The Winter Horses(68)

Only Taras seemed able to tolerate the noise. He lay quietly next to Kalinka as if not in the least bit concerned about anything; she badly wanted to hug him to her for comfort, but she didn’t, forbidding herself this selfish comfort in the hope that the brave wolfhound might get some much-needed sleep. Börte even came over and had a look and a sniff at Taras, as if envious of the wolfhound’s extraordinary ability to relax.

At least that’s what Kalinka thought.

“Shh,” said Kalinka. “Don’t wake him, Börte. He’s tired. We’re all exhausted. But him especially. You should have seen him fighting that lynx. You would have thought that the poor cat was a German officer, he was so fierce in attack.”

But a little later on, she noticed that Taras was breathing strangely, as if he was nervous after all, and when she stroked the dog in an effort to calm him, she discovered that he was covered in something sticky.

“Hey,” she said, “what have you been rolling in, you silly dog?”

Kalinka brought the candle close to the wolfhound to see what was on his coat and learned, to her horror, that Taras was covered with blood. And when she lifted the candle over him to inspect the dog more closely, she found that he was lying in a pool of his own blood. During the fight with the lynx, the wolfhound’s sides had apparently been raked to the bone by the cat’s powerful claws and he was now in danger of bleeding to death.

“I’m such an idiot,” said Kalinka. “I should have taken a closer look at you after your fight with the lynx. Do you forgive me, Taras?”

Weakly, the wolfhound lifted his head for a moment, and with a faint wag of his curved tail, he licked the girl’s face fondly.

“I have to do something,” she told herself. “But what?” Desperate to help the stricken dog, she rummaged through her forage bag for something that might help, but there was nothing that seemed likely to do the job of fixing up an injured dog. What Taras needed most was a vet, but finding one in Simferopol was out of the question. Kalinka thought for a minute; she knew she’d seen a medical kit somewhere in the zoo, but where?

“Yes, I remember now. There was a first aid kit on the wall of the ticket office, wasn’t there? Look, hold on, Taras. I’m going to fetch that kit. I’ll be as quick as I can, all right?”

She grabbed her helmet and went up the stairs, where she peered cautiously out of the front door. Already the zoo looked very different from even a few hours before—the birdhouse was completely destroyed, and the dead elephant’s enclosure was missing two of the walls. Even the dead elephant had disappeared. She had to look hard before she could even make out where the ticket office had been. Finally she saw the place and started to run.

The air was thick with the smell of cordite, burning wood and blasted stone; the monkey house was on fire, and it was fortunate that there were no monkeys in it. She could actually taste explosives on her tongue as she made her way through the bomb-damaged zoo. At any moment, a shell might have landed and blown her to pieces, but Kalinka’s fear for the dog was greater than her fear for herself.

Close to the ticket office, she paused briefly beside an open cage with a sign hanging upside down on one screw that identified the enclosure as that of a Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx).

“Well, that explains that,” she muttered. “We were in his territory, I guess.”

The sign also pointed the way to the lion house; somewhere, at the back of her mind, she hoped a small hope that the lynx was gone and that there would not be a lion loose in the zoo as well, but all that really mattered now was quickly finding that first aid kit and helping Taras.

This brief pause in front of the lynx enclosure almost certainly saved Kalinka’s life.

She never heard the Katyusha rocket that hit the nearby lion enclosure, and she didn’t hear anything for several minutes after that; all she knew was that she was lying down on the ground and staring up at the stars.

“Oh, I never realized,” she heard someone whisper. “I never realized how beautiful the stars are in the Crimea. There’s the North Star, just where it ought to be. And look at that purple sky. It must be that we’re so near the Black Sea.”

It was a minute or two before Kalinka realized that the voice she could hear above the whistle in her ears was her own.

She swept some rubble off her chest, picked herself up and, feeling a little faint, knelt again for another minute until her head had properly cleared. Tasting blood, she spat and then wiped her mouth; her lip was cut, but that seemed to be her only injury. Her coal scuttle-shaped helmet now felt different against her head, and taking it off for a moment, she saw that there was now an enormous dent in the gray metal, as if something hard had hit it. Realizing just what a narrow escape she had experienced, Kalinka whistled with wonder.