While hunting, Nils found where a bear had raked up duff from the forest floor, stuffing it in the opening beneath the sprung root disk of a fir that had blown partly over. It would be his winter den. They’d wait till after winter came, Nils said, and the bear had holed up. Then they’d visit the den and kill him for his fur and flesh.
Achikh said he’d never seen such good hunting ground. Game was so plentiful and easy to approach, it appeared that no one had hunted there before.
With the roof on they moved into the cabin, and worked by firelight when darkness came. Baver learned more skills. He sewed pelts into clothing, using sinew and a bone needle; helped scrape the fat off a third moosehide; made window coverings of sewn moose gut. Made mittens of the wolf skin, fur-side in. Nils made a door for their low doorway, splitting and shaving boards from a pine log, cutting tiny notches for fastening them together, then hanging it with leather straps. It was not a tight door, but lacking awl and hinges and proper doorposts, it would have to do. Nils also made a trough from a poplar log, to melt snow in and hold their water supply.
The trough did double duty. Nils and Bans split thin staves from birch, soaked them in the trough in boiling water, bent them around blocks and tied them, continuing the soaking and increasing the curvature till the bend
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was sufficient and permanent. Before long they would all have skis.
Achikh tended their snares and hunted, cut firewood, and made various things from leather.
In the evenings while they worked around the fire, Achikh continued their lessons in the Buriat dialect of Mongol. He also told stories in it that gave them insights into his people. This story telling would continue throughout the winter, and Baver set out the recorder to get them on audio while he worked. Occasionally when me press of his more immediate tasks allowed, he got video as well.
He came to understand almost anything Achikh said in Mongol, and learned to speak it easily himself.
Achikh also told them his people’s beliefs and taboos, that they might not offend when they reached them, perhaps to be punished.
After sixteen days, true winter came. One morning they awoke to find the hut cold, and twenty centimeters of dry fluffy snow on the ground. Baver thought it must be at least minus fifteen or twenty degrees Celsius outside. His watch made it October 24.
They harvested their bear, a large male. A fourth moose gave his life, his hide, and his flesh to their survival. Already, it seemed to Baver, they had meat enough to feed them through two winters. The raven stayed with them and was fed by them, living in the thick treetops. Hans named it Svartvinge. Nils was its chosen; the others it accepted. The nights grew colder, while the sun, its course ever lower, its stay ever briefer, seemed scarcely to warm the air at all by day. This was not the Arctic, Baver knew, but visualizing maps he’d seen, it was probably Siberia, albeit southern Siberia. And what he’d learned of Siberian winters, in his studies on New Home, was not reassuring.
It was a long winter, and colder than anything Baver had ever imagined. Nils said it was considerably colder
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than his original homeland. Achikh said it was colder than his, too, but here the forest protected from the sweeping winds. The snowfall was much greater here, he said, and blamed it on the adjacent mountains. The hut was never as warm as a proper cabin, by quite a bit, but wearing furs it was tolerable.
The meadow grass was buried and flattened by the snow, and the horses tramped trails through the deep snow to browse the goatsbeard lichens from the tree trunks.
Svartvinge got so he would come into the hut in the evening, to sit on a boot-drying peg and commune silently with Nils, or so it seemed. But half an hour of the smoky air was invariably enough for it. Then it would fly to one of the smokeholes, perch there for a moment, and launch itself out.