“A bone to the dog is not charity.
Charity is the bone shared with the dog,
when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
Jack London
From afar, through the spreading fir branches, I recognized the rundown framework of a bus stop by the dirt road, strewn with gravel, and my heart filled with pure joy. The joy grew even bigger when I glanced at my watch and found that I was about an hour and a half ahead of time. There were fewer Neanderthal frescoes on the bus stop walls, but the general condition of it, both outside and inside, was not that glamorous. The floor was broken, and cheerful twigs stuck out through its moldering floorboards. There was no place to sit or spread out one’s things. I had to clean myself up before I got on the bus, as some of my clothes were still damp, reeking of the bog. I didn’t want the people on the bus to die out of suffocation. It could take ages until the smell dissipated completely, but I decided to try my best and expose all my stuff to the purifying powers of the sun, which, was raising steadily like a freshly-minted ruble (not from the financial point of view, of course).
The ground around the bus stop was a mixture of slippery mud and last year’s damp grass, which gave me the impression that it could have rained here sometime before. I looked around. I had some spare time to put my things in order and get myself in shape, and I had to use it quickly. I noticed a smooth hill not far from the bus stop, jutting out like the top of a hiding giant’s bald head. It was a nice place to get ready for my return, and I wanted to do it, as they say, in style.
The reality, as usual, was less rosy. To reach the hill, I had to cross a wide gully with a small, gushing creek at the bottom, which I didn’t recognize at first glance. It wasn’t a quest to Mordor, but I spent about a quarter of an hour reaching the hill. I looked at my watch again. It was a simple watch given to me by my parents for my sixteenth birthday. It had a deep blue face, chromium hands, and a calendar, which I liked the most. It didn’t have a second hand. You will soon see why this fact was important.
Still, I had time.
I reached the top of the hill, dropped my backpack, took my stuff out carefully — what was left of it — and spread it under the sunlight on the dry, flat ground, soft and smooth like royal felt. Then, I stood for a long while in the middle of that solitary flea market I had made, with my eyes closed and my hands stretched to the sides, wearing nothing but airy blue underpants, exposing my pale skin to the scarce ultraviolet rays.
The first horseman came when I looked at my watch again. Its hands were in exactly the same position as an hour before. The watch had stopped, and I had no idea when. If it had a second arm, I probably would have noticed that it was not working. Quite simply, I had forgotten to wind it. My heart stopped, ticking for a moment, too.
The second horseman rolled in straight after the first one, blowing his rusty trumpet, as a distant rumbling sound, which was quite strange, almost offensive, to the magnificent silence of the Siberian backwoods. I didn’t like that sound, as well as the impending fact that it might be the bus I was supposed to board.
I started packing up my things, quickly, without panicking. The sound grew nearer. Then I saw it — the result of a short romance between a pushy military cross-country vehicle and a naive city coach painted in notorious orange.
I got an idea. It was impossible that I could have collected all my stuff and caught the bus. So, I decided to pick up only the most important things and run with them. I had only three such items — the bear knife, money (which was hidden in the knife’s sheath), and my internal passport.
The knife was lying in a prominent place, but suddenly I couldn’t recollect where I had stuffed my passport. I started rummaging through my things but couldn’t find it. It was not that I was childishly attached to that red-covered document, but it was requisite to confirm the fact of my existence. That piece of paper made me appear legitimate and real, for example, in the eyes of the local police. If I lost it, I would have to prove my identity, report to the police where and how it had been lost, and pay a fine. It could lead to a long and exhaustive encounter with the bureaucracy, which I preferred to avoid at any cost. Finally, I found my passport at the bottom of my backpack, hiding from the harsh daylight, lonely and vulnerable. But the bus was gone.
I packed the rest of my things promptly, dressed up, and dashed down to the road. I also wound my watch just to mark my progress. “You could have cried and waved to the driver, you retard,” I said to myself, climbing out of the gully. “Huh. Pale, like a plucked rooster, in huge, blue underpants and boots? Don’t be ridiculous!” another voice retorted. I liked the second one more.
Then, I remembered the flare torches, but I simply ignored the belated thought, as I had already been met with enough of disappointment. Now, the only option I had left was to go down the road and hope that a random vehicle would give me a lift. So, I walked… and walked… and walked.
There were no random vehicles, however, just solitary, bloodthirsty mosquitoes that had already started their procreation season. I was moving ahead as fast as I could, swatting them in all my anger. According to my calculations, the road had to merge with a bigger one in a few miles, and my chances to get a find a vehicle might be better — might be.
I walked leaning ridiculously far forward as if such a posture could give me an advantage in speed. Well, for sure, my head would cross the finish line way before my butt, and that fact made me more optimistic. So far, no cars, no horses, no low-flying dragons, no racing hedgehogs had passed by.
I had been walking for about an hour when I spotted something by the roadside — a dirty, yellow-white blot amidst serene, muted natural colors. I rushed to that mysterious thing at double the speed and discovered something that simply blew me away.
