After they’d both eaten some canned Army surplus meals that Harley had picked up at the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe, they stepped out onto the rocky ledge. Harley had strapped a twelve-gauge shotgun on his back and wedged a can of bear mace — made from concentrated red chili peppers — in his pocket. Over one shoulder he carried a spade; Eddie had a pickaxe. As they marched off, he had an unfortunate image of the seven dwarfs heading off into the woods.
Fifty feet in, and it started to feel even more like that damn fairy tale. The island itself was small, but forbidding. Densely forested with spruce and hemlock and alder, the ground was rocky and uneven and lightly dusted with snow, with a lot more to come if the weather reports were true. The prickly spines of devil’s club bushes snatched at their sleeves, and one of them even pulled Eddie’s stocking cap off his head. He had to stop and snatch it back, then, out of sheer annoyance, he broke the twig off and stomped on it.
“You sure it’s dead?” Harley said.
“Fuck you,” Eddie replied. “You have any idea where you’re going, by the way, or are we just out for a hike?”
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.”
As they passed the front steps of the church, with one door sagging and ajar, Eddie cast a longing look back but followed Harley past an old well and into the open area of the colony. They were surrounded on all sides by crumbling old cabins and open stalls. In one of them, Harley saw a rusted anvil, in another a pair of iron-hooped kegs. Plainly, it had once been a working village, with maybe forty or fifty people living in it. But all that concerned Harley was where these people went when they died. There was no sign of a graveyard anywhere, not even on the other side of the church. Weren’t folks supposed to be buried in the churchyard in the old days?
At the far end of the stockade he saw what had to have been the main gate to the colony — some weathered beams, off-balance like the totem pole in town, still framed the entrance — and after switching the shovel to his other shoulder, Harley set off for it. Outside, a path led away from the colony, across some cleared land, and straight into a dense grove of trees.
“Not another fucking forest,” Eddie complained.
“This one’s got a trail,” Harley said, striding ahead, and it did. Although it was narrow and winding, the path seemed to be leading him back toward the rim of the island. Gradually, it descended, and to Harley’s relief yet again, he saw a gateway ahead, like the colony gates only much smaller. And the posts, he noted as he got closer, were elaborately carved with something in Russian. It looked like the same word or two, chiseled into the wood over and over and over again. Even Eddie paused to study the writing. “You think it says, ‘Welcome to the buried treasure’?” he said.
And Harley could only wonder. Just beyond the posts lay the colony graveyard, no more than an acre, but littered with stone markers and wooden crosses tilting this way and that in the frozen ground. It was starting to get lighter out, the sun fighting its way through a scrim of hazy clouds, and in the faint daylight Harley could also see that many of the headstones had their own curious inscription down toward their base. It looked like a little crescent, but he was damned if he knew what that meant either. Did headstone makers sign their work? Shit, he thought, dropping the end of his spade between his feet, where was he supposed to start?