line only: a single set of boot tracks leading away, and never coming
back. His traps, which were set at the bases of small trees and among
overhanging roots along the right bank, lay empty and undisturbed. A
mile downstream from the apiary, hunkered down among bare stalks and
saplings on the same side of the river, was Tsepalev’s tarpaper hovel. As
the men drew abreast of it, they noticed a second set of tracks emerging
from the low doorway. Under normal circumstances these would have
been made by the owner, a trapper and poet who was known to these men.
But these tracks weren’t made by a man.
It was shortly after noon, a week from the solstice, and the sun hung
low over the river, blazing heatlessly. It was so cold and dry that it felt as
if every molecule of moisture had been sucked from the air. There was no
wind, and the snow sparkled with such fierce precision that each flake
appeared distinct from those around it. In the midst of this exultant
dazzle, dread turned to certainty. They readied their weapons and
followed the tracks—across the river and up the left bank, over to a
massive spruce tree, well over one hundred feet tall. There at the base,
they found, along with the poet’s tattered bed, a story very like the one at
Markov’s cabin: that of a tiger who made no attempt to hide and who
attacked an alert, armed man head-on from ten paces away—as if he was
an adversary, as opposed to prey. It was becoming a kind of signature.
How, they wondered, could Pochepnya have been so close to something
the size and color of a tiger, lying in the snow—on a mattress, no less—
and failed to see it?
The site of the attack was clearly marked by the trampled snow, but
there was strangely little blood, and Pochepnya’s body was nowhere to be
found. Only his rifle remained where it had fallen. Denis Burukhin picked
it up and the first thing he did was draw back the bolt and look in the
breech; it was still loaded. He withdrew the bullet to study it more closely
and there in the primer, at the center of the bullet’s brass head, was a
dimple where the firing pin had struck it. The gun had misfired. Andrei
Pochepnya’s last fully realized thought may well have been the sickening
realization that his father’s gun had betrayed him. Burukhin cleared the
snow from the barrel, reloaded the same bullet, and pulled the trigger.
ron
(Ron)
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