Andrei and the Snow Walker

by Larry Warwaruk

  “Yes, Andrei, a Cossack can ride at full gallop, swing himself down and snatch a silk kerchief from the ground with his teeth. We have the world’s greatest horsemen. We were the first to tame the horse. Three thousand years ago, our Scythian warriors rode far and wide across the grasslands of Ukraine. They introduced horses to the world. Horseman-ship is in our blood.” He cups his hands, yelling to his son-in-law, “Stefan! Tell the driver to stop.”

  Dido crawls down off the wagon and walks up to the stonework staircase of a burial mound. He stops at each step and kneels, bowing his head to the ground over and over, repeating the sign of the cross, thumb and two fingers touching his head, chest, shoulder, and shoulder. He prays each time with his eyes glued to the cross at the top of the mound. On reaching the summit he kisses the cross, picks up a clump of earth and crumbles it on his bald head, crosses himself three more times, each with a bow, then descends from the mound.

  Andrei knows the history of the mounds. At school the teacher told of the ancient battles against Turks and Poles. He told of the Hetman Bayda-Vyshnevetsky with 35,000 Cossacks fighting on this hillside three hundred years ago. Sacred graves. Mounds like the graves of their Scythian forebears. No one plows the land of the battlefield. Andrei has often asked if the Hetman was his ancestor. And Dido Danylo has often said, “Of course!”

  “Are there still Cossacks?” Andrei asks his grandfather.

  “A few.”

  “Should I pray for them too?”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Where do they live?”

  Andrei has asked these questions before. Dido never can say enough about Cossacks. How many times has he told the story of the Hetman Bayda-Vyshnevetsky? How many times has Andrei heard about the famous Cossack island fortress, the Seech, far to the east on the Dnipro River, and how the Hetman Bayda had started this brotherhood of Cossacks.

  “Do they still live at the Seech?”

  “No more,” Dido says. “Maybe some day again.”

  “Who lives on the island now?”

  “Farmers,” Dido says. “The Empress Catherine brought them from far away to plow up the Ukrainian Steppes.”

  “Can farmers be Cossacks?”

  “You should ask instead, can Cossacks be farmers? Could they have even wanted to be farmers when they could ride their horses across the steppes?”

  Dido plays notes on his flute, then he sings a part of one of the many verses from the song of the Hetman Bayda. He doesn’t sing the verses that he usually does, the ones with the Hetman riding a horse, or shooting arrows at an enemy from the Empire of the Turks. Instead he sings as the Ukrainian women do at weddings, calling for the Cossack to quit his roaming, his fighting, his drinking, and return to his family. Dido must be feeling sad that the Bayda family is leaving their homeland forever and will not be coming back:

  Go home and quit your wandering life

  You’ve children and a lovely wife...

  Dido sings on and on, and he hums. Not long after the wagon pulls away from the burial mound, from over a ridge on the hillside, as if out of nowhere an old man appears. He’s dressed in dirty grey sackcloth, his hair and beard straggling to his waist. He drags a cross hoisted on his shoulder, an assortment of stars and crescent moons carved into the wood. His eyes like cold crystal fix trance-like on Dido Danylo. Andrei remembers the moving shadow of early morning, the figure on the hillside just before the brilliant light appeared.

  “Skomar!” In a hoarse whisper the old man repeats the family name of Andrei’s Dido. “Skomar! Skomar!” as if in death’s last gasps. He points at Dido. “I am your Uncle Skomar, and my time ends.” He stands behind the wagon thirty feet from Andrei, the mounds far in the background. He shakes his finger, then gestures for Dido to follow him. The Holy man Skomar and Andrei’s grandfather climb up the hill and disappear over the ridge.

  The wagon driver and Andrei’s father say nothing. Mama has often said that you must never interfere with fools or Holy men. Mystics have wandered the land for centuries, and God blesses those who respect these Holy fools.

  They wait a long time. Finally Tato shouts to Andrei. “Go get him! Does he think we have all day?”

