After the first snowstorm, the travelers had a sixteen-day return to mild weather. The nights were cold though; a chill wind flowed down off the snow-covered mountains every evening after sunset, freezing the ground by morning.
They worked incessently from dawn till after dark. At the end of the seventh day, the rude hut had a low roof of poles, and bark held down by more poles. There was no chimneyed fireplace; the local mud was unsuitable for making one. Instead they had a fire circle in the middle of the floor, and at each end of the hut beneath the ridgepole, an opening beneath the roof. Through these openings the wind would blow, when there was wind, carrying out the worst of the smoke.
After the seventh day, while Hans and Baver cut and dragged firewood, Nils and Achikh hunted. Achikh said he’d never seen a luckier hunter than Nils. The raven helped; it found a moose for them, and then another.
Baver learned to scrape hides till the last bits of flesh and fat were gone, then to rub them with tallow and pound it in with the sides of his fists, to make them pliant for clothing and winter boots.
There was a meadow along the stream, where the horses grazed the coarse dead grass and sedge. Achikh feared they wouldn’t live through the winter without hay, so the men harvested grass, great armfuls of it. They d use it as bedding till the horses’ situation became desperate, then as a supplement to whatever the horses found to eat.
From the beginning, the Buriat and the two Northmen set snares and deadfalls in the taiga, and began to harvest snowshoe hares, which were numerous, and lynx; even sable. One night wolves howled, and in the morning the horses were close outside the hut. Meanwhile a wolf had triggered a deadfall, and contributed his pelt.
While hunting, Nils found where a bear had raked up duff from the forest floor, stuffing it in the opening beneath the sprung root disk of a fir that had blown partly over. It would be his winter den. They’d wait till after winter came, Nils said, and the bear had holed up. Then they’d visit the den and kill him for his fur and flesh.
Achikh said he’d never seen such good hunting ground. Game was so plentiful and easy to approach, it appeared that no one had hunted there before.
With the roof on they moved into the cabin, and worked by firelight when darkness came. Baver learned more skills. He sewed pelts into clothing, using sinew and a bone needle; helped scrape the fat off a third moosehide; made window coverings of sewn moose gut. Made mittens of the wolf skin, fur-side in. Nils made a door for their low doorway, splitting and shaving boards from a pine log, cutting tiny notches for fastening them together, then hanging it with leather straps. It was not a tight door, but lacking awl and hinges and proper doorposts, it would have to do. Nils also made a trough from a poplar log, to melt snow in and hold their water supply.
The trough did double duty. Nils and Bans split thin staves from birch, soaked them in the trough in boiling water, bent them around blocks and tied them, continuing the soaking and increasing the curvature till the bend was sufficient and permanent. Before long they would all have skis.
Achikh tended their snares and hunted, cut firewood, and made various things from leather.
In the evenings while they worked around the fire, Achikh continued their lessons in the Buriat dialect of Mongol. He also told stories in it that gave them insights into his people. This story telling would continue throughout the winter, and Baver set out the recorder to get them on audio while he worked. Occasionally when the press of his more immediate tasks allowed, he got video as well.
He came to understand almost anything Achikh said in Mongol, and learned to speak it easily himself.
Achikh also told them his people’s beliefs and taboos, that they might not offend when they reached them, perhaps to be punished.
After sixteen days, true winter came. One morning they awoke to find the hut cold, and twenty centimeters of dry fluffy snow on the ground. Baver thought it must be at least minus fifteen or twenty degrees Celsius outside. His watch made it October 24.
They harvested their bear, a large male. A fourth moose gave his life, his hide, and his flesh to their survival. Already, it seemed to Baver, they had meat enough to feed them through two winters. The raven stayed with them and was fed by them, living in the thick treetops. Hans named it Svartvinge. Nils was its chosen; the others it accepted. The nights grew colder, while the sun, its course ever lower, its stay ever briefer, seemed scarcely to warm the air at all by day. This was not the Arctic, Baver knew, but visualizing maps he’d seen, it was probably Siberia, albeit southern Siberia. And what he’d learned of Siberian winters, in his studies on New Home, was not reassuring.
It was a long winter, and colder than anything Baver had ever imagined. Nils said it was considerably colder than his original homeland. Achikh said it was colder than his, too, but here the forest protected from the sweeping winds. The snowfall was much greater here, he said, and blamed it on the adjacent mountains. The hut was never as warm as a proper cabin, by quite a bit, but wearing furs it was tolerable.
