“I’ll be fine. He thinks he’s my friend, remember? Give me the compass.”
Max showed her how to read the compass and then gave it back to her.
“Now listen to me: you should always be going southeast, toward the Reds,” he said. “There’s plenty of moonlight, so you won’t have any problem reading it tonight. To the north are Captain Grenzmann and his detachment of SS—not to mention Dnepropetrovsk; and to the west is the whole German army. So above all, steer clear of northwest. If you lose the compass, just walk toward the rising sun. Clear?”
Kalinka restrained a yawn and then nodded.
“I know you’re tired,” said Max. “But there’s no time to lose sleeping. Besides, the cold will wake you up. You and the horses need to put as much distance as you can between yourselves and this place before morning. And then to keep going all day if you can, before resting. Don’t worry about the horses. They’re tough as nails and can walk forever. Just remember that. If they stop, it will only be because they think it’s you that’s tired.”
Max and Taras and Kalinka and the two Przewalski’s went outside the water tank, along the brick passageway past the pumping room, and through the hidden entrance to the outside, where the wind on the open steppe took her breath away.
Max knelt down beside Taras in the snow and hugged the dog for a moment.
“Go with her, Taras,” he said. “Go with Kalinka and see that no harm comes to her.”
Taras barked his obedience and stood next to Kalinka. Max rose stiffly.
“Max, no,” she protested. “I couldn’t take your dog.”
“He’s getting fat and lazy, staying here with me,” said Max. “Aren’t you, boy? You’d be doing him a kindness to take him with you, young lady. He’s a borzoi—a wolfhound. Wasn’t bred to be a pet, which is what he’s become. This is just what a dog like him needs. A proper steppe-sized adventure. Like something from a great novel by Gogol. He won’t get that if he stays here with an old man like me at Askaniya-Nova. He’s a good dog. You only have to tell him anything once, and I’ve told him now—to go with you, Kalinka—so there’s no going back on it and that’s an end to the matter.”
“God bless you, Max,” she said, and embraced him. “I shan’t ever forget you. Not if I live to be a hundred.”
Max kissed her forehead and then walked quickly toward his cottage. There was much to do before morning.
EVEN INSIDE HER BIG black Astrakhan coat, Kalinka felt bitterly cold; the wind was from the north and behind her. Temüjin and Börte, following in her footsteps, managed to screen the girl from the worst of the bora wind, but even so, the night was soon in her bones, as if she had fallen through a sheet of ice and into the dark water of a freezing lake. The tattered lining of her coat was made of red silk, and she found it almost funny that she could be swathed in red and yet still feel blue with cold.
“If we can keep up this pace until dawn,” said Kalinka, “then maybe we stand a chance. I know we’re leaving a trail in the snow that’s going to be very easy to follow, but there’s not much we can do about that. And if we hear motors coming after us, then you horses should run in opposite directions. Have you got that?”
From time to time, she brought out the little brass compass and took a bearing in the way that Max had shown her—just to make sure that they were headed in the right direction. The strange quartet made good progress, for the snow was only a few centimeters deep on the steppe and the ground was more or less flat. After a couple of hours, she guessed they’d walked at least ten kilometers.
The bread and cheese felt good in her pocket, and she decided to put off eating them for as long as possible; experience had taught Kalinka that she was never as hungry if she knew there was food she could eat than when she had no idea of where her next meal was coming from.
At first, Kalinka spoke to the dog and to the horses to try to keep up her spirits, but every time she said something, she saw her hot breath appear before her face in a little white cloud of steam, and she soon realized that talk was an easy way to lose body heat. And so, after a while, she said nothing at all. Besides, it was easier to hear things when you weren’t talking.
Not that hearing things was always a good thing.
Once, she heard what sounded like a lion roaring in the distance, and it was several heart-stopping moments before she managed to remember that there weren’t any lions in Ukraine and that what she could actually hear was the sound of a European bison bull bellowing his heart out. All the same, she was glad there wasn’t much light and that she couldn’t see the bison and that he couldn’t see her.