and almost out of Siberia.
This thought of Baikal as a natural guide out of this country of bondage was the goad which kept us going fast and determinedly for the next few weeks.
I
FIND IT
difficult to remember in sequence the many changes in the face of the country through which we passed. In my mind
there are thrown up images, clearly detailed, of stretches of Siberian landscape highlighted and fixed by the memory of some extraordinary incident, like the scenic background to a moment of drama
in a play.
From a tree-topped knoll we looked south and rolling away from us stretched twenty or thirty miles of openish country, sliced through by a broad river and melting away in the farthest distance
to forested hills. Through scrub, dwarf trees and tufted grass we plodded cautiously for a whole day to reach the cover of the forest. Our way lay through the trees for some days. On about the
third day we were enveloped in an early morning ground mist as we started out. We abandoned for once our practice of advance in extended line and pushed on through the mist in a bunch. Somebody
hissed urgently for silence. We stopped dead and listened.
Ahead of us and quite near came a shuddering, deep-throated cough, a violent thumping on the ground and a succession of crashing noises as though some heavy body were hurling itself towards us
through the undergrowth. We stood as still as a collection of statues. Then I reached down for the knife, Kolemenos swung his axe up to his shoulder and the others purposefully swung their cudgels.
The furious commotion stopped. We waited a full minute, straining our ears. Faintly came the sound of choked, laboured breathing. Another minute went by. The uproar exploded again and we felt the
vibrations as the earth was pounded. Kolemenos came up beside me. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘Must be an animal,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s not coming any
nearer,’ said the big man. ‘Let’s go and look.’ We spread out and went forward.
Through the mist a few yards away I saw an animal bulk thrashing convulsively from side to side, its head down and hidden from me. I made the remaining short distance at a crouched run. The
others came up fast behind me. There, kicking, snorting and struggling, its muzzle flecked with spume and its breath pumping out steamily to join the morning’s white mist, was a full-grown
male deer. Its eyes as it took the fearful taint of our human scent, were wide with desperate fear, showing the whites. The flailing front legs had dug a small pit in the hard earth. But it was
trapped and could not run. The fine spread of antlers was locked fast in the tangled roots of a fallen tree. From the chaos around, from the hard-beaten ground and the fact that the animal was
almost spent with its efforts to break free, it seemed that it must have ensnared itself hours earlier. Flailing, kicking, grunting and slobbering, terror of our presence injected into its tiring
muscles one last surge of strength. Then it quietened, nervously twitching the off front leg. We looked at Kolemenos and Kolemenos looked at the stricken beast, nodded and moved in.
Kolemenos walked softly round the deer. He stepped up on to the trunk of the fallen tree, balanced himself expertly and swung the shining axe blade down with a vicious swish. The edge struck
home where the back joined the neck and the deer slumped, quite dead. Kolemenos jerked his axe free, wiped the blade on his leggings. We all ran forward and unitedly tried to get the head of the
animal free. Kolemenos got his shoulders under the roots and heaved upwards, but even he could not release the antlers, and eventually he brought his axe out again and hacked the head from the
body. We hauled the carcase into a clear space and I cut it open and carefully skinned it.
The thing had happened very quickly and in the flurry of killing and cutting up we had not spoken much, until Makowski, speaking to us in a general way, but with his eyes on Mr. Smith, said,
‘What are we going to do with this lot?’ My arms bloodied almost to the elbows, I stopped the work of carving one of the hindquarters and stood up. ‘We had better have a
conference,’ said the American.
Mr. Smith opened the meeting with the statement that we could not carry all this meat and we could not afford to leave any behind. In all our minds was the idea that we had our scheduled twenty
or thirty miles to do that day. We tried to estimate the maximum amount of meat we could carry, but it still seemed we could not take it all. Marchinkovas propounded the obvious solution. ‘We
must not waste food,’ said the Lithuanian. ‘Therefore there is only one answer to our problem. We must stay here for twenty-four hours and eat as much meat as we can hold. What’s
left we ought to be able to carry.’ Zaro, licking his lips, said he was quite sure he could help to lighten the load. ‘All agreed, gentlemen?’ asked Mr. Smith. There was a chorus
of approval.
