The Winter Horses(66)

Lying on the ground, inside what had once been its enclosure, lay the huge body of a dead elephant. It smelled even worse than it looked—so bad that Kalinka gasped and covered her nose and mouth. She wasn’t sure if the poor animal had been killed by a bomb or by German soldiers who’d been unable to feed it, but either way, it was the saddest thing she’d seen since leaving Askaniya-Nova. Kalinka had never seen an elephant before, and it was a source of great regret to her that the first one she saw should also be dead.

There wasn’t time to mourn the poor beast. Another shell zoomed over her head and landed harmlessly in a park to the west. She saw pieces of tree fly up into the air. Nowhere aboveground seemed safe from the Russian artillery. But a little farther on, she found what promised to be a good place of sanctuary, the zoo’s aquarium.

Kalinka ran through the open door, past the cashier’s window, and down a curving flight of stairs into an evil-smelling basement with blue mosaic walls and stone floors. Apart from the stink of fish, it seemed perfect. Passing through an arch that was painted to look like the open mouth of a whale, she flipped the electricity switch on the wall, without result, but there was at least some daylight coming through the top of the green fish tanks, most of which were thankfully empty of fish and water.

“This looks fine,” she said. “With a few candles at night, we should be safe down here until the worst of the bombardment is over.”

She hurried upstairs again, hoping that the wolfhound’s keen nose would soon track her down and the dog would take her to the horses, or even better, bring them to her. And there was no time to lose; outside, she heard an explosion as another shell hit the soccer stadium. She might almost have pitied the Germans—at least Germans like Captain Stammer—who were the targets of such relentless bombardment.

In the damp shadows ahead of her, something moved and then growled, and Kalinka felt her blood run cold. She caught a faint glimpse of four legs and a whiff of something pungently musky and very much alive. At first, she thought it was a large dog, but when the animal growled again—a low, rumbling growl that was full of sharp teeth—Kalinka realized that this was not like any growling dog or wolf she’d ever heard before; it was something else. She backed away, retreating down a few of the stairs that led to the basement, as she guessed that the animal was now between her and the front door. She knew that if she made a run for the outside, the animal would certainly attack.

Glancing around for some kind of weapon, Kalinka saw that at the bottom of the stairs was a cone-shaped fire extinguisher. Quickly she turned and ran downstairs, and fetched the extinguisher off the wall. But it was heavy.

In the shadows, the animal growled again, and this time she thought it sounded more like a lion than a dog—a lion that had escaped from its ruined enclosure, perhaps.

Kalinka started slowly up the staircase, and at last, she saw what she was up against. The animal had a short tail and pointed ears, with big padded paws and goldish fur with brown spots, and for a moment, she thought it was a leopard before she recognized that it was actually a very different kind of big cat: it was a lynx. It was over a meter long and at least half a meter high at the shoulder; she estimated that the lynx probably weighed as much as thirty kilograms. It might have been bigger if it hadn’t been so thin; like everything else in that part of the world, the cat was hungry—hungry enough to consider eating Kalinka.

The lynx crept toward the top of the stairs, crouched down as if preparing to spring and then growled again; only this time, the cat showed her its teeth and its claws as if to remind her that it was strong enough to bring down a fully grown deer, which was its normal prey. Kalinka lifted the extinguisher and prepared to hit the plunger, but since it was full of water, it took all of her strength to aim the nozzle at the cat.

She was just about to fire a jet of water at the lynx when she heard a bark. It was Taras, and Kalinka would have cheered if she hadn’t feared for the wolfhound’s chances, because a hungry lynx was a formidable opponent for a dog, even a dog as large as Taras. The lynx turned abruptly and, snarling fiercely, sprang at him.

Kalinka ran up the stairs two at a time to find Taras locked in a vicious battle with the big cat. Taras had a good grip on the lynx’s neck with his strong jaws, but the big cat was clawing his sides fiercely—so fiercely that each rake of its claws tore into the dog’s fur.

Kalinka screamed with anger and leapt to the dog’s defense. “No, you don’t!” she yelled at the lynx.

Now that she wasn’t coming up the stairs, she no longer had to lift the nozzle of the heavy extinguisher so high, and Kalinka had a much better shot. Hoping to drive the big cat off, she fired a jet of water at both the animals, since it was almost impossible to tell them apart.