Siberius (18 page)

As he turned back to the convoy, Radchek saw, or thought he saw, a pair of what looked like glowing eyes among the trees. He shook his head, cleared his vision. When he looked again, he saw nothing but dark woods. The lack of sleep was starting to take its toll, and although he craved rest, the last thing he wanted to do was spend time in Josef Stalin’s version of a concentration camp.

20

             
“You’re right, they’re not tigers,” Talia said. They plowed through the forest in a fast walk, and Nick’s pace was increasing the gap between them.

             
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Your books tell you that?”

“
Will you please slow down?” Talia grabbed his arm and stopped him in mid step. He spun around and faced her. Both of them were breathing heavy.

“
I’ve seen some shit in my day, sister,” said Nick, then he began to pace in a circle. “Jesus Christ. That thing was on the roof of the cabin. It almost got in.” He stopped and thought about the reality of his statement. “God, it almost got
in
.”

“
Nick, for God’s sake,” Talia said, exasperated.

“
No, either you start talking, or I start walking.” They stared at each other for a long time before Nick said, “Hell with it.”

Before he could move, Talia grabbed his arm again. “You have to make a promise to me then,” she said. “The most important promise that I have ever asked anyone. Take my hands.” She grabbed his hands and held them tight. “Look into my eyes, and promise me that no matter what happens, you will never reveal to anyone the existence of these animals. Not to your friends, not to your family. Not to anyone.”

He laughed at first, but when tears began welling in Talia’s eyes, he decided she was serious. The whole thing was dramatic and mysterious and absurd, and now, more than ever, he wanted out. Of everything.
An animal? Is that what she called the thing on the lake? How about monster? Wasn’t that a more appropriate term?

Yet Nick heard himself say, “Yeah, fine. I promise.”

              “Okay,” she said, gathering strength. Talia sat down on a fallen tree and Nick joined her, giving her his full attention. Now miles away from the Chukchi village, they had walked without talking for over an hour, crossing a span of forest that appeared to end at a clearing ahead.

“
I arrived in Siberia in the summer of ‘39, at that village.”

             
“What does that have to do with-”

“
Please,” she said, raising her hand.

Nick clammed up. It wasn’t easy. “Sorry,” he said. Talia was having a hard time with the whole thing.

She removed a glove and brushed her parka’s hood back from her head. Without it, she was even more beautiful, and Nick found it impossible to tear his eyes away from her.

“
I came because of a man named Leonid Andrychenko. He was an anthropology professor at Moscow University and my academic advisor during my undergraduate years. He was also a friend of my parents and the sweetest man I’d ever met.”

Nick ordinarily had lots of patience, but at the moment, it was as thin as cotton thread. No, a hair. A
baby’s
hair. He wanted an explanation, not a life’s story. If she wanted to tell him about her college years, that was fine with him. But not here, not
now
. In his mind, he prodded her along.
Get on with it.

“
He took care of me after The Great Terror took my parents away.”

             
”Uh-huh. The Great Terror.” Nick said it as if it were an old Boris Karloff movie.

             
Talia looked at him, astonished. “Yes. You’ve never heard of it?”

He shook his head and in that instant somehow felt ashamed.

She told him how Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, without any evidence, had ordered the extermination of three million of his own people, simply because he thought them traitorous. He was as bad as Adolph Hitler.

             
”Dr. Andrychenko was a great man, very generous, very caring,” she continued. “My parents were taken away in ‘38. I was 20 then, finishing my undergraduate studies. Dr. Andrychenko.” She changed her tone. “Leonid. He feared for my safety. He paid my way out of Moscow just as Stalin and Hitler invaded Poland. A few months later I arrived at the Chukchi village. It was there that I discovered just what he was studying. Leonid was Russia’s preeminent anthropologist, and he was passionate about ancient peoples of Siberia, especially the Altaic Scythians.”

The word
Scythian
had a familiar ring to Nick. “Scythians,” he said. He doubted anyone outside a Russian museum ever heard of them. Then, he remembered:

The book
.

That’s why it sounded familiar. He remembered the book in Talia’s collection; it concerned Scythians. He also remembered the author’s name.
Andrychenko
.

“
The Scythians were Siberia’s dominant tribe 3,000 years ago,” Talia said. “They were nomadic warriors. Leonid would spend part of the year in the Altai and Sayan mountains to the south, excavating their tombs. Around 1928 or so, long before I met him, he was excavating a site in the Altai. There, he found a mountain tomb that defied the paleontological knowledge of that time. Like the Pazyryk mummies, the bodies inside this tomb were frozen solid and in an excellent state of preservation. Leonid identified the body as a chieftain and a man of some importance because he had been buried in full battle regalia with 20 horses, his wife and two servants.”

“
Okay,” said Nick. He still wondered what all this had to do with the monster lion he had seen.

“
That in itself wasn’t too unusual. What
was
unusual, though, was the tooth in the mummified chieftain’s hand. It was unlike any tooth Leonid had ever seen before.”

Nick nodded, getting it. “One of those lions?”