Paluchowicz busied himself gathering wood, laying and lighting a fire while the rest of us built a shelter and completed the butchering. Within an hour we had choice cuts of venison grilling on
a wooden spit over the flame and the melted ice and barley gruel was steaming fragrantly with the addition of titbits of liver and tender meat. We could not wait for the joints to cook through; I
kept hacking slices off and handing them round. It took a bit of chewing, but it was excellent meat. Paluchowicz borrowed my knife and cut his share into small pieces because of his lack of teeth
and we let him later have the first go at the mug of gruel. We ate and ate, the fat of the meat running down into our beards, and we belched loudly and laughed, congratulating ourselves on our
miraculous good fortune. We smoked and dozed in the shelter for an hour or two afterwards and then decided we must get to work on the skin.
The preparation of the skin took some time. We armed ourselves with pieces of wood and painstakingly scraped off the adhering lumps of fat. We found that the sandy soil churned up by the stag
was also a help in this part of the operation. Faced always with the necessity of travelling light, the big stretch of hide presented its own portage problem. The answer was on the same lines as
that for the disposal of the carcase. We made moccasins, fourteen pairs of them. We put one pair on over those we were wearing and packed the spare pair in our sacks. And there was still a piece of
skin each left. I carried mine rolled on the top of my sack. We broke off from our shoemaking to cook and eat another great meal, and again at night we fed off venison until our bellies were blown
out with food. Not quite so heartily, but still willingly, we ate meat again just before dawn and distributed the best of what was left among our packs.
Somewhere about halfway between the Lena and Baikal we had been making heavy going of hours of climbing towards the upper slopes of a range of hills and towards mid-afternoon entered the cover
of woods. The day had been arduous and the widely-spaced trees caused us to wander on tiredly for a couple of hours looking for suitable shelter. At this higher altitude the wind was blowing a gale
and it was imperative we got as much protection as possible from it. We found more than we had been hopefully seeking – a long-disused trapper’s hut of logs, the main roof timbers
hanging down into the interior. We scouted carefully, but there was no need for caution. The place was derelict. Moss and fungus covered the earth floor. We set to work, roughly repaired the roof,
got a fire going and slept, each man taking an hour’s guard duty.
Zaro was first out in the morning after taking the last guard shift. He burst back into the hut. ‘Somebody’s playing the violin out there,’ he shouted. We roared with laughter
and asked Zaro what new trick he was up to. He was trying to be serious but suffering from his reputation as a humorist. ‘I tell you somebody out there is trying to play the violin,’ he
insisted. We went on laughing. Mr. Smith suggested Zaro might do a Russian dance to the music. Zaro stood his ground. ‘Come outside and listen,’ he invited. The Sergeant, eyeing him for
a sign of a smile, got up to go out with him. We followed. About twenty yards back of the hut Zaro held up his hand for silence. We stood with our heads cocked.
Zaro
had
indeed heard something extraordinary. The description of someone trying to play a violin was setting it a little high musically. It was like the plucking of a string on a
double-bass. The note was loud and sustained, dying gradually away. It was being struck about once a minute and throbbed through the trees. We looked at one another in wonderment and started a
stealthy general move in the direction of the sound. Fortunately – and quite accidentally – we reached the source downwind of it, and froze. We were on the edge of a clearing, on the
other side of which was a tree blasted by lightning. The main trunk had fallen outwards from the clearing without having torn itself completely free of its lower part. At the break, about five or
six feet above the ground, a long splinter stuck straight up. And as we watched, the splinter was drawn back until it was bent like a bow. Then it was released and the ‘music’ vibrated
on our ears. And the performer? A great, black Siberian bear, reared up on his hind legs to his full and impressive height.
Peering round trees we saw him pull at the splinter again and again, standing each time with head on one side listening in comical puzzlement to the sound he was producing. The performance
lasted several minutes before he got tired of it and shambled off – away from us.
The incident was good for a laugh for a long time afterwards. Zaro’s act, entitled ‘The Russian Fiddler’, was well worth seeing. Incidentally, the bear had a considerable
advantage over us on his chosen instrument. We found afterwards that not one of us could haul the splinter back far enough to set up any vibration. It took Kolemenos and two others to reproduce the
note. This was the only bear we saw, although the older inmates of the camp had told us they were not uncommon and, especially in early spring, were dangerous to meet. Wolves, the other menace, we
never saw, although we heard their howling and often came across their tracks. Our immunity from attack we probably owed to the size of our party.