The Winter Horses(7)

He knew it was hopeless even to try and round up the horses and lead them to a place of greater safety; previous experience had taught him that catching even a Przewalski’s horse that had gone lame could be the work of several frustrating days. A few of the horses—Ruslan, Mykola, Dmytro, Leonid, Ihor, Yaroslava, Snizhana, Oksana, Sofiya, Yulia and sometimes Luba—would come to Max’s call when he had a treat for them, but they would never consent to being stroked, let alone consent to a rope or a bridle. Usually, it was possible to catch the horses only when they were very young and lacking in cunning and when they had yet to develop their tremendous capacity for speed. One of the two lead stallions, Temüjin, and his mare, Börte, Max had only ever seen at a distance. And it wasn’t as if all of the horses were in one herd; there were two, perhaps even three, herds of about ten horses each, with one dominant stallion.

Max told himself that all of this was in their favor.

They were also able to survive a long time without water, which meant that their human hunters were denied the most obvious strategy—to hide by the lakes where the horses came to drink. Besides, the lakes at Askaniya-Nova were frozen, so that was good, too. Max himself had seen how a lead stallion would scout the way ahead to water before directing his herd with snorts and whinnies—sometimes from the cover of a bush or a clump of trees. The fact was that even on the reserve, where until now the Przewalski’s horses had lived in almost perfect safety, the animals took no chances where humans were concerned.

Another thing in favor of the horses was that they were stealthy at night—as stealthy as any fox—and, by day, astonishingly adept at using features of the country as camouflage. From what Max had read about the horses in books the baron had lent to him years ago, it was not unusual for Mongol hunters to track a small herd and then lose it, only to find out later on that the horses had been hiding close by all along.

Max concluded it was one thing for the German captain to say that his men were going to round up thirty Przewalski’s and shoot them, but it was quite another actually to do it.

He fell asleep in his chair and dreamed sweet dreams of Askaniya-Nova before the Nazis and the Communists, and of the baron, who had been so kind to him.

A couple of hours later, he awoke with a start, certain that something he heard had interrupted his dreams. He stayed seated for a moment or two, his old ears straining to find an explanation for his sudden wakefulness.

And then he heard it: the sound of automatic gunfire.

Max grabbed his coat, his cap and his rifle, and opened the door. He listened again and, hearing yet more shots, he set off in the direction they had come from.

Any other man wearing a dirty fur coat might have been worried about being mistaken for one of the horses the Germans were probably shooting at. But Max cared nothing for his own safety; he welcomed any bullet that would have spared the life of one of his beloved Przewalski’s, and he hurried toward the scene in the hope that he might still reason with the Germans.

Gradually he heard the sound of engines as well as automatic gunfire, and another ten or fifteen minutes’ quick march brought Max to the brow of a small hill overlooking a wide, gently sloping snowfield, where a terrible sight greeted his eyes: he saw an SS motorcycle roaring across the steppe, and then another. The snow hardly interfered with their speed, thanks to their thick, knobbly tires. Wearing heavy leather coats, steel helmets and goggles, both riders were in hot pursuit of a herd of Przewalski’s, and that would have been bad enough, as wild horses don’t much care for noisy engines, but attached to each of the motorcycles was a sidecar in which another SS man was seated behind a heavy machine gun mounted on the chassis. These men were firing the guns in short bursts of five or six shots, but worse than that, they were grinning widely.

Several horses were already dead, and even as Max watched with horror, he saw another—a mare, he thought—falter in the midst of her frantic gallop, as if tripped by some unseen wire, hit the snow headfirst and then lie still.

He shouted at the four Germans to stop, but it was useless; they wouldn’t have heard him anyway. For a brief moment, he considered shooting at the men with his rifle—he might have done so, too, but for the fact he knew he wasn’t the type of man to shoot anyone. Killing an animal was quite hard enough, but killing another human being struck Max as something abhorrent.

So he just stood there and forced himself to watch.

Many terrible things had happened to Max in his life, but nothing he had ever experienced compared with the dreadful scene he was witnessing now.

Finally, when the horses were all dead or had escaped, one of the motorcycles turned around and drove back toward the old man. For a long moment, Max thought they were going to shoot him as well, but at the last minute, the man driving the motorcycle stopped, cut the engine and climbed off his vehicle. The other man stayed put, and Max was now near enough to see the smoke trailing from the long, air-cooled barrel of the machine gun that had been used to such deadly effect.