The Winter Horses (4 page)

Max told himself that all of this was in their favor.

They were also able to survive a long time without water, which meant that their human hunters were denied the most obvious strategy—to hide by the lakes where the horses came to drink. Besides, the lakes at Askaniya-Nova were frozen, so that was good, too. Max himself had seen how a lead stallion would scout the way ahead to water before directing his herd with snorts and whinnies—sometimes from the cover of a bush or a clump of trees. The fact was that even on the reserve, where until now the Przewalski’s horses had lived in almost perfect safety, the animals took no chances where humans were concerned.

Another thing in favor of the horses was that they
were stealthy at night—as stealthy as any fox—and, by day, astonishingly adept at using features of the country as camouflage. From what Max had read about the horses in books the baron had lent to him years ago, it was not unusual for Mongol hunters to track a small herd and then lose it, only to find out later on that the horses had been hiding close by all along.

Max concluded it was one thing for the German captain to say that his men were going to round up thirty Przewalski’s and shoot them, but it was quite another actually to do it.

He fell asleep in his chair and dreamed sweet dreams of Askaniya-Nova before the Nazis and the Communists, and of the baron, who had been so kind to him.

A couple of hours later, he awoke with a start, certain that something he heard had interrupted his dreams. He stayed seated for a moment or two, his old ears straining to find an explanation for his sudden wakefulness.

And then he heard it: the sound of automatic gunfire.

Max grabbed his coat, his cap and his rifle, and opened the door. He listened again and, hearing yet more shots, he set off in the direction they had come from.

Any other man wearing a dirty fur coat might have been worried about being mistaken for one of the horses the Germans were probably shooting at. But Max cared nothing for his own safety; he welcomed any bullet that would have spared the life of one of his beloved Przewalski’s, and he hurried toward the scene in the hope that he might still reason with the Germans.

Gradually he heard the sound of engines as well as automatic gunfire, and another ten or fifteen minutes’ quick march brought Max to the brow of a small hill overlooking a wide, gently sloping snowfield, where a terrible sight greeted his eyes: he saw an SS motorcycle roaring across the steppe, and then another. The snow hardly interfered with their speed, thanks to their thick, knobbly tires. Wearing heavy leather coats, steel helmets and goggles, both riders were in hot pursuit of a herd of Przewalski’s, and that would have been bad enough, as wild horses don’t much care for noisy engines, but attached to each of the motorcycles was a sidecar in which another SS man was seated behind a heavy machine gun mounted on the chassis. These men were firing the guns in short bursts of five or six shots, but worse than that, they were grinning widely.

Several horses were already dead, and even as Max watched with horror, he saw another—a mare, he thought—falter in the midst of her frantic gallop, as if tripped by some unseen wire, hit the snow headfirst and then lie still.

He shouted at the four Germans to stop, but it was useless; they wouldn’t have heard him anyway. For a brief moment, he considered shooting at the men with his rifle—he might have done so, too, but for the fact he knew he wasn’t the type of man to shoot anyone. Killing an animal was quite hard enough, but killing another human being struck Max as something abhorrent.

So he just stood there and forced himself to watch.

Many terrible things had happened to Max in his life, but nothing he had ever experienced compared with the dreadful scene he was witnessing now.

Finally, when the horses were all dead or had escaped, one of the motorcycles turned around and drove back toward the old man. For a long moment, Max thought they were going to shoot him as well, but at the last minute, the man driving the motorcycle stopped, cut the engine and climbed off his vehicle. The other man stayed put, and Max was now near enough to see the smoke trailing from the long, air-cooled barrel of the machine gun that had been used to such deadly effect.

With a machine pistol slung around his neck, the driver walked solemnly toward him, lit a cigarette and smiled.

“Hey, Max, you want to be careful wandering around in that old brown fur coat of yours,” said the man, whom Max had talked to before. “We almost mistook you for one of the horses and shot you, too.”

“I wish you had.”

“Don’t say that. Look, Max, none of us wanted to do it—to shoot your horses. But orders are orders, eh? It’s war. What can you do? The captain says jump, and we jump. That’s how it’s got to be.” He offered Max the cigarette, but the old man declined with a shake of the head. “For what it’s worth, none of the horses suffered. You get hit with a bullet from Hitler’s buzz saw and it’s over in just a few seconds.”

Max nodded. “Did many horses escape?” he asked hopefully.

“A few. But we’ll catch up with them later. We’ll let them regroup and go after them again tomorrow, probably.”

Feeling quite sick, Max wiped the tears off his old face and walked away without another word.

J
UST AS HORRIFIED BY
what had happened to the wild horses of Askaniya-Nova was poor Kalinka, for after living with them for several weeks, she had grown very close to these animals. Indeed, since her own family was now no more, Kalinka regarded the horses as a sort of substitute for brothers and sisters. And while she was astonished that anyone should have tried to exterminate a whole herd of harmless wild animals, she was hardly surprised that the authors of this crime should have been wearing the same gray field uniforms as the men who had killed almost everyone she knew in her hometown of Dnepropetrovsk.

