by Steve Haynes
‘He was trapping?’ she asks Sam.
‘Looks like it.’
The man is explaining something to Vargas. He talks quickly, gesturing with his beer can, glancing around all the while. Nicole watches the dog. It is pawing at a pile of snow to one side of the tent. She walks over there and scratches its head.
‘What is it, boy?’ she asks. ‘What have you got?’
She brushes the snow away. At first she’s not sure what she’s seeing. The fur is frosted, the hide rigid as cardboard. An animal skin. There are others underneath.
‘What are you doing?’ Vargas says. ‘Do not touch things.’
She glances back, lifts one up. ‘These are sable skins.’
Silence. The bald man just stares at her. Shrugs. Takes a sip of his beer.
‘Yes,’ Vargas says. ‘He was poaching.’
He doesn’t sound surprised. She looks at him, at all of them. Trying to guess what’s going on. Sam is pretending to study the snowy ground, not meeting her gaze.
She says, ‘Then maybe he got what he deserved.’
She doesn’t expect the other man to understand, but apparently he does – he slams his beer can in the snow, spiking it like a football. Then he is approaching her, spitting at her, shouting in her face. She catches one word, which he yells repeatedly: ‘Blyad! Blyad!’ She has no idea what it’s all about, and can only hold up her hands, palms out, to both protect herself and profess her innocence. Eventually Vargas gets between them; he shoves the man back and points towards the village, ordering him to go. The man does, kicking through the drifts – still yelling at her over his shoulder. His beer can lies in the snow, sputtering foam.
She looks at Vargas for explanation.
‘This man is his brother.’
‘Oops,’ Sam says.
She shrugs. She can’t take it back, now.
For the next half hour, the three of them examine the campsite, treating it like a crime scene. Treading carefully. Not touching anything they don’t have to. The villagers, according to what the man told Vargas, heard the screams in the night. A few rushed out with rifles, but by then the screaming had stopped; the poacher was gone. They saw and heard nothing else. Or so they say.
While Sam studies the perimeter, she and Vargas check the tent. Inside they find a rug, a pot-bellied stove, and a mattress. The mattress is shredded and ripe with blood. They crouch down on either side of it. Vargas touches the blood; it is frozen.
‘Why was he sleeping out here?’ she asks.
‘So he can skin his hides,’ he says, ‘without us finding him.’
Leaning closer, she studies the mattress. It has an animal stench to it, of sweat and urine. Among the frozen gore, she spots a cluster of hairs. Maybe human, maybe not. Removing her gloves, she places the hairs in a ziplock bag. It only takes thirty seconds, but by the time she’s finished her fingers are numb from the cold.
‘What about the body?’ she asks.
As they consider that, Sam calls to them from outside. They find him standing at the edge of the campsite, restraining the dog by the collar. It pulls against his hold, its muzzle buried in the snow. There is a track there, wide and blood-streaked – as if something has been dragged into the woods. Keeping the dog on a lead, they follow the trail. Only fifty yards away, strewn across a starburst of crimson snow, they find the remains. Some ribs. A femur. Scraps of clothing. And the head, trailing a rope of spinal cord. The face has been gnawed, the nose and cheeks torn away. Nicole stares at the pieces of flesh, trying to make them fit, trying to imagine them as a man. Off to one side she notices a hand, oddly untouched, still clenching a hunting knife.
‘Can I take that?’ she asks, pointing.
He looks at her curiously.
‘The blood on the blade,’ she explains. ‘Maybe he cut it.’
The fingers are stiff around the handle. She has to pry them off individually; the knuckles crack and pop and the sounds evoke a shiver of frisson, trickling down her spine. Vargas is watching her as she stands and bags the blade and seals the top.
‘What about the remains?’ she asks.
‘We have coroner,’ Vargas says. ‘Is his job.’
‘Look at this,’ Sam says, pointing.
He has found clear prints, leading away from the carcass. They gather around and hunker down to study them. The shape – a rear pad and four claws – is definitely feline. Sam spreads his fingers and holds his palm over the print. It’s both wider and longer than his hand.
