The Siberian Incident

by Andrew Gille

  The driver of the car was friendly but didn’t know Colin or who I was. He was obviously just hired to get me from general aviation to the terminal. When I looked at my boarding pass, I realized that Colin hadn’t even purchased a first class ticket for me and he’d only paid for one bag, so I had to square that up with Delta when I checked my bags.

  About eight hours later I arrived in Kalamazoo and called your grandma to pick me up. I gave her the story that Colin had presented me. She was puzzled as to why I recounted it in such a monotone and unexcited manner.

  “Jet lag,” is what I told her.

  I was actually asleep when the Savage 99 came back. Grandma Diane answered the door for the guy. It wasn’t Fed Ex or UPS, it was just some guy who dropped the gun off. Not sure if Colin hired him specifically for that or what but I put the gun back in the case where it belonged. I scrutinized it, noting where every scratch and ding in the newly polished finish had come from including one that I think was made by the claw of a particular Pleistocene animal.

  One day I took your grandma out to Otsego, I asked her to hike into the woods with me. We sat on a fallen log, and I told this exact story to her. I am not sure she believed me, but she knew that the story I’d told her about the hunt was probably not true and that something had happened on the trip. She told me that I didn’t act like I did before the trip anymore. She thought that maybe it was such a great trip that I didn’t think I would do anything more significant in my life and it had given me some kind of mid-life crisis. I laughed. Telling her was cathartic and helped me deal with the whole situation a little.

  I unpacked the bag that had stayed packed and in my closet when I opened it the stale scent of the beasts was still present. I hurriedly ripped the jacket out and plunged my hand into the pocket. There was the thick tuft of hair that I had ripped from the beast’s chest while it carried me away. I put it in a cigar box which is on that shelf over there.

  As far as Colin goes, I haven’t really spoken to him since this. I’ve been in Minneapolis at family events and I saw him at Uncle Grover’s funeral, but we didn’t really say much. It’s not too difficult to avoid him, he expects you to come shower him with attention, he doesn’t seek out other people. He was there parading some supermodel around and seemed more interested in being seen with her than doing any mourning for his great uncle. I’d come to expect that kind of behavior from him.

  Of course, when the Russian investigation happened, and he was in the news for it, I expected to be called up to testify. I never was, and this hunting trip was never mentioned during the investigation. I think the reason was that we were never actually there. My passport has no stamp from Russia, and we never went through customs there. When I boarded my flight back to The United States from Canada, I guess I never thought about it, but they just asked how long I’d been gone, and never asked if I’d been out of Canada. I listened to the hearings pretty intently, I was still working at the time, but I think I caught every single minute of his testimony. The two things I realized when hearing him speak were that almost everything he said was a lie and that his business dealings in Russia went far beyond marketing RC Cola.

  When the bears arrived about thirteen months later, an appropriate time to receive trophies from a foreign hunt, they were labeled as purchases. It was like I’d just gone online and bought the things. There was a note written in Russian which I took to a friend whose daughter minored in Russian at Notre Dame. She said it said, “Compliments of your Russian friends, silence is golden.”

  It was actually a very nice mount and rug, the taxidermist was an artist. Obviously, I keep the rug there by the fire but it has as much meaning to me as the rug I put in front of my door. It is pretty and pleasing, but it wasn’t something I earned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Aftermath

  SCOTT FELT A little drunk now as during the entirety of the story his grandfather had not allowed his glass to empty. He was more than a bit bewildered by what Mason had just revealed.

  “So a while ago, I had a security company do a sweep of my house, and they found no electronic listening devices,” Mason told him, “Of course, it could be that they are just so sophisticated that a company from Detroit can’t find them. I do however think that it's been long enough that I think the Russians think they are in the clear with me.”

  Mason stood up and retrieved the cigar box from the shelf on which it sat.

  “I am now going to give this to you Scott,” he said opening the box and revealing a tuft of white hair, “I hope someday after Colin and I are gone, you can tell this story and have that analyzed to find out exactly what it is. Maybe it will be some sort of synthetic fiber, maybe it will turn out to be something common like wool, but I think you’ll find it to be something extraordinary, unlike anything seen on this earth for thousands of years. I wish I could be around when that happens, but I know that for everyone’s safety I can’t be.”

  Mason also reached a gun that hung over his fireplace, “I think it is time that I passed the Savage 99 down to you as well, I want you to have it, and I don’t want Colin to have any claim to it. Maybe don’t tell anyone that you have this gun, I don’t want him dragging you through court for it in the future. It should be yours, not his, and I’ll go to my grave a little happier knowing that you’ll have this.”

  Scott nodded, not quite sure what to think of his grandfather’s story. At any moment during the time since he’d started, he expected Mason to laugh and explain that it was all a joke or a tall tale. However, the story had added up, and the animosity between him and his nephew had been caused by something after the Russian hunt. It was certainly plausible.

  Scott fell asleep on the couch that night. When he left with the Savage 99 and the cigar box in the morning he went straight back to his parent’s house in Battle Creek and hid the gun and fur sample in his room. He then traveled back to his dorm at WMU where he began typing out the story that his grandfather told him so that it could be revealed in the future when it posed no threat to living persons.