The River Will Do It

Chapter One: The Sound Under the Snow

The light came back to the Tolba in the last week of January, a thin brass line lying along the south rim of the world for about as long as it takes to boil a kettle. By the second week of February there were four hours of it, and men who had spent the dark season quarrelling in smoke-blackened huts came out squinting like moles and remembered they had work.

Andrei Yudin walked half a verst ahead of the first sledge and listened to the river.

The Tolba lay under him, four feet of ice and under that a hollow, and under the hollow the water. It was never still. In the deep cold it went on grinding southeast toward the coast, squeezed thin between ice and gravel, and where the channel narrowed or the gravel humped it had nowhere to go but up. It would find a crack, or make one, and come climbing out onto the top of its own ice, and spread.

That was overflow. The herders called it the river's second skin. A sheet of water, sometimes a finger deep and sometimes to a man's knee, running out across a hundred sazhens of ice and then lying there under a blanket of snow that kept it from freezing the way a fur blanket keeps a sleeping man from freezing. At fifty below, that water stayed liquid for days.

Step into it in felt boots and you had, by Andrei's counting, ten minutes. After that the water had wicked to your skin and frozen there, and your feet were no longer yours. He had seen a Cossack from the Lena lose both of his below the ankle in the space of a single afternoon, and the man had not even known he was wet until he tried to stand.

Andrei carried a staff of larch with an iron ferrule, and every dozen paces he set the point down and let the shaft ring, and listened to what came back. Sound ice gave a hard, bright note, like a nail struck on a stove lid. Ice with water under it answered soft and thick, a noise with mud in it. He did not have to think about the difference any more than he had to think about the difference between his mother's voice and a stranger's.

He looked at the snow, too. Overflow gave itself away if you knew what to look for: a faint grey-blue bloom under the white, the way skimmed milk shows through linen. Frost chimneys, little chalky towers where warm breath came up through pinholes. A sag in the drift where the snow had wet itself from beneath and settled. A smell, even, mineral and faintly sweet, like a wet stone brought in beside a fire.

Half a verst behind him, sixty sledges came on down the ice in a line nearly a mile long, and every one of them followed the line his snowshoes had drawn.

Most were dog sledges, twelve and fourteen animals to a team, the fur bales lashed under hide and wrapped in matting against the rime. A dozen were drawn by harnessed reindeer, hired with their drivers from a clan on the middle river. Somewhere in the middle of it all Lieutenant Boris Prokhorov rode on a load of prime sable with his back against the lashings and his hood pulled forward so that nothing showed but the frozen fringe around his mouth.

Andrei set the staff down again. Hard note. He took eleven paces. Hard note. He took eleven more and the river answered him with a sound like a hand slapped on wet clay.

He stopped.

Away to the left, where the channel bent under a cutbank crowned with dead willow, the snow had the faintest grey shine to it, and the whole surface between him and the far bank had settled by perhaps a hand's breadth. A quarter of a verst of it, at least. Enough to swallow a third of the train.

He turned and lifted his staff crosswise over his head, and held it there.

Behind him the first team slowed, and the second, and the word went up the line: hold, hold, hold, hold, thinning as it went until it was only a shape a man made with his arms.

Boots crunched up the trail toward him. Andrei knew the walk before he turned. Yakim Gladkov came heavy and rolling on his snowshoes, a big man moving carefully the way big men learn to, with a fowling piece slung across his back and his beard grown out into a solid grey-white shelf of ice under his chin.

"Water?"

"Water."

Gladkov looked at the same stretch of river Andrei had looked at, and saw a flat white plain with a bend in it. He had been on this river nine years. He blew out through his nose. "I'd have run straight across it."

"You would."

"And I'd have got a hundred versts up the bank on one foot and been proud of myself." Gladkov turned his head and spat, and the spit crackled before it landed. "How far around?"

"Under the cutbank there's a shelf. Old ice, no seep, the current's off it." Andrei pointed with his chin. "Follow the willows to the second bend, then straight out. It costs us two versts."

"The lieutenant will love you for two versts."

"The lieutenant can love me or he can buy sixty men new feet."

Gladkov laughed, a short bark inside his hood, and clapped Andrei on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him. Then he went back down the line, bellowing, and the train came alive again and swung left toward the willows in a long slow curve, obedient as water finding its own channel.

Andrei stood a moment and let them come past him.

This was the thing he was for. He knew that and did not resent it much. He was thirty-three years old, born in a log room at a smaller fort than Kamensk to a Russian father who had gone north for sable and a Sakha mother who had cooked for him and then married him and then buried him. His father had left him the name Yudin, a wooden trunk, and a way of squaring his shoulders when spoken to. His mother had left him everything else: the language, the river, the knowledge of how snow behaves, and a fixed understanding that the land does not hate you and does not love you and will kill you without noticing.

At the fort they called him the half. Not always unkindly. Among his wife's people they called him the half too, and there it stung more, because he wanted it not to be true there.

He reached inside his outer coat and touched the horn.

It hung on a thong under his arm where his body heat could reach it. It had been a bull's horn once, sawn short, plugged at the wide end with a fitted disc of birch and a cap of hide. Inside, packed in ash and shavings, lay a fist-sized plug of birch fungus, black-crusted and rust-coloured within, smouldering at one edge with the patient slow heat of a thing that has no reason to hurry.

Sardana's mother had put that ember in his hand eleven years ago, three days after the wedding, in the smoke of her tent at the Steam Rocks. She had told him the fire in the horn had come from her mother's hearth, and that fire, once it has been carried a long way, does not like to be dropped. Andrei had thought it was a pretty thing to say to a young man. He had fed it morning and night ever since. Eleven winters. It had never gone out.

He let the coat fall closed, took up his staff, and went on ahead of the train.

At the second bend he found the shelf just where he had said it would be, hard old ice glazed with wind-scour, and he stamped along it a hundred paces to be sure. Beyond it the river opened out white and empty to the northeast, and the low sun laid the shadow of the willows across it in long blue bars.

Somewhere up in that white country, twenty days' travel to the northwest and then up into the headwaters, was the camp at the Steam Rocks: nine hundred reindeer, forty people, and inside one particular tent a woman with a scar on her thumb from a bad knife and a boy of nine who had been born with his fists closed and had not much opened them since.

Andrei had been away since the end of September, hired out to a collection party that had gone east almost to the Kolyma divide and come back in January with frostbite and eleven sledges of poor grey fox. He had come into Kamensk and asked after his family and been told they had gone up to the herd before the snow, and he had believed it, because it was the sensible thing for them to have done, and because Yakim Gladkov had said it to his face over a kettle of tea.

He had not seen his wife in five months. When the train reached the coast road and turned, he would take his pay and go north up the Tolba with the last of the ice, and be at the Steam Rocks in time for the calving.

He stood on the good ice with the sun on the side of his face and let himself want that for as long as it took the first team to come up level with him.

Then he turned and walked on, and the day was ordinary until evening, when the train came down to the willow bar where the Yukaghir hunters were waiting to trade.