He whistles. ‘Big fucking cat.’
Vargas shakes his head. ‘Is too big. Too big for tiger.’
‘What else could it be?’ asks Nicole.
Then, as they contemplate that, his dog starts barking furiously. It is looking out at the forest, in the direction of the tracks. The three of them stand up. Nicole can see nothing but snow and trees and stillness. Nothing at all.
‘Should have brought the guns,’ Sam says.
‘We go back,’ Vargas says. ‘Now.’
He mutters to his dog, which stops barking and whimpers once, as if asking a question. Vargas gathers up its lead and they retreat, moving quickly and awkwardly in the deep snow, glancing back like fugitives as they go.
The vodka is cold and numbing and slides straight down her throat like an ice cube. The aftertaste is unbelievably smooth. No bite, and no cloying bitterness. Nicole places her glass on the table and smacks her lips, accentuating the flavours.
Sam and Vargas watch, waiting for her reaction.
‘That’s nice,’ she says.
‘You see?’ Vargas says, holding up the bottle with a kind of reverence. It is a plain black bottle decorated with lettering that glitters gold like his teeth. Nicole has never heard of the brand. ‘I told you the Yuits have all the money, all the luxuries.’
‘It was a gift from my grandfather,’ Sam says.
He takes the vodka from Vargas and pours out three more glasses, then places the bottle next to the others they’ve sampled. They are sitting at the table in his living room. It is cramped and cluttered with Yuit art and paintings, and dozens of stuffed animals frozen in life-like poses. They came back to his apartment so Nicole could use her laptop to scan and upload the samples she’d found at the site. Now it’s a matter of waiting, and drinking. Which, in Siberia, seem to be one and the same.
‘What next?’ Vargas says, eyeing the bottles.
Sam taps a clear bottle without a label, and Vargas groans.
‘No – not that Yuit shit.’
‘It’s a new batch. I filtered it better.’
He fills their glasses. The moonshine looks suspiciously cloudy. As the men bicker about that in Russian, Nicole takes her glass over to the sideboard, where her laptop is set up among stacks of movies – most of them American horror films and creature features. She logs in to check her email again. Still nothing. Straightening, she unzips her fleece and wriggles out of it. Her chest feels hot, her cheeks flushed. Drinking always does that to her. Especially vodka. Just above the sideboard is a shelf with three animals perched on it: a crow, a squirrel, and – in the centre – a ferret. The ferret has two heads. Both its mouths are twisted into a twin-snarl, teeth bared.
‘Is this real?’ she calls over.
‘The ferret? Caught it myself. It had two brains, too.’
‘Is nothing,’ Vargas says, thumping his chest. ‘I killed deer with six legs – and all legs worked. Are many freaks up here. You can make big money from them.’
Sam grins. ‘The Chinese go crazy over the body parts. They think it will cure cancer and grey lung, and put a little lead in their pencil. And a lot of other bullshit.’
Nicole nods, takes a tentative sip of her moonshine. It tastes better than she expects. ‘Is that what the poacher was after?’
‘That,’ Sam says, ‘and the usual. Rare breeds. Endang
ered species.’
‘Is illegal, but . . .’ Vargas shrugs. ‘What else is there, up here? No logging, no farming. People must eat. People must live. So they hunt and trap and kill.’
‘Which is where we come in,’ Sam adds.
Nicole nods. She is standing at the window, now. It overlooks the adjacent apartment blocks, and the rest of town. There’s not much to see. Everything is squat and low and buried in grey snow, like ash. Directly below, she spots their truck, and the blue tarp stretched over the bed. It is covering the sable furs that they confiscated.
‘What will you do with the hides?’
There is a pause. Then Vargas says, ‘Evidence.’
She turns to look at him. He regards her steadily, his eyes heavy with vodka. She almost challenges him about it, but doesn’t. That’s not what she came here for.
‘Anything?’ he asks, pointing at her laptop.