  Andrei’s familiar with the terrain, and even when he gets to the river, there should be nothing to upset his bearings. He’s positive there isn’t a spot anywhere along the river that he hasn’t previously explored...unless away further upstream into the mountains where the Hutsul people live. But Dido and the Holy man can’t have gone that far. All at once he feels again the strange sensations of the early morning. As he steps down a path through the shrubs to the river’s bank, the twitch in his temple returns, like a seizure. In Andrei’s vision the willow branches are laden again with coins and the river water’s turned to a broad path of gold. A fog rises swirling in circles, and like Aladdin, Andrei’s standing at the mouth of a cave. An energy like that of the morning draws him inside.

  Through a fog of incense and rainbow colours, two Scythian warriors stand guard, each with sword, shield, and gold helmet, each with a horse at his side; a white horse and a red horse. For a moment Andrei sees the warriors as Dido and the Holy man, but each much younger. Then he recognizes himself on each face, himself a Scythian soldier, the earliest of Ukrainians. A halo glimmers on a flat stone altar, a red gleam at its centre.

  The rainbow fog thickens and Andrei’s lifted, swirling round and round in its colours, until everything turns black. He remembers nothing more, only the vision in the cave, nothing more until he’s back at the wagon with his grandfather. Dido carries a goatskin bag with something bulky inside.

  “What do you have?” Tato asks.

  For a moment it appears as if Dido’s eyes are those of a madman. He stares back to the hillside.

  “He is my uncle,” Dido says. “He is of our Skomar family that goes back to the ancients.”

  “It’s true?” Tato asks. “The Holy one is your uncle?”

  “Skomar of the Scythians,” Dido says, as if locked in a trance.

  “What’s in the bag?” Tato asks again.

  “A relic of the Scythians,” Dido says. Slowly the spell washes from his eyes. He rubs his hand twice across his chin as if brushing away a fly. “Maybe just from Gypsies.”

  “Scythians? Gypsies? What have you got to do with Gypsies? Is this some kind of treasure? Magic?”

  Scythia, Andrei thinks. The sight in the cave stays with him. Overwhelms him. Dido has told him that the making of burial mounds began with the Scythians. No one knows where the Scythians came from or where they went. Only that they were warriors and that they lived before Cossacks. What does Dido have in the bag? Is it the golden halo?

  “What is it?” Tato repeats.

  “Ah, it’s nothing,” says Dido. “Just a bag. What can be more homely than goatskin?” And then he laughs.

  “Something is funny?”

  Dido pauses for a long moment, all the while tugging at his moustache. “I’ll tell you,” he says, biting his lips. “Uncle told me that two hundred years ago a Skomar ran off with a woman. In Bukovyna...some Romanian girl. A Gypsy for all that, the fool said.” He holds up the bag. “Her people had carried this with them for centuries.”

  “Scythians,” Andrei blurts, as if he’s taken up Dido’s trance.

  Dido turns his attention to Andrei, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

  “There is Skomar blood in you also,” Dido says. “You must hear. My Uncle Skomar said that there is a talisman in this bag that came from somewhere deep inside a Scythian burial mound. Robbed from the grave. He said it is a talisman that will reveal messages for lives yet unborn who will struggle far off in a new land.”

  “Take the bag away,” Mama says. “Leave devil worship alone.” She makes the sign of the cross three times across her breast. “Better yet to bury it in a pile of pig manure.” She draws her shawl tightly over her shoulders.

  “So,” Tato says as he rubs his moustache with his fingers. Then he turns h
is attention to Dido. “Let’s have a look in the bag.”

  Both Dido’s hands clutch it to his lap. His eyes dart in all directions, and then he reaches for his own packing crate, opens it, and stuffs the bag under a bundle of clothing.

  “I’m not to show a soul.”

  Dido waves his hand for the driver to get going. “Aren’t we a fine bunch,” he says. “Here we sit gabbing as if the train is supposed to wait for us.”

  Andrei tries to make sense out of what’s happening. The halo was guarded by the ghosts of Scythian warriors. It has a power, and it is possible that the power’s been assigned to Andrei himself, and it might give him the strength of a Scythian warrior. Andrei and Dido will carry the secret of this magic with them to their new place in Canada.

