Page 69 of Tiger's Tale
“Why not just look at it when Iriko returns?”
“I suppose I could. But the others...”
“You mean the tokens worn by Stacia and Veru?” Nik shook his head. “I never got a good look at those. I can describe them the way they were explained to me though. It might be better to get the description from the horse’s or tiger’s mouth, as it were, while we have Iriko to serve as a translator.”
“What about the others—the tokens worn by the Death Draughtsman, the man you brought from the forest? Did he show you those?”
“No. But after what Matriova said, I believe he has at least one of them, maybe more. She said they’d been lost to her people. If two of them fell into the hands of the tsar and tsarina, who knows where the others ended up. But from what the Death Draughtsman told me, I got the sense he’d been collecting them.”
Danik returned soon after that with a few birds. He’d placed the rest of his traps, hoping to catch some animals. They had roasted one of the birds and fed the tigers the other three before Iriko returned dragging the heavy carcass of a large deer behind him. Though Nikolai and Danik were happy they’d be able to fill their own bellies as well as the tigers’, they wore unhappy expressions, especially knowing Iriko had left without a trap or a weapon of any kind.
It was a puzzle to Danik in particular, how a blind man with no obvious weapon could not only track and take down a deer but then manage to find their camp again. Lifting his shoulders, he gestured silently to Nik, pointing at the deer. In response, Nik simply shrugged and shook his head, equally clueless, mouthing “I don’t know.”
Iriko paused where he was crouched over the beast and said, “You realize that even if I wasn’t able to use the eyes of the two tigers sitting near you, I’d still know you were talking about me. I can hear you moving your mouths.”
Flicking his long hair back from his face, he added, “Can you toss me a knife, Priest?”
Zakhar said, “Certainly,” but then seemed hesitant to throw it, assuming the tiger who couldn’t see wouldn’t be able to catch it, resulting in an injury.
Iriko sighed and reached over to grab it from his hand, cutting himself in the process. A few drops of his blood fell into the snow, but Iriko took no note of it and began hacking limbs off the deer. “If you want to talk about me, I’d prefer you do it to my face,” he said to the others. “If you can’t bring yourselves to do that, I’ll just assume you’re too cowardly.”
“If that’s the way you want it,” Danik replied.
“No holding back, then,” Nik added.
“How did you track it?” Danik asked.
“With my ears and my nose,” Iriko replied.
“But wouldn’t it run when it saw you?” Nik asked.
“Yeah. But I climb a tree or a hill or hide and wait for it to come to me.”
“What happens if it gores you?”
He held up his hand where he’d grabbed the knife. It had already healed. “No problem.”
“Okay, so how do you kill it, then?” Danik asked.
Iriko shrugged. He pulled out a makeshift ivory knife from inside his vest. It was polished and sharp, and Danik realized he was looking at bone. “Sometimes I use this. Sometimes I just grab them around the neck and hold on until they stop breathing.”
“Hey,” Zakhar said. “If you have that, why’d you want my knife?”
Iriko smiled then and winked, but at no one since his eyes were focused on an empty space. “I can always use a backup.”
Satisfied, but still shaking their heads, Nik and Zakhar helped him carve up the beast and feed the tigers, saving a portion to place on the fire. Danik then openly scolded Iriko about leaving a trail of blood behind him that would attract every predator for miles. Iriko laughed and called Danik a trus and an old grandmother worrier before consuming most of the half-cooked deer roast and climbing halfway into a bed of furs, leaving his burly chest exposed to the freezing air. It only took a moment or two before he began snoring loudly.
Sated, the tigers rested deeply, too, and one by one the other men also drifted to sleep, lulled by a gentle but cold breeze and the twinkling stars overhead. With the hot fire warming their backs and the steady, deep snoring sounds of three large predators nearby, the three average human men felt as safe as anyone could be when sleeping in the frozen Siberian wilderness in the deep of winter.
Unfortunately, they were awoken by the snuffling of something large, with fetid, hot breath, that pawed at the remains of Iriko’s kill, and it wasn’t a tiger. It nudged Zakhar, still deeply asleep in his furs, pressing him deeper into the snow. His eyes flew open as the breath was knocked out of him, and he gasped as he stared down a dark open maw surrounded by dangerous white teeth. Just as he was wondering if it was to be the end of him, the large creature’s attention was caught by something else, and its heavy paw lifted off his chest.
“A great white bear!” Danik cried, throwing off his furs and reaching for his hunting knives, quickly tossing Nik the axe. “Nik, see about Zakhar. I’ll try to distract it.”
As Danik pulled a torch from the dying embers, the tigers sprung to action. They roared and leapt, one on either side, challenging the bear by swiping the air just next to him, barely missing Zakhar, who was being awkwardly pulled away from the bear’s stamping feet by Danik. Then, with a great bounce, the bear was upright, standing on hind legs and bellowing.
The breath came back to Zakhar at once, and it was as if he couldn’t stop himself. He screamed. Panic seemed to invigorate his limbs, and he scrambled away from the bear and the tigers faster than a lightning strike. Within a moment, he was thirty, forty paces away. Then suddenly, he stopped, remembering his precious papers. He was about to head back toward the waning fire, praying that his careful work wouldn’t get trampled, but slipped on an ice patch.
Sliding down a hill, Zakhar tumbled end over end and came to a stop on top of a strangely shaped pile of snow. That’s when he heard the soft cry coming from a dark opening behind a bunch of brambles and branches. He got awkwardly to his feet, his bruised ankle causing him to limp, and headed toward the opening to investigate the source of the cry.
