NOW still lay in the hollows and in the rock nests where the sun did not touch. But the earth was damp and a soft blur of green was to be seen on the gray bushes that covered the hillocks. Spring had come to the steppe.
A warm wind rippled the forest of rushes that stretched down from the knolls into the Hooded river. And this river, without a boat or sail visible on its dark surface, murmured in satisfaction, like a man full fed. Beyond its edge black pools of water also had their voices—the song of myriad frogs that felt the growing warmth. By the thin smoke of a fire two black horses snorted and tossed their heads as Kirdy parted the last fringe of rushes and strode toward his camp, a dead heron in one hand, a bow in the other.
With the bow he held an arrow, a light shaft with two tips that had struck down the bird rising in flight from the river mud. The man looked at the sun, sinking to the edge of the plain, and turned aside to a hillock where he knelt, gazing intently in all directions. In the bare plain—that was like the bed of the ocean at sunset—nothing, apparently, was to be seen. But the Cossack noticed slender gray forms, blending with the blur of brush—wolves, evidently full fed. For a moment he studied them without surprize. They had appeared around his camp at intervals during the weeks since he had left the Volga and the leader of the pack was surely Karai, the giant borzoi.
The wolves had not attacked his horses, perhaps because Kirdy had lived for a while with the wolf master of the Wolky Gorlo, perhaps because Karai, the leader, had once been the Cossack's dog.
Kirdy did not bother his head about why things happened on the steppe. He was grateful to the wolves because they had frightened off the Nogai tribesmen who would otherwise have killed him for his horses.
If he had met one of the still more to be dreaded riders of the steppe—a spirit that had crept out of a murdered body that had not been buried—he would have reined to one side with a “Luck to you, sir brother!”
But, as he waited for the plucked heron to cook on the wooden spit over the fire where a handful of barley was already boiling in his one iron pot, he pondered men and their ways and especially the men he was following. He took out of a goatskin sack a worn leather horseshoe with the remnants of wooden cleats. Placing this before him, he added a tarnished silver coin with a hole in its center and a length of thin hemp rope.
These three things he had found by the ashes of a large fire to the north of his camp. Around these ashes at the edge of the river he had seen the tracks of a score of horses and the wheel track of a wagon. Now the men he had been following had with them a sledge with narrow iron runners, and a similar number of ponies. Back on the Volga their trail had revealed no wagon.
Moreover there was something curious about this trail. He had followed it back a little into the steppe and had spent a day in making wide circles without picking it up again. It ran to the ashes and it did not go away again. He had noticed many of the cleated horseshoes lying around.
He was certain that the man he sought, Gregory Otrèpiev, had camped at that fire, for several days. The silver coin was a Muscovite coin and the hole in it showed that it had been used as an ornament on a horse's rein or a saddle. The rope, too, was not native workmanship.
Otrèpiev and his five companions had not turned back toward Muscovy. They had crossed the river and entered the unknown world that lay beyond it.
Kirdy knew this because the tracks had extended to the fire at the river's edge and had not left it. The six men had waited at their camp until they had hailed a boat, or a raft drifting down the river. The cleated horseshoes they had discarded because the horses no longer had to pass over snow. For the same reason they must have removed the runners from the sledge and fitted on the wheels that had been lashed to the sides.
So he was glad that he had found the camp site, after a week's careful search of the river's edge for that very thing. Only a tribesman or a steppe-bred Cossack would have discovered it and learned from it that on the other side of the river the trail would be that of a wagon and a score of unshod horses—
But he had discovered also this thing that troubled him, the worn leather shoe at his feet. A Cossack cares for his own horse, always, and Kirdy had cut out that same piece of leather at the Wolky Gorlo, and had nailed on those cleats. It was a piece of ox-hide with the hair still on the inner side.