Hiding in a thick grove of trees near the old man’s blue cottage, she watched with horror as the Germans on their big, powerful motorcycles and sidecars chased the horses across the steppe, firing their machine guns
and laughing like they were on some kind of macabre holiday. What was so funny about killing something, or someone? It had been the same back in Dnepropetrovsk, where the SS had gone about their bloody business with great good humor; indeed, it had seemed to Kalinka that many of them had been quite drunk, and she suspected the same was probably true of these men on the motorcycles.

Of course, Kalinka wanted to run out in front of them and tell the Germans to stop, but she knew they would not have listened to her. Back in Dnepropetrovsk, several girls not much older than Kalinka—including her elder sister Miriam’s best friend, Louise, who was generally held to be the most beautiful girl in the city—had actually knelt down in the streets and begged the laughing Germans to stop what they were doing. They had been shot without mercy. So Kalinka stayed hidden and, with her stomach knotted, waited for the massacre to end.

Her hopes rose a little when the old man from the blue cottage arrived on the steppe, waving his arms and shouting loudly at the Germans. She hoped they would pay attention to him, if only out of respect for his silver beard, but they ignored him and carried on shooting. Kalinka almost hoped he might unsling the rifle he carried and shoot a few of them instead, although she could easily see how useless that would have been. The Germans had no more respect for old age than they did for youth; hadn’t her own great-grandmother been shot—a woman
aged ninety-five? But still, she admired the old man’s courage, for it was plain that they could have shot him just for the pleasure of it and because killing was all they seemed to know.

When finally the shooting stopped and the Germans drove back to the big house, where they were all staying, Kalinka waited for the old man to leave, too, before she quit her hiding place in the trees. She had learned to avoid all people, much as the horses did. Besides, the old man looked rather frightening.

Venturing out onto the steppe to see if she could help any of the horses who had been shot, she could soon see plainly that her mission was pointless. The Germans had done their job with predictably brutal efficiency, for the wild horses were quite beyond anything that even a veterinary surgeon could have done. A horse in motion is a beautiful, almost fluid thing, but now their ragged brown bodies lay on the pinkish snow like untidy heaps of solid, upturned earth. Nothing ever looks quite as dead as a dead horse. It was a heartbreaking sight.

To Kalinka’s relief, there was no sign of the mare who had first befriended her, nor the stallion who was her mate; of course, this was no guarantee that they were still alive. The steppe is a vast plain and it was not unlikely that their dead bodies lay several kilometers on the other side of the horizon, where they might have been chased by the relentless SS motorcycles. But she hoped for the best, and it was with a tremendous sense of relief
that when she returned to her hiding place, she found the stallion and the mare hiding there.

“Thank goodness you’re alive,” she said, embracing the mare. “I thought you were both dead.”

Kalinka tried to embrace the stallion, too, but he was having none of it, and to have tried more than once would have been to risk a kick or a bite, so she embraced the trembling mare again, and this time she found there was blood on her hands.

“Oh, but you’re hurt,” she said, and as soon as she had found the wound—which was in the mare’s shoulder—she scooped up a handful of snow with which to wash it clean and, she hoped, to stanch the flow of blood. Kalinka held the snow over the wound for as long as her bare hand could take the cold, and the mare seemed to appreciate her attempt to help, for she dropped her nose onto Kalinka’s neck and licked it. But the flow of blood from the horse’s shoulder was only a little diminished by the snow poultice.

Kalinka debated out loud what to do. “It’s not like I can put a bandage or a tourniquet around this,” she said. “For one thing, it would have to be a very big bandage. And for another, I can’t see how it would possibly stay on. Stitches would be best, I think, but I’ve never done that kind of thing before. Besides, I don’t happen to have a needle and thread.”

She thought for a moment, and nodded firmly as she arrived at a decision:

“I think we’ll see how you are in the morning and then, if you’re still bleeding, I shall have to return to that old man’s cottage and see if I can’t steal a needle and thread. Although having seen his clothes, I don’t hold out much hope of that. I never saw such a ragged-looking person. Except perhaps myself, of course. But then I’ve got an excuse. He’s living in a warm cottage with a fire and a wood-burning stove, and I’m living out here, on the steppe. I’m sure if I lived in such a nice little place, my clothes wouldn’t look like a family of mice had been nesting in them.”

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, M
AX
heard more gunfire in the distance, but this time he did not go and watch what was happening, nor did he go to saddle Molnija for the captain; instead, he stayed in and around his little blue cottage and tried not to think about what was happening. He washed his crockery, took out the hot ashes, did some dusting and swept the floor. A couple of times he caught his dog, Taras, looking at him in a strange way as if he held all men—including Max—responsible for what the German soldiers had done to the Przewalski’s horses.

“What could I have done?” Max asked Taras. “You tell me. I’d like to know. Really, I would. The Germans would have shot me, for sure. And then who would look after you, dog? Tell me that? And, after all, it’s not like the horses are the only animals at Askaniya-Nova. There’s all sorts of rare breeds that’ll need our help before this war
is out—you mark my words. We’ll recover. You’ll see. The Germans can’t stay here forever. You heard what Captain Grenzmann said; the war is not going well for them, so God willing, they’ll be leaving soon. After they’re gone, things will get back to normal. I promise. It’ll be you and me and the animals, just like it was before.”

The day after this, things were even quieter, but still Max did not go to the stables to saddle Molnija for the captain.