01 THE SNOW and wind that blew into the drovers’ hut when the door was thrown open nearly snuffed out all the kerosene torches within two or three metres of the entrance. Essentially, the entire interior of the small, temporary metal sheeting hut.
Dayden awoke with a start at the sound of the door whipping open, he was a light sleeper to begin with, but the freeze-you-to-the-bone chill absolutely made sure he was wide awake.
‘Would you close that damned door?’ Dayden shouted, his gruff voice making his annoyance loudly known. ‘Is there no way you can sneak in here and not wake me up? I’ve got a line-ride shift at oh-four hundred.’
‘Dayden!’ the voice of the newcomer was panicked and short. ‘Dayden!’
‘You hitting the sauce again, kid?’ Dayden asked rudely, pulling the heat-retention blanket over him as he laid back down on his bunk. ‘Dreaming about Carla, or Ferrly, or whichever hovel-girl it is tonight? Go outside or get in your bunk, I don’t give a damn… just shut up.’
‘I’m not a kid, Dayden, I’m seventeen!’
‘Kid, I don’t give two shits if you’re fifty-seven, I want to sleep!’
The kid pulled the door of the hut closed against the harsh wind, and brushed sticky snow from his thick coveralls off in sheets. He slid to a kneeling position next to Dayden’s bunk and pulled the heat-retention blanket off his hutmate. ‘Listen to me, old man! There’s been gunshots.’
Dayden sat up and scrunched his eyes together for a second. ‘What’d you say, boy? Gunshots?’
‘That’s what I said, innit?’
The older man, late forties by the lines carved deep in face by the wind and sun, rolled out of his bunk, feet slipping into thick, knobby tread harsh-environment boots. ‘You hear anything else?’
The kid’s eyes were full of as much panic as his voice, and sweat caked his face even in the sub-freezing temperatures of the Taiga Wasteland. He didn’t look a day over fourteen, and most of the drovers thought he lied about his age so he could come on the drive. ‘No… no, I don’t think so.’
‘Don’t think so? Or you didn’t?’
‘I didn’t. The chuupas weren’t making no noises, if that’s what you mean.’
Dayden had thrown on his heavy jacket and latched it closed when he reached the door to the hut. He hesitated before opening it to the elements, and grabbed his long slug rifle propped against the doorframe, checking that the magazine was full and a slug was loaded in the chamber. He fumbled his nic-inhaler from a breast pocket, keyed it to extra-strength and heard it power down. He took the nicotine lug from the device, saw it was empty, and threw it into a corner of the hut. The lug crashed into a generous pile of other empty lugs.
‘Well shit,’ the old man said as he opened the door and stepped into the harsh, snowy night.
The midnight sky was the dark indigo that neared complete blackness, stereotypical of the long winters high up in the Taiga Wilderness; it was so dark that the constant, near-blizzard snowfall were mere ashy specks. Out in the distance, well past the mountain ridges that crest the boreal forests, winter lighting struck without the accompanying clap of thunder.
Dayden couched his rifle against his shoulder and scanned the area. Nothing out of the ordinary that he could see. Across the way, Tupper and Jade had emerged from their triangular hut, both packing slugthrowers as well; Tupper hadn’t even latched up his harsh-environment jacket and was bare chested underneath. If he didn’t latch up quickly, he’d catch a bad case of frostbite within minutes and be useless for the rest of the drive.
Jade looked over at Dayden, and pantomimed the shooting of a gun with his hand inquisitively. Dayden nodded but also shrugged, and he crunched his way over to them in the metre-deep snow.
‘You hear anything?’ Tupper asked, easing his rifle down from an alert shooting position at his shoulder.
‘I was asleep,’ answered Dayden. ‘The kid woke me and told me.’
‘I heard them shots,’ piped in Jade, moving his rifle to rest upright against his shoulder, all the while nervously tapping the handle of an antiquated slug revolver in a holster at his right hip. ‘Sounded close, maybe one of ours?’
‘Rustlers? Y’think?’
Dayden turned to look behind him, from where the question originated.
The kid.
‘Possibly,’ he replied, turning his head back towards where the herd was bedded down for the night and squinting his eyes. The darkness and the constant snow made for shit visibility. ‘Latch up that coat, Tupper, or you’ll regret it. Let’s go look at the herd.’
The four drovers crunched their way from the makeshift metal huts towards the area where the herd was bedded down. It was eerily silent, save for the soft murmuring of the bulky chuupas swaying from side to side in their sleep. Dayden didn’t like the feeling of unease amongst the men he was walking with, didn’t like how the silence of the night was building on this uneasy feeling.
They pushed up to the edge of the clearing where the chuupas were sleeping, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The large cattle beasts were stand-swaying as they should be while they slept, the rhythmic rocking an ever-present quirk of their sleep cycle. Steam geysered off their large humped shoulders, as well as out of the three massive nostrils that ran the entire length of their nasil crest, from the tip of their top lip to the back of their heads.
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All seemed well with the herd, but something was certainly off kilter.
‘Where are the line-riders?’ Jade asked. ‘Who was running this shift?’
‘I don’t remember. Thom, maybe?’ commented Tupper. ‘But they sure ain’t around. No one is.’
‘You two skirt the right flank, see if no one’s down that’a way,’ Dayden instructed, the older man taking charge. ‘Kid and I will take this left side and see who’s riding shift down there.’
‘Shouldn’t we wake the other huts?’ the kid asked, wrenching his toque in both hands before putting it back on his sweaty head.
