It wasn’t a bad question. Harley had only the vaguest sense of where the colony lay ahead, and he figured the graveyard had to be part of it. “If we keep to a fairly straight course, we’re bound to hit it,” Harley said, turning around and cutting through some brush. He purposely made plenty of noise as he went since bears were partial to thickets like these, and a startled grizzly was a pissed grizzly. At this time of year, it was unlikely he’d stumble across any of them foraging for food—normally they’d be hibernating in their dens, or, if they were really lucky, the hollow core of a big old cottonwood tree—but it was better to be noisy than sorry, he figured.
Wolves, however, were another matter. Wolves were always on the move, year-round, scavenging dead carcasses, and hunting fresh prey—young caribou or unwary moose. Only on rare occasions had they been known to hunt man, and the one thing Harley had been taught was that you never ran from them. If confronted, you stood your ground, shouted, threw rocks, anything. Running was an invitation to be chased by the whole pack, though who knew how the black ones that inhabited this island—known to be a peculiar lot—would behave. There were all kinds of tales about them. Sailors told stories about seeing them lined up on the cliffs at night, looking across the strait toward Siberia, their muzzles raised, howling in unison. And a couple of hunters from Saskatchewan who had set out to bag a few never showed up again. Their kayak washed up a few weeks later, holding a bloodstained pair of gloves and a wooden paddle that looked like it had been nearly gnawed in half.
At the time, even though the two hunters were presumed dead, there had been some talk of mounting a rescue mission. But nobody had wanted to volunteer, and Nika, the newly elected mayor, had seemed perfectly okay to let things stand. It was almost like she was on the side of the damn wolves.
For another hour or so, they plowed through the forest, the evergreens towering high overhead, and just as Harley was beginning to fear he’d gone off course, he spied a clearing through the trees—and just beyond it, the timbered wall of a stockade. A wall that had fallen into considerable disrepair, its logs listing to one side or the other like misaligned teeth. To Harley’s relief, there was even a ragged gap large enough to offer easy entry to the colony grounds.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Eddie said, coming as close to a compliment as Harley was ever likely to get.
And given the ghoulish nature of the work they were planning, Harley wondered for a moment if it wasn’t true.
“Is that their church?” Eddie said, and Harley, too, lifted his eyes to the crumbling onion dome that rose on the other side of the wall.
“Guess so,” he said. “And just as long as they’re not holding any services, it’s fine with me.”
The truth was—and despite the jokes—the whole place was still giving Harley a very uneasy feeling, not that he would ever confess anything like that to Eddie. For years, he had heard stories about the old Russian colony, and that was all before he’d been washed up on the beach that night and nearly lost his left foot to that leaping wolf … or glimpsed a flash of that yellow lantern sailors used to talk about spotting. But he had never imagined himself standing in the dark, frigid morning air, with a spade in his hand, about to enter the abandoned colony itself.
“Come on, man,” Eddie said, shouldering past him with his pickaxe cradled like a musket against his shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”
Harley let Eddie slither through the opening in the wall first, then followed. They were at the back of the church, its wooden walls stripped bare of almost all their white paint by the years of wind and rain and snow. Angling around one side, he came across a window with only a splinter or two of glass jutting up from its frame; a lone shutter banged back and forth. As the church was raised on rotted pilings, and tilting a bit at that, Harley had to stand on his tiptoes to peer inside. Taking out the flashlight, he played its beam around the front of the nave and saw a faded mural painted on the opposite wall. From what he could see in the gloom, it had once been a picture of the Virgin Mary with a halo over her head. But what thrilled him was the touch or two of gold paint that was still left on the picture; those old Russkies loved their gold almost as much as they loved their Madonna. He hoped they’d buried some of that, too.
“What do you see?” Eddie said. “Let’s go inside and check it out.”
But Harley didn’t want to get sidetracked, especially as all he could make out besides the painted icon was a great big pile of junk—old milking pails, blacksmith tools, broken furniture—piled up against a carved screen. It looked like the place had been pretty thoroughly scavenged, and trashed, by somebody in the past hundred years.
“On the way back,” he said, just to shut him up. “Let’s find the cemetery first.”