No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless. Martyrdom was the easiest way to make a living, but death didn’t appeal to Ramzan, and he was pleased when the sheikh, gleeful after winning the ten-thousand-dollar tournament, crossed his spindly legs and offered a different proposal.

The real war was one of supply, explained the sheikh, who had been trained as a tax attorney before giving his life to Allah, and would return to tax law in five and a half years, when Allah failed to warn him, for the final time, of his opponent’s full house. The dzhigits had to be restocked and rearmed, the sheikh said, and failing to do so was more destructive to morale than a barrage of mortar rounds. At times, the sheikh continued, when the fighters were encamped in mountain caves, without the firepower to defeat a pack of wolves much less the Federal army, the jihad subsisted purely as a prayer in the hearts of its devout adherents. By this point, it was difficult to pretend that a few thousand men hiding in the mountains could overcome one of the world’s largest armies. Yet they had to pretend. The illusion of victory in the minds of the newly converted was, in itself, victory. And morale was essential in maintaining this ancillary conquest for Chechen souls. If the foot soldiers died in bomb blasts, they would blame the Russians. If they died of hunger, they would blame the Wahhabis. Trustworthy transportation was needed more than all the prayers of the Arab world, yet was so difficult to obtain, for the sheikh was a foreigner and didn’t know the land. Ramzan did. In the end, he was easily coaxed. The sheikh gave him an envelope with ten pale green twenty-dollar bills and Ramzan pinched the money with his fingertips. For some reason, he’d always imagined American bills would be thicker.

While his neighbors slogged farther into the forest in search of game, Ramzan drove to Volchansk, Shali, even Grozny. The weapons he would deliver to rebel encampments all came from Russian munitions factories. Some he purchased in bulk from a crooked Federal captain who would order his company to attention when Ramzan arrived, and would then walk down the line with an open parachute bag as Ramzan read aloud from the sheikh’s handwritten list of needed munitions; in reports to his superiors, the captain would refer to such incidents as rebel ambushes in which his soldiers had no choice but to surrender. Others came through the smuggling routes that ran through the border regions like veins through marble. One day, when discussing supply routes, the sheikh showed him a map of the entire republic, pasted together from a dozen low-resolution pages printed from the Internet. “What’s wrong?” the sheikh asked when Ramzan goggled at the misaligned segments held by peeling tape. It was the first time he had seen a map of his own country. The Soviets had banned maps of the entire republic for fear that such a symbol would serve to foment national solidarity, or, at the very least, make long-haul truckers a little too complacent. In the frenzied smuggling following the Soviet collapse, no one, to Ramzan’s knowledge, had ever thought to sneak a map across the border. And here was one, right in front of him. His country looked like a rectangle drawn by a man suffering from delirium tremens. He hadn’t known that. It did make him feel patriotic. “This is a beautiful map,” Ramzan answered, at last. The sheikh let him keep it.

Over the sixteen months he worked for the sheikh, Ramzan transported semiautomatics, machine gun belts, Makarov pistols, aluminum pails of loose bullets divided by caliber, telescopic sniper rifles, hand grenades, clothes-hanger trip lines, brown paper — wrapped blocks of Semtex, stopwatches, coils of multicolored rubber-coated wires, black-and-white photographs of Russian military bases, maps redrawn to include road blocks and checkpoints and ruins, jars of thick dark grease, red plastic jugs of petrol, batteries, butane lighter fluid, compasses, bandannas, powdered soap, iodine tablets, cigarettes, sacks of rice, spotted potatoes, plum jelly, dried apricots, condensed milk, lentils, ground pepper, communiqués, translucently thin rice paper, pens, envelopes, letters from family members, pay, prayer rugs, paperback Qur’ans, and steel septic pipes used to launch homemade rockets, which he also transported. Compensation was subject to the exigencies of combat. Sometimes it came in envelopes: U.S., Russian, British, or E.U. currency. Other times as a cut of the delivered goods: a pair of dull leather military boots, a basket of fresh corn, a boar’s hide, a sheepskin overcoat, a silver Makarov pistol. When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.

Combat enlarged the resupply journeys beyond the simple calculations of time and distance. Covering a hundred kilometers could take weeks to prepare for and days to execute. He packed his truck to capacity and used only a frayed blue blanket to conceal its contents. It didn’t matter if the Feds caught him with a butter knife or an atomic bomb. A gunshot would announce the same sentence. He drove toward ridges that sawed farther into the sky as he approached. Danger resided beneath, on, and above the main roads — land mines, patrols, and helicopters — and so he instead followed the trails of shepherds, flattening the tall grasses. Plains grew to foothills and foothills to mountains. He ascended switchbacks so sharp they required three-point turns. Both side-view mirrors snapped off. The rock scraped the paint from the door. Now and then he’d glance down to the gullies of indefinable green funneling toward slivers of water that marked the depth and decline of the land. Cloud cover dwarfed distant cities and villages. Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

He drove until the mountains no longer let him. Then came the shortest and most arduous distances. He loaded the supplies on a plywood frame and strapped the frame to his shoulders with strips of canvas and bungee cord. If properly balanced he could carry forty kilograms up the mountain. The rebels would not assist him, believing such labor beneath men of their pious patriotism, and he carried the forty kilograms up boulders and bluffs while the drop of the valley glared up at him. Every ten minutes he checked the compass and mountain line. He tied a bell to his wrist so the lookouts would hear his approach before their scopes saw him. They materialized in camo fatigues faded to the same moss-spotted tan of the stone. Beards hung from their sun-darkened faces and the martyrs greeted him with imperious gratitude. Depending on where the rebels were camped and where the road ended, he would invite Dokka, never Akhmed, to join him.

There.

The hoofprints of an elk.

He squatted to the ground, stopped by a set of prints that marked the snow like a long ellipsis leading nowhere. The tracks hadn’t yet frozen and the elk was likely within a few hundred meters. To come upon an elk again. To admire rather than shoot. He stood and checked his watch. The sunlight turned