  •••

  They travel twelve miles to a siding on the railway to Lviv. From that city Dido says they will travel on a train across Europe all the way to Hamburg in Germany. There they will get on a ship.

  They wait half an hour at the siding for the train to come. Three families from another village are waiting with them. Finally Andrei hears the train’s whistle, hears the chug of its engine, and sees the belching smoke, a grey passenger car, and a red-painted wooden car behind it. The chugs come farther and farther apart as the engine slows, and steam shoots down from somewhere under its black steel belly, down between the rails of the cinder track. Andrei smells coal fire.

  Men lift the trunk off the wagon and carry it to the open door of the freight car. Tato and Dido help cart belongings off the other wagons. The men talk about how there has been little rain in Horodenka province this spring and the crops will likely be poor. Tato gives their tickets to a man standing at the passenger car doorway, and Andrei follows Dido, Mama, and Marusia up the steel steps into the train.

  Chapter 2

  The docks in Hamburg are a confusion of sounds, sights, and smells. Crowds of people talk in a variety of languages. Some shout and others laugh. Someone sells loaves of bread. Someone else, sausages. A man wearing a black floppy-brimmed hat plays polka music on a button accordion. The great ship blows its horn, sounding echoes across the bay. Seagulls swoop, screaming as they dive. The air smells of fish and salt brine. Mama clings to her own bag of bread and sausages as the family crams together up the ramp, following the throngs of passengers boarding the big ship, anxious to set out across the sea to Canada.

  Andrei waits until they are well out to sea, below deck preparing for the night’s sleep, before he asks Dido about the cave. They sit on Dido’s crate, crouched under a metal staircase in the ship’s hold.

  “What cave?” Dido asks.

  “Two Scythian warriors? A white horse and a red horse?”

  “You talk nonsense.”

  “Then what did you see?”

  “You should know. You came to get me on the riverbank. Old Uncle told me he was dying.” Dido puffs on his pipe, and then for a second time he draws the smoke deeply into his lungs. As he continues speaking, the smoke releases. “He said he’d been caring for the relic many years in a Cossack cave far to the east, an ancient Scythian cavern in the bank of the Dnipro River.”

  “You weren’t in a cave?”

  “There are no caves along our river. Uncle pulled the bag from out of a bush and handed it to me. Told me to guard it with my life. That’s just when you came to get me. ‘Tato wants you to hurry,’ you said.”

  “You didn’t see a light?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did the Holy one speak of a power?”

  “A Holy man trusts in the power of God.”

  Andrei shivers, though he’s not cold. The damp air reeks with the smell of many people crowded together, their sweat and vomit, but none of this makes him shiver. Nor the smell of cattle manure. Dido says that people are shipped one direction, and the cowboys in Canada ship cattle back. People one way, cows the other. But it’s not the living quarters for the ocean crossing that make Andrei shiver. It’s his wonder about the talisman.

  “Can I see it, Dido?”

  “No,” Dido says. “I’m to guard it. Carry it to Canada. Only there will it reveal its wants to us.”

  The next morning up on deck, Andrei’s parents argue, their voices hushed. Mama insists they get rid of the goatskin bag as soon as they get to Canada. She wants nothing to do with what she calls Gypsy black magic. She says that if the authorities find out they are carrying the Devil, they won’t let the family into the country. Tato says not to be so foolish. The Holy man is no Gypsy; he is a mysterious man of God. Why don’t they simply wait to see what the bag contains? He thinks it’s all nonsense anyway. Marusia pays no attention to them, lost as she is in her own world of memories. Dido says to argue about something else. Andrei wishes he could sneak below and search Dido’s belongings, because his grandfather for sure won’t show him. Dido thinks it’s his mission alone, that Andrei’s too young for such a responsibility. Little does Dido know what Andrei saw in the cave.

  But Andrei realizes that he shouldn’t dwell on his visions. There’s a lot of other things on the ship to catch his attention. It’s bigger than anything he could ever have imagined. Even the boat pulling them out of the Hamburg harbour was huge, but the ship Carpathia is as big as the mountains themselves. And it seems that the farther they sail away from land, when they can no longer see land, the boat seems small.

