Zmeya came snaking back from the ridge, his clothes stained a dull green from
the lichen that clung stubbornly to the lee of the boulders. He scurried to
where Uchitel stood, holding his stallion quiet.
“One man alone, a trapper laying lines below the ice of a stream. Shall I kill
him?”
“He is the first American. I would see him myself.” Uchitel turned to the rest
of the band. “Mount up, brothers and sisters. Let us to war.”
The trapper, Jorgen Smith, was thirty-three years old and lived in a hamlet a
few miles inland. His wife had been killed two years earlier by a pack of mutie
wolves. They had had no children. Now he was content to venture out each
morning—if the wind wasn’t blowing to flay the skin off a man—and lay his traps
for the beaver that still lived in the streams that ran fast and clean toward
the sea. The water was saved from freezing only by the warm slopes of the live
volcanos where the streams began.
Kneeling in the snow, he sang to himself as he worked, fighting the loneliness
and isolation. His battered Remington M-700 sporting rifle was at his side in
its sheath of caribou skin. The gun, a family heirloom, showed the scars of a
hundred years of constant use. It fired 7 mm cartridges of which the community
now had less than one hundred rounds left. Soon they would either have to barter
for more, or rechamber the rifle. The Garand-type ejector—a spring-loaded
plunger tucked in the bolt face—had broken in Jorgen’s father’s time, and a
manual ejector had been rigged up by an itinerant blacksmith who visited each
hamlet in the far northwest every two or three years.
“Remember me to one who lives there, for once she was a true love of mine,” he
sang.
Tying thin strips of rawhide, Smith fumbled with a stubborn knot, considering
risking the removal of his gloves. He’d already lost his thumb and two fingers
from his left hand by getting them wet and frozen the day he’d tried to rescue
Jenny from the wolves.
He caught a glimmer of movement out of the corner of his eye where his goggles
were cracked. Quickly pushing them up on his forehead, Jorgen reached for his
rifle, dropping the trapping lines in the snow.
On the ridge behind him, silhouetted against the pallid sky, there was a man on
a horse: a huge black stallion, much bigger than the little ponies that most
folks ride. A gun of a design that Jorgen Smith could not identify, was slung
across the man’s shoulders.
The stranger was joined by a second rider, then a third and fourth, then more
than Jorgen could count.
Holding his Remington, he stood up, waiting as they approached. To see so many
strangers was something utterly beyond his experience. They could only be
traders, with their goods on the pack horses at the rear of the column. But with
their guns, they looked very threatening. Perhaps they were worried about
muties. Guns were what kept muties away from the scattered villages.
Uchitel halted his stallion a dozen steps from the man, staring at him
curiously, disappointed in a strange way that this American looked so like the
wretched peasants on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. He wore torn and
ragged furs, and boots that seemed to be no more than strips of cloth and
leather wrapped around his feet.
“Hi, there,” called Smith. “You tradin’? I’ve got some skins.”
“What does he say, Uchitel? Should I kill him?”
“No, Pechal. Wait. I have a book that teaches how to talk to these Americans. It
is here.” Fumbling in his saddlebag, he pulled out a dog-eared volume.
On the front cover it said: “Convenient conversations for the traveler for any
eventuality.” It was written by G. Duluoz and offered easy translations from the
Russian tongue to the American and vice versa in seventy different social
causes, with full index.” It was published by Strafford Books in 1925.
Trying to be casual, Jorgen hooked his rifle so that it lay cradled in his arms,
pointing in the general direction of the tall man with the kindly smile and the