It was a huge pile of demolition waste — all sorts of pipes, wires, layers of cracked plaster, clods of lime, rotten boards spiked with pristine shiny nails, torn mercilessly from their comfy holes. All that meant only one thing: somebody had renovated their house and on the way to a dump, dropped it here, in the middle of the road. But, holy apes, why?
I gave it a thought. Probably, that guy had a tough childhood. His mother could have never cuddled him, and his father could have beaten the socks off him, while the guy himself wore only footwraps (by the way, they were more convenient and comfortable than you might think). Perhaps, the guy’s puberty hadn’t been that smooth either, and his girl had cheated on him with his best friend, while he had been busy arranging his footwear. Or, maybe, years ago, he had sneaked under the Iron Curtain and had been mercilessly sent back because of his peculiar foot habits. I just couldn’t conceive what kind of suppression, abuse, or hardship a man could have faced leading him to empty five tons of garbage in the middle of a virgin forest.
I carried on, looking back from time to time as if something could have changed in that heap. It didn’t. The only positive thing about finding that monument to environmental vandalism was the faint hint it provided that, sometimes, vehicles did pass through that desolate road.
Another hour passed. I reached the intersection, drank some water, dropped a couple of hardtacks into my mouth, and plowed on. Strangely, I had almost stopped worrying about my delay. I did what I did and did it darn well, and the only thing I could really do was to rush along the road at maximum speed.
I even started to notice some nice things around me: a bunch of snowdrop-like flowers — yellow, pristine, and shy — muffled voices, an indecisive woodpecker that was hopping along the trunk of a tree thoughtfully without taking a chance on any particular hole, clouds of green leaves shining in the sun like giant emerald diadems, small bridges over the rough streams, and even more.
Though I was a stranger in those lands, even I could notice the tremendous transformation that had happened to that forbidden world in just three days’ time. There were more voices, more movements in thickets, more smells, more passion and appetite. I slowed down and stopped. The sharp tips of the tall, blue-green firs on both sides of the road swayed solemnly without making much sound. The air was warm, and it was filled with the smell of incense. Could I ask your favor just one more time? I stood motionlessly and waited.
Then, I heard a noise. My ears picked up a weak, pumping sound, like a hidden symphony untwined by a composer from the chirp of awakening meadows, long before my eyes noticed its source. However, in contrast to the meadows’ tweet, this sound was thick, monotonous, with sharp chopping staccatos in it, and obviously had a mechanical origin. It might be a motorcycle!
The good news was that it was indeed a motorbike approaching me. The bad news, however, was that it was coming from the opposite direction. I recognized the sturdy figure of a man riding a pitch-black, heavy bike with an empty sidecar attached to it. It was definitely an “Ural” — the only heavy bike the Soviet industry produced. Its grandpa was a carbon copy of the German BMW R71, which was widely used by the German army during the Second World War, as well as the electric suburban train my friends and I had ridden on two days ago.
Despite being a copy, that rugged bike shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about its descent — no one had to — for the word “german” in the old English tongue meant “brother.” Dozens, if not hundreds of devices and pieces of machinery — from lamps, photo cameras, and computing machines to rockets, airplanes, and submarines — had been copied by the Soviet industry from the German prototypes; and not only by them.
History doesn’t recognize “it-would-have-been” stories but only accomplished facts; at least, it has to. However, if there had been a way to prevent the Nazis’ rise to power and all the years of bloodshed that followed that ominous event, the first man in space would have been a German pilot. They already had the technology to do that. Probably, it wouldn’t have been a full circle around the Earth, but they were perfectly capable of making a short suborbital jump over the 100-kilometer mark, as Alan Shepard did in May 1961, just a month after Gagarin’s orbital flight.
That last fact, probably, would have made that bike rider happy and proud, but I preferred to keep my mouth shut, for I had already had enough trouble for that day. I waved to him with enthusiasm. He didn’t even move his head but gradually slowed down and stopped a yard straight in front of me.
The man switched off the engine, took his gloves off, straightened his back, and stared at me quietly, studying me without saying hello or showing any particular emotion. He was in his fifties, strongly built, and was wearing a fresh black fur cap with ear-flaps, a black cotton-padded set of jacket and trousers, and a pair of high graphite jackboots. He had an open, clear-cut face with the sharp eyes of a man who never missed a target. His clothes were simple but neat and well-fitting. He was the master of that domain. He was an old-timer.
Folks like him lived for generations in small but wealthy settlements across Siberia, in large households far away from the ever-jealous eyes of the Soviet bureaucrats, and led their lives in their own ways. They would hunt, go fishing, keep bees, pick mushrooms, berries and pine nuts, taking only what they needed for living from the generous nature. They were the true salt of the Siberian earth — tough like a rock, strong but not cruel, dignified without arrogance. But when large timber companies got a grip on their lands, they became an endangered species.
“Lost?” asked the man in a strong, smooth voice.
I nodded energetically.
“Where is your group?”
“I’m alone,” I replied, as I saw no reason to lie to him.
His face didn’t change. Then, a barely visible smile cracked. I thought his next words would be, “What an idiot you are!” But, after a pause, he said, knowingly, “Ah, romantic… A city guy, ain’t ya?”