  Seven days after Dido and Andrei talk about the talisman, the waves rise high, nothing is rooted, only railings and tables, and their bunks. All day and all night the ship bobs up and down like a duck, and the hundreds of people deep in the hold moan and groan and heave their suppers.

  “Be brave,” says Dido, hanging on to the staircase railing, peering upwards to the closed hatch above his head, appearing as if he is helmsman. “At Hamburg the officer said two weeks and the ship arrives at Halifax Port.” Dido takes a crumpled paper from his pocket and marks off the strokes with a pencil. “Fifteen days,” he says. “That is more than two weeks.”

  Marusia lies in her bunk, a cloth held to her mouth. Andrei’s mother prays on her knees while his father sits on the edge of his bunk, his hands at his head, staring at the floor. Andrei stands on the floor, legs apart, fighting to keep his balance with the rocking of the boat.

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” Dido says, counting the pencil strokes once again. “We should have arrived yesterday. Canada can’t be far from here.”

  When morning comes and the storm subsides, they venture to the open deck and a blue sky. Someone has heard from the Captain himself that they will reach Halifax by nightfall. They’ll be in Canada.

  They arrive in a fog. The ship’s horn blares into the darkness. Lights show through, faint beacons surrounding the arc of the harbour. A tugboat chugs far below in the dark, pulling the ship toward dock. Andrei had expected to be shouting the excitement of reaching land, but in the fog and darkness, he feels instead a lull, almost a dread of venturing into the unknown.

  By midnight they are on another train, all through the night hearing the click-click, click-click. The car sways back and forth. Over and over the wheels click where the rails join, click-click, click-click. All the next day they wind through forests and rocks, by lakes, click-click, click-click.

  Mama still carries her sack of bread and sausage. As each day passes, she doles out less and less. Will they ride this train forever? Andrei drinks water from a little paper cup. He leaves his seat time and again, parading to the water cooler. In a tiny room he presses a lever on the toilet. A flap opens and he sees the rush of the railbed passing underneath. Hears the click-click, click-click.

  They reach Winnipeg, the place they’ve been told is their destination. Stay overnight in the immigration hall. Where are the farms everyone is supposed to go to? Can they walk to them from here? Tato talks to others, and he learns that they must go back again on the train.

  Click-click, click-click. They are being sent further. Will they ever stop riding on trains? It seems like ages ago, the
morning they left their village in the wagon, ages ago on the road where Brovko lurched and howled in the clutch of Petrus’s arms. Andrei’s dog is so far away he may as well be on the moon.

  As much geography as Andrei learned in school, he really didn’t know anything until now. Yet still he can’t believe how big the world is.

  Chapter 3

  They spend the next day at the immigration hall, and at night, they board a train again. Early the next morning, at Regina, they change trains. Mama worries that their trunk will be lost and then what would they do? Tato says not to worry. The Canadian Pacific Railway knows what it’s doing. The Baydas aren’t the first family it’s brought across the country.

  Tato talks with others and learns that they go north now. In Saskatoon he’s to go to the Land Office and get the paper for his farm. Ukrainian people are settling north of Saskatoon, on the east side of the Saskatchewan River. The paper will give Andrei’s father title to one hundred times the amount of land he owned in Zabokruky, and all they want for it is ten Canadian dollars. He will have even a few dollars left to rent a wagon to take them to the homestead. At least he hopes he will have enough money left.

  North of Saskatoon, at the railway station in Rosthern, the family reaches the final stages of its journey. The only travel left will be with horse and wagon. A light drizzle falls. The smells of fresh-cut clean white lumber waft from the many stacks piled on the platform. Andrei stands against the station wall with Marusia and his mother where Tato and Dido have left them while they go to hire a wagon. Families mill about all over. The freight carts are piled with steamer trunks, rolls of barbed wire, bags of flour, boxes of apples. Men shovel coal out of boxcars, and unload steel plows in wooden crates. Andrei runs up close to a boxcar ramp. A pair of horses step down, ears flat and nostrils flaring, jerking their heads, a handler pulling on the lines, coaxing the animals down.