“Yes. But more important than the tooth itself was what was stuck to it. Around the root, Leonid had found quite a bit of fleshy material relevant to the tooth’s growth and structure. To him, that meant one thing: the warrior had come into contact with the actual animal, either alive or dead.”

“
The tomb was over two thousand years old, which meant the tooth had to be the same age. Leonid realized that an animal thought extinct 10,000 years ago was in fact still alive at the same time Alexander the Great was conquering Persia.” She took a deep breath and continued. “Like I said, that was around ‘29. He spent the next 10 years retracing the routes of Scythian nomads, eventually finding his way up here. That’s where he met and befriended the Chukchi.”

“
Wait,” said Nick. For some reason, he felt jealous, and he didn’t like it. He steered the conversation back to Talia’s involvement. “You said he taught at your college.”

“
He lived in Siberia during the summer. His commitment to the university kept him in Moscow for most of the year, but that all changed when we went into hiding. We spent our first winter together in Siberia with the Chukchi. I learned their language and discovered a whole new way of looking at things.”

Before Nick could ask about their relationship, Talia said “We became more than friends that winter. He was 26 years older than I was, but it didn’t matter. I loved him, more like a father than a husband, I think. We married in a Chukchi ceremony the following spring.”

Nick resented his own jealousy, but he couldn’t help it. And it was clear now that the items back in her cabin, the shaving kit, the boots, everything, were Leonid Andrychenko’s.

             
“I helped Leonid the next summer. It was the greatest summer of my life. We explored some of the gorges and hills within the taiga, looking for caves. We found a few, but archeological evidence of people was sparse or non-existent. And of course, we found no traces of an extinct cat. That changed in the winter of ‘39.”

She paused. It was the first time in a long time that she had tracked through the events. It was therapeutic, yet the more she remembered, the less she wanted to talk about it, for the story always ended the same. “Leonid had accompanied one of the Chukchi elders to a sacred river west of the winter village,” she said. “As it turns out, 10 miles north of where you crashed. Chukchi legend spoke of ancient structures, possibly whole villages, along that river, and Leonid hoped to find them.”

She took a deep breath, then went on. “What they found instead was a hunting party of big cats long thought extinct. Three juvenile cats ambushed them. Leonid said they were camouflaged in the snow and they never saw them. He was knocked to the ground while they attacked the Chukchi elder.”

             
Nick shuddered as he imagined being mauled by an animal with daggers for teeth. “But your husband escaped,” he said.

             
Talia took another deep breath, pulled the hood back over her head. Nick couldn’t help but feel disappointed when she did that. “Yes,” she said. “He managed to climb a tree. The cats couldn’t follow.”

             
Nick was skeptical. “I thought cats could climb anything.”

             
“Your average housecat perhaps,” Talia nodded in agreement. “But these cats are far too big. In Africa, lions climb trees when they’re still young and small, but once they get over two hundred pounds, they have problems. Getting up a tree is easy. Getting down is life-threatening. And this species is at least twice the size of African lions.”

             
“So that’s why you observed them from the tops of trees.”

             
“Precisely.”

             
“So what happened to your husband?”

“
He sat there all night while the cats tried to get at him. He said he’d never seen anything like it. They left before daybreak, dragging the elder’s body with them, who at that point was near death.”

             
“
Near
death? They didn’t kill him?”

             
“No,” Talia said. “Not right away, anyway. Leonid said he could hear the elder moaning as they dragged him away.”

             
Nick shivered. “God
damn
.”

“
They were juveniles and not yet adept at killing. Or so we think. I mean thought. Regardless, Leonid came back to the village the next day, but kept the truth to himself. He said a bear had attacked them, but I could see something had changed. That night, he confided in me what happened. You can imagine my excitement at the thought of a living, breathing saber-toothed
Felis
.”

“
Yeah, I can imagine.”

“
We never told the village,” she continued. “Until today, it was assumed the cats stayed far to the northwest of the Chukchi winter camps. Leonid and I spent that winter up in the trees, drawing the cats to us with reindeer carcasses. Sometimes, there would be no sightings for weeks, but when they did show up, it was a remarkable experience. We observed their behavior, discovering fascinating things about them: their hearing was acute beyond any known cat or other
Carnivora.
And like wolves, they followed the reindeer herds south for the winter, but they never ventured past the southern tip of their predetermined territory.”

             
Nick nodded and said “Until just recently.”

             
“Yes,” said Talia.

             
“Why?”

             
“I don’t know.” She kicked the snow, her mind drifting off. “The following summer,” she said in earnest. “We built the cabin at what we thought was a safe distance from their hunting grounds. Still, we made every effort to make it invisible to eye and ear.”

             
‘That’s why you had blankets hanging everywhere,” Nick said.

             
“Yes. We piled snow up around the outer walls during the winter, too. I planted pine sapplings around the perimeter for camouflage as well, though it will take years for them to grow.”

             
“You weren’t just hiding from monster cats.”

             
“No. We got very little news from the outside world, so we weren’t sure who was in charge at any given moment.”

Nick understood. A silence fell over them for a moment. “You’ve been expecting some kind of confrontation though, even if it wasn’t from those things. You built the place with double walls.”