I nodded again.
“Where are you going?”
I told him my destination. He frowned.
“Not in my direction at all,” he murmured and looked at the empty sidecar and then at me again, with no smile on his face. He pondered. I prayed. Time crawled like a litter of newborn kittens. “Well, then,” he summarized his thoughts. “Get in. I’ll take you to the station.” He cleared his throat. “If you’ve already gotten lost, you’ll get lost again. You took too much upon yourself, lad. It’s no good.”
I nodded again. He grinned.
“Like these lands, ah?”
“Very much so,” I said sincerely. “I’d love to live here.”
He smiled broadly and waved his big hand as if he didn’t want to believe me. “All young people go to the city these days, all of them; my children too. Why? Are there honeypots everywhere?”
“Not exactly.” I twitched my lips.
“That’s what I tell them… but they don’t listen.” He snorted and put his gloves on. “Jump in. Let’s go.”
I rolled up the canvas that covered the sidecar, pushed aside a hunting rifle wrapped in soft cloth, and perched on the seat. It was a flat wooden board, with no padding on it at all, but I wouldn’t have changed it even for ten dozen of easy chairs, with eiderdown pillows, and another dozen belly dancers thrown in as a part of the deal. The man pushed the kick-starter, and the engine roared; we made a slow U-turn and rolled off.
He drove his heavy bike skillfully and fast along the rutted, bumpy road, looking straight ahead, paying no attention to me as if I didn’t exist, but that was the last of my worries. Thank Goodness, I had been saved. I was so grateful to him and wondered about how to thank him. I could give him all my money — all the chicken feed I had — but it would have been the wrong move. It wasn’t a Hammurabi law carved on a stone, but if you paid money for a genuine favor, it could be considered an insult. You had to return the favor, not pay money, to a man. You might be surprised, but back in those days, the word “money,” for many people, meant a “dirty thing.” Unfortunately, at that particular moment, I had no opportunity to do any favor for that man. The only valuable thing I still possessed was the bear knife. After all, he was a hunter, and it would be useful for him. And I could pay a reasonable contribution to the knife’s owner later on. That idea made me feel better.
I looked at the man again. He must have been a young kid when his father and grandfather, like my grandad, had gone to the war with fascist Germany. Did they return? Or maybe he was raised by his mother alone, like millions of other kids whose fathers never came back from the battlefields. As I said, about 26 million of the Soviet people of different nations were lost in that horrid war. Germany lost seven million; Poland lost six million; Japan lost two and a half million; China lost 15 million; the United States, France, and Great Britain lost about half a million each. The numbers will never be precise. It was the bloodiest war history had ever known, in which every nation received their share of the fallen to mourn, heroes to praise, and skeletons to hide.
In December 1941, the Nazi armies, almost a million soldiers, exhausted and frozen in the snow, stood at the Moscow boundaries, still fighting. It was a crucial moment. Up to that time, the Soviet army had suffered from a series of bitter defeats. Thousands of poorly equipped units had been fed to the Panzer Moloch, until the monster, choked by human blood, had stopped its crawl at the suburbs of the Soviet capital city.
Then, a new fresh force was deployed from behind the Ural Mountains. They called them the “Siberian divisions,” consisting of Russians, Buryats, Evenks, Tuvinians, and men from many other nations — strong, tough people who were accustomed to severe frosts and handled rifles better than one could handle his spoon. Dressed in white overalls, they moved fast on their skis, turning up where the enemy wasn’t expecting and sowed death. But they weren’t immortal gods, and many of them had found their rest far away from home. A tiny nation of Tofalars — a few dozen native Siberians — had sent all their men to the war; most of them had never came back. Did those millions mean something to these people? Did the man know about all that? Sitting on the perch, I didn’t feel like asking him too many personal questions. He was doing a more than generous favor for me, so I had to keep my mouth shut.
As we progressed to the station, the road became duller and more featureless. More and more vehicles were passing by — mostly long heavy-loaded timber trucks — smudging us with black toxic clouds of diesel exhaust. I saw staggering power poles, stand-alone farms on the roadside, log cabins hidden behind the trees, random ulcers of deforestation, more garbage along the road, more smoke and disorder and realized that the beauties of nature were well behind me. I was coming home.
My savior drove me up to the station — a small dusty platform made of concrete. We stopped at a graveled glade nearby. I climbed out of the sidecar and thanked him profusely. He listened to me patiently, hiding his amiability in the wrinkles of his eyes. Then, we shook hands.
“So long, lad,” he said. “Come back but bring some people with heads on their shoulders. This time, the forest let you go. Who knows what will happen next time. You must be a good lad if it let you go.” He laughed almost soundlessly, slapped the bike’s fuel tank with his gloves as if it was the back of a horse, then put the gloves on, gripped the handlebars, put the throttle up, and drove back along the road.
I stood on the crackling gravel in the middle of the glade and watched him moving away, until he disappeared behind the trees, leaving only a receding chopping sound. Then I realized that I had forgotten to give him the knife. Damn, I had just forgotten it! I hadn’t even asked his name.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.