The meadow grass was buried and flattened by the snow, and the horses tramped trails through the deep snow to browse the goatsbeard lichens from the tree trunks.
Svartvinge got so he would come into the hut in the evening, to sit on a boot-drying peg and commune silently with Nils, or so it seemed. But half an hour of the smoky air was invariably enough for it. Then it would fly to one of the smokeholes, perch there for a moment, and launch itself out.
Hans had continued to grow and fill out. Despite the hard life, he must have gained fifteen or twenty kilos since they’d left the ting, Baver thought. And surely he himself must look different now. He wished he had a mirror, preferably full length.
When the cold was not extreme, they often hunted or explored. If nothing else, it got them out of the smoke reek and let them breath clean air. Nils and Hans skied almost as easily as they walked. Baver and Achikh also became reasonably adept, although their skis fitted more loosely than skis on New Home, with their sophisticated bindings. Baver learned a great deal about the animals they saw and sometimes killed.
Achikh made him a laminated bow, short but stiff. He learned to make and fletch his own practice arrows, and practiced until he was pleased with himself, though clearly Achikh thought him hopeless as an archer. He d shoot at a target tree outside the cabin, a rotten birch stub that didnt damage the unpointed practice arrows when they struck it. He could usually hit it at twenty doubles—forty steps—though his accuracy wouldn’t suffice to consistently kill marmots as the others had the previous summer. He was pleased with himself nonetheless. They’d teethed on bows and arrows, he told himself, while he was new to them.
After a time, the days became noticeably longer, but the nights were as cold as ever and the snow continued to deepen. All winter long they’d hear wolves occasionally; the horses, increasingly gaunt, would gather by the door on those occasions. One night, on what Baver’s watch told him was February 16, the horses whinnied with fear. The Buriat and the Northmen went out with arrows nocked and bows half drawn, Baver with them carrying two torches. A number of wolves crouched down in the torchlight, eyes gleaming, and in a moment, three had been shot. Two of the three who’d been pierced with shafts, tried to flee. Nils pursued them and killed them with his sword. It was hurtful to a man’s soul, Achikh commented, to let a wounded wolf crawl away and die slowly. They used the furs, of course.
Afterward they still heard the pack howl from time to time, as it passed through the area in its hunting, but the pack members stayed well away from the hut.
One evening Achikh, who’d been exploring new territory along the foothills, found where an ancient highway had been. It was overgrown now with forest, but recognizable by the cuts and fills. He’d taken time to explore it, and it did indeed go up into the mountains as if to cross them. It seemed that when spring came, they wouldn’t need to find a route across the Altai; the ancients had made one for them.
At length the days were as long as the nights, more or less, and the surface of the snow sometimes grew wet where the sun shone on it. Not long afterward—a couple of phases of the moon—they’d find a hard crust on the snow in the morning, sometimes lasting all day. Sometimes one could walk on it without skis. Now the horses truly suffered, for they broke through the crust at every step and could hardly lift their hooves back out. Nor could they paw the snow away to get at last summer’s meadow grass. The small stock of bedding hay was doled out, and when it was gone, the men collected lichen for the horses to eat, and branches of Siberian fir, which they’d seen them browse.
The days continued to lengthen. The birds of summer began to appear. The snow settled in earnest, and sometimes no crust froze on it overnight; when it did, it melted by midmorning. Hans wondered that Svartvinge didn’t leave them; ravens nested when there was still snow, he explained to Baver, and surely he must have a mate somewhere. Achikh said a spirit raven might not nest, might have no mate. Nils grinned and said nothing at all about it.
Noisy meltwater ran down the stream over the thick ice, and they traveled little. The days grew long, the snow soggy and much shrunken. Achikh said the steppes would be bare now, and the first spring flowers showing. Baver asked how long it might be before they tried crossing the mountains. Achikh said the snow in the high country would still be deeper than a man’s height.
The ice went out and the stream rose further, but not enough to cover all the meadow. Fortunately, because the snow had melted on it, and the scarecrow horses were eating last summer’s dead grass and sedge there. None had died, but another month of winter would surely have killed them all.
At Achikh’s suggestion, Nils felled another large birch and split wide thin planks from it. Then they each began to carve a wooden shovel. In the high passes, Achikh believed, they’d have to dig paths for the horses in the worse places, or wait halfway through the summer.
Baver accepted the thought without a shudder.