Kalinka sat down and started to pound the snow with her fists. “No! No! No!” she yelled at the sky. “After everything else, how could you let that happen?”
For a moment, she caught sight of herself as if from above, and she almost heard Max’s voice inside her head.
“It’s no good yelling at God,” he would have said. “He had nothing to do with what happened. Don’t blame him. Like you blamed him for what happened before. If you want to blame someone, young lady, then blame me for not getting you away from this place earlier. Blame the Germans for being stupid enough to elect Hitler, and invade Russia and Ukraine. Blame that stupid young captain for being such a fanatic. But don’t go blaming old God.”
Throughout all this, the two Przewalski’s horses waited patiently for their companions to deal with their feelings; being wild animals, they were made of sterner stuff than the dog and the girl, and while they were capable of becoming depressed—Börte had lost a foal once and spent a whole summer pining for it—they were not creatures of emotion in the same way as a pet dog or an adolescent girl.
Temüjin allowed a decent interval to elapse before he nudged the girl in the back; it was time to get moving again. While his wild animal’s senses had not registered the old man’s death, they did now feel something else of vital importance. Sniffing the trail that they had left behind in the snow and placing his head close to the ground had alerted him to something that only an animal of a species that had been chased and killed by men for thousands of years until it was almost extinct could have felt in its bones.
They were being hunted.
CAPTAIN GRENZMANN BORROWED HIS sergeant’s steel helmet and goggles, and had the man take the horse back to the stables at the big house while he took the sergeant’s place in the sidecar of the BMW R75 motorcycle. Known as the Type Russia, the machine was more than equal to the task of riding across the snow-covered steppe at speed. During the invasion of Russia and Ukraine starting in June 1941, transport like this had enabled the German army to cover hundreds of kilometers in just a few days. So he was full of confidence about the success of their enterprise. Before they set off, however, he addressed the other three men, in order to impress upon them the importance of their mission.
“This won’t take very long,” he said. “We’re after two wild Przewalski’s horses and an escaped prisoner. I don’t much care what happens to the dog, but the other three are the enemies of everything we’ve been fighting for since we came to the Soviet union : a clean, open living space full of new beginnings and the past washed away for good. A place where we Germans can enjoy that which is our right. So we’ve no choice but to go after them. Now, they’ve left an obvious trail southeast of here, and it seems equally clear that they can’t be traveling very quickly. It’s not like these filthy horses can be ridden by anything except the lice and fleas they usually carry on their Gypsy backs. So they’re walking. Which means we should catch up with them in just a few hours, well before we get anywhere near the Russian army lines.”
The three SS men listened and nodded their approval but kept their thoughts to themselves; none of them dared to ask the captain the question that was on all of their minds: why were they wasting their time and effort going in pursuit of a couple of scruffy horses and a child? The size of the handprint on the wall of the water tank and the half-burned coat made that clear, at any rate. But as they took a closer look at the trail in the snow, another question presented itself to their already skeptical minds: just how was it possible that two wild Przewalski’s horses, which had never been herded or domesticated in thousands of years, were willing to walk in a straight line behind a human being and a dog? Wild animals were wild animals, and none was wilder than those Przewalski’s horses. Something as strange as that just didn’t happen without a reason. It made no sense—at least none that could withstand rational explanation.
“Sir,” said one of the men, a corporal called Hagen, “I’m not questioning your orders. But as you said yourself, that trail goes southeast, straight toward the Russian lines. Well, suppose the Russky lines are a lot nearer than we think they are? Isn’t it possible that we might run straight into a Russian patrol before we catch up with these horses?”
The two other SS men nodded their agreement with what Hagen had found the courage to say.
Captain Grenzmann bit his lip and managed to contain his irritation; he disliked being questioned by his men, just as his own superiors in Berlin always disliked being questioned by a mere captain.