‘We’re here now, so we’ll check it out. Might’nt been gunshots. Might’ve been a tunderclap,’ Dayden answered, trying to keep his irritation in check. ‘What if the brythms slipped and went down? Riders pinned, helpless?’
‘Yeah…’ the kid said, trailing off. ‘I get it.’
Dayden nodded to Tupper and Jade, and the pairs split off. The wind was so harsh and powerful, neither Dayden or the kid could keep their face gaiter up without holding it from time to time, and the kid’s toque flew off his head a time or two despite being tightly fitted.
Silently, they followed the brythm tracks wide around the herd, the four-toed tracks as wide and heavy as a manhole cover. Dayden stopped to observe the tracks for a moment, silently plotting along them with his squinted, focused eyes as they disappeared into the distance, when suddenly a flare silently shot up into the sky from far on the other side of the chuupa herd.
Right about where Tupper and Jade would be.
‘Found something,’ Dayden said, more to him than to the kid, who was lagging behind. He turned and motioned in their direction. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’
They started towards the flare, cutting across the bedding area off the beaten down snow track, when the first pop pop pop of slug rifle fire started. Chuupa were startled from their deep sleep, shaking snow from their thick, wiry coats in fits of wakefulness. Dayden’s eyes grew round with concern and he broke into a shuffling run, the kid following behind.
pop pop pop. pop pop pop pop pop pop.
Dayden and the kid slid down a black ice divot to the beaten snow track on the opposite side of the bedding area, hoping the gunfire wouldn’t start a chuupa stampede. A night stampede would be the worst-case scenario on this drive. The two recovered from their slide on the black ice, and stumbled onto the line-riders’ track within sight of Jade, who crouched behind a wretched looking tree with his revolver gripped in both hands. He heard them stumbling, and, jumpy, shot a single slug at them. The slug hit the ground a half-metre from Dayden’s feet.
‘Dammit, Jade, watch it!’ Dayden yelled, jumping back a bit. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘So… sorry, Dayden. Y’scared me,’ Jade stuttered, pulling the revolver back.
‘What the hell is happening? Where’s Tupper?’
Jade pointed past the tree he was sheltering behind, where the track went down another divot. ‘Down there…’
Dayden nodded and, couching his rifle, started to move towards where Jade indicated. He thumbed a switch near the rifle’s long, cylindrical sight, and a red flood lamp brightened up the area.
‘Don’t Dayden, please…’ pleaded Jade, a panic Dayden had never heard from the man filling his voice.
Dayden just looked at him for a moment, and went onward.
He crouched at the top of the divot, and lit up the area below with his rifle’s flood lamp. There, in the metres-deep snow next to the beaten down track, laid the torn apart bodies of a brythm and rider. The large, bipedal beast was gutted open from the base of its thick tail to his large and powerful head, intestines and stomach sack spread out on the snow still emitting some heat. Sticky blood covered the snow, showing up nearly black in the red light of the flood lamp.
Tupper was correct, the line-rider was indeed Thom. He sat cross-legged a metre or so from his brythm, completely stripped of his clothing in the harshness of the winter night. Though, being naked in the sub-freezing temperatures were the least of Thom’s problems now, because cradled in his crossed legs was his head and in his slack-jawed mouth, Dayden could make out what he could only assume was Thom’s own genitals.
Dayden gagged and looked away, but was able to keep down the vomit that tried to push up his throat.
‘Shit…’ he hissed, steeling himself before looking again. He swept his rifle around the area, covering as much of the slaughter scene as he could with the flood lamp. ‘Tupper!’ he hoarsely whispered as loudly as he could. ‘Tupper!’
There was no answer initially, but as he started to make his way towards the carnal pile, another pop pop pop pop came in response. Dayden sprinted as best he could in the deep snow past the disassembled Thom and the brythm, not once looking at either, and rushed towards the sound of gunfire.
‘Dayden?’ the kid called from the top of the divot, but Dayden ignored him.
pop pop… silence.
‘Dammit, no!’ Dayden cursed to himself, knowing the implication of the drawn out silence.
He skittered to a stop when he saw a pile in the snow just up ahead, a pile that was noticeably different than the white blankness of the snowy surrounds -- an orange pile that matched the standard-issue harsh-environment gear all the drovers wore. Couching the rifle again, Dayden slowly approached with caution. It wasn’t long after discovering the pile from afar to see that it was Tupper, laying face down in the snow, nor did it take an advanced medical degree to see that the poor bastard was dead. Dayden knelt by the body and rolled Tupper onto his back.
Both the harsh-environment jacket and overalls were slashed to threads, as if they were being torn from Tupper’s body like the pelt of a game animal while being field dressed. There was not a mark on Tupper’s still warm body, except for his throat, where it looked like he was attacked by the back-and-forth motion of a bonesaw.
‘Sonuvabitch!’ Dayden exclaimed, the anger in him overtaking any horror. He started to shake slightly, his eyes meeting the crystal blue of Tupper’s. He took off one of his thick mittens with his teeth, and gently closed the man’s eyelids. Skin to skin in this cruel environment was a sign of great respect.
Dayden knew he had to move, get back to camp and wake the others. The drovers had to secure the herd so there wouldn’t be a stampede, come out here in numbers for Thom and Tupper’s bodies. Light fires around camp, safety in numbers… this wasn’t some animal, this was someone.
pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
Behind him, over the divot towards camp, shots fired over and over. Dayden knew the difference between a single rifle and multiple overlapping each other like a damn fire fight, and that was exactly what he was hearing now. For no more than a moment, he looked at Tupper’s face, peaceful in his eternal rest, slipped his mitten back on his numb hand, and turned towards the rise.