Today's Reading
"Did she say how big its tusks were?" Dmitriy asked. "I bet someone made a fortune off that 'monster'—and if they went mad, it was in a Moscow banya surrounded by blondes."
Thee mechanic who had been speaking, a man named Myusena, just shook his head and returned to his bowl of rice and fish.
Dmitriy nudged Svyatoslav. "We touched plenty of monsters from the underworld last year, without any madness. Right, son?" Svyatoslav thought of the expedition he had taken with his father last year, hunting for mammoth tusks in the thawing permafrost along a muddy, freezing river. He thought of the wounds torn in the earth by the miners' hoses, the men in rubber hipwaders crawling into the gaping holes, chipping fragments of bone, teeth, and skulls from the ice.
They had found no tusks, but at one point the melting ice ceiling of a hole collapsed. One of the men was buried forever in that filth. Afterward, the others realized they only knew his first name. Nobody could even remember where he'd said he was from. There was nobody to tell about his death.
The whole expedition had been a blur of drunkenness and chaos. On the way back downriver, one of the boats foundered and sank. The "team," bickering and fighting the whole way, had to cram into the other boat and labor home, dangerously taking on water while the men passed a bottle around.
All they had to show for the trip was one complete steppe bison skull, which they cleaned and mounted on the front of the boat.
Later, while the men were drunk in some nowhere town and Svyatoslav was huddled in the hotel room with a pillow over his head to keep out the sounds of the things happening in the hallway and in the adjacent rooms, someone stole the skull. That left them with nothing to show for the trip at all.
"I think your grandfather was right," Svyatoslav said to Myusena. "The creatures of the underworld are cursed, and terrible things happen to people who disturb them."
Myusena looked up at him. Svyatoslav could not tell if it was a look of gratitude or suspicion or contempt: the six men in the tent were all drunk. Their slack faces in the colorless LED light of the tent's lantern were unreadable.
Only Svyatoslav was sober. He never drank. This made him suspicious to everyone, almost feared. But the one thing his father did not press on him was alcohol. Throughout all of it, he'd never tried to pour Svyatoslav a glass.
"Here's a toast, then, to curses!" Dmitriy said.
Svyatoslav did not hear the rest. Wrapping his plastidown blanket around his shoulders, he left the tent.
The drone mules were about thirty meters away. They stood with their stumpy heads lowered, completely motionless. Svyatoslav could never get used to the drone mules: every time he approached them, he expected them to shift their weight or twitch a tail, like real mules. But they looked nothing like real mules. And when activated, their movements were more spider-like than mule-like.
Svyatoslav retrieved his drone kit from one of the saddlebags. He found himself making a wide circle around the last mule, with its strapped-down load of four long, curving tusks, still spattered and smeared with blood.
The mules were Myusena's—they were the only reason he was on this expedition. When Dmitriy and his hunting buddies were planning the trip, they had first thought of using ATVs, as they usually did. But ATVs were loud, and could be easily tracked. So they had found Myusena, the muleteer and mechanic, and convinced him to come along. The group had left their ATVs beyond the boundaries of the reserve, hidden in a copse of larch, under branches and needles, along with their terminals, shut off and cloaked in a Faraday bag.
The mules were nearly silent, no louder than real mules on the trail. But silence was in short supply. Listening to the drunken laughter of the men in the tent, Svyatoslav wondered how far that sound carried. The reserve was huge, and remote, and nobody had ever poached in it before that they knew of, but Svyatoslav looked up into the sky and expected to hear, from out of the starred dark, the buzz of a patrol drone. Nothing as valuable as the mammoths could be left unguarded. There would be camera traps—and worse.
But not yet. And maybe they would escape. Maybe they would get out. It was three days' march to the edge of the reserve. To the ATVs. Then two more days, if the weather held, to where the battered old UAZ van waited beside an abandoned hunter's cabin. Load the tusks in, sell them to a contact—the sum it was rumored they could get for them was unbelievable. The market was hot.
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