She checks it again. ‘No.’
He grumbles about that for a while. Then, ‘How long?’
‘Normally it could be days. But I called in a favour.’ Passing behind his chair, she pats him on the shoulder. ‘I said: ‘my new friend Vargas is in a rush.’’
Sam laughs. ‘He was in a rush to get out of those woods – that’s for sure.’
‘So?’ Vargas splashes more moonshine into his glass, spilling some on the table in the process. ‘You went whiter than me. A snow-white Eskimo.’
‘It was stupid to go unarmed.’
Nicole takes her seat at the table again, allows Vargas to top her up.
‘Do you think it was out there?’
Vargas shrugs. ‘Something. There was something.’
Sam nods, deliberately solemn, then turns his empty glass upside down on the table, like a magician performing a trick. ‘You know what my people think?’
Vargas moans. ‘They only think about big government cheques.’
Sam waggles a finger at him. ‘They think,’ he said, ‘that Siberian tigers are spirits. They carry messages between heaven and earth.’
‘Yes. The message is: I am hungry.’
Sam holds up his hands. ‘I’m just saying that’s what they believe.’
Vargas grunts. The light in the kitchen is getting dim, now. Behind the layers of smog, the sun must be going down – even though it’s only two in the afternoon.
‘But it got me thinking,’ Sam continues, smiling. ‘Say this cat does turn out to be special or unique or whatever. Maybe that means its message is unique, too.’
She can’t tell if he’s just needling Vargas, or if he’s half-serious. Either way Vargas doesn’t rise to the bait. He stays silent. Nobody speaks for a few minutes. They sit and sip, wrapped up in the warmth of the vodka. Then her laptop pings, breaking the spell. She gets up to check it, feeling light and loose-limbed as she strides to the sideboard. The men watch, expectant. She scans the email once, re-reads it to make sure. Then she turns to them, trying to decide how to play this.
‘We have a saying in English,’ she says. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
She expects anger, but instead the two men burst out laughing. They pound on the table, nearly falling out of their chairs. It takes her a moment to make the connection to what Sam said – about tigers being messengers. Then she laughs, too.
‘They say it may be a new species,’ she tells them, gasping.
‘Whoo-hoo!’ Vargas says, raising a bottle in toast.
‘And that you can’t kill it, until we find out if the mutation is a defect.’
The worse the news gets, the funnier it seems to be, until they are breathless, bent over in hysterics, their eyes watering. Nicole sinks to the floor, clutching her stomach. It aches – actually aches – with laughter, almost like she’s broken a rib.
She can’t remember the last time she laughed so hard.
The joke has worn off by the time her and Vargas head back to his house. For most of the drive, neither of them says anything. The heating fan rattles intermittently, and through her seat she feels the steady grinding of the tyre chains. The landscape beyond their headlights is drawn in black and grey, like a charcoal sketch. Vargas sits hunched forward, twisting his hands back and forth on the wheel. He is driving more slowly than usual; other than that he shows no signs of all the vodka he has drunk. Every so often, he coughs, clears his throat, and rolls down his window to spit – letting in a blast of icy air in the process.
He says, ‘If it kills more people, is their fault.’
‘I know.’
‘Is your fault.’
She doesn’t have the energy to argue, or the grounds to defend herself. The message was clear. The agency won’t issue a hunting permit unless they can provide more information. When she asked what was meant by ‘more information’ the reply came back: suggest examining site of first attack for further evidence. She didn’t mention this to Vargas at the time, but she tells him now.
‘I have gone to other site,’ he says, banging the steering wheel. ‘I tell you – is same animal. If a freak – so what? Is still a tiger, still a killer. It has the taste.’
‘I believe you,’ she says, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’
Back at the house, Vargas gets out a beer and settles on the sofa to watch hockey highlights with his son. Nicole sits cross-legged on the threadbare carpet, her laptop balanced on her knees, studying the DNA analysis the lab sent back to her. Lines of code fill the screen, a maze of genomes and chromosomes, a labyrinth of proteins and nucleotides. Certain sections have been flagged by their technicians.
‘What is this?’
Vargas is standing behind her, stooping to peer over her shoulder.
‘The genetic sequencing of the animal. By comparing it with a Siberian tiger, they’ve isolated the differences in the genes. Some of them, anyways. It takes time.’
He blinks at her, his eyes bleary and bloodshot. ‘So?’
‘None of them are frameshift mutations. Most are transpositions, along with a few point mutations. They still can’t tell if any are beneficial or sustainable, though.’
He waves his beer. ‘I do not know all this. Speak English.’
Nicholas comes over to join them. He leans against her, clinging to her shoulder in that overly familiar way children do. She can see his face reflected in the screen. She says, ‘The main alterations seem to be in size, and bone structure.’
Vargas snorts. ‘So is bigger. We know this.’
He goes back to the sofa and slumps into it, changes the channel to an American comedy dubbed over in Russian. Nicholas stays at her side, watching her work. She smiles at him and adjusts the settings – changing the lines of code into a visual DNA model. The double-helix winds its way up the screen, linked by ladder-rung bases of nitrogen compounds. It turns slowly on the spot, rippling and hypnotic.
‘Tiger,’ she tells him.
He gapes, awestruck. Then he whispers to her in Russian, tugs her to her feet, and drags her into his bedroom – wanting to show her something. On top of his pine dresser he has an old-style gaming console, and a battered monitor. He switches both on and picks up the controller, using his bad hand to deftly operate the tiny joystick.
‘Tiger,’ he says, beaming.
It is a hunting game in which you get to select various weapons, various locations, various animals to stalk. She watches him as he plays, eyes fixed on the screen, his mouth slightly parted. His avatar creeps around a tropical jungle landscape while cradling a semi-automatic hunting rifle. It has a scope that allows him to zoom in and aim from afar. When an animal crosses his sights, it always goes down in a spray of blood: boars, baboons and exotic-looking birds. Before he can find her a tiger, though, Vargas appears in the doorway and growls something to his son in Russian. Nicholas drops the controller and scampers out. It’s bedtime, apparently.
Nicole yawns. ‘We go early tomor
row?’
For some reason, she’s started to adopt his curt, broken English.
‘Not so early.’ He glances at the ceiling, studying the fake stars, as if he’s a bit embarrassed by what he’s admitting to her. ‘Is long hike, but is not safe in dark.’
It takes her a moment to decipher his phrasing, and grasp what he means.
‘Because of the animal.’
‘We go at dawn, in light. Then, maybe we must stay overnight.’
He nods and strides out, pulling the door shut behind him. Nicole is left alone, sitting cross-legged on the floor like a child. Then, from the monitor to her left, a roar erupts, startling her. Claw-marks have appeared on screen, which flickers red before fading to black. Apparently the tiger has found the hunter before the hunter found it.
Nicole squats in the snow, struggling to adjust the straps on her snowshoes. The set is too big but she doesn’t want to give Vargas the satisfaction of asking for help. He and Sam are at the side of the truck, unloading rifles from the gun rack. They’ve come to a forestry commission parking lot, a few miles out of town. According to Vargas, it’s the closest they can get to their destination; they’ll start their hike from here. The morning light is still dim, the world still locked in monochrome. A glaze of smog coats the sky, grey and hazy, so heavy it seems to be weighing down the trees.
Finishing with her snowshoes, Nicole stands up. The two men are in the truck bed inspecting their guns: checking chambers, loading cartridges, adjusting scopes.
‘This is still only a research trip,’ Nicole says.
‘I know.’ Vargas tucks an additional cartridge into his pocket. ‘So?’
‘Isn’t that a bit of overkill? All the hardware?’
‘Is for protection only.’
Sam smiles at her. ‘Don’t worry – he’s not as trigger-happy as you think.’
The dog bounds up to her, its muzzle coated in snow. She rubs its head, packs down a snowball, and lobs it across the lot. The dog tears after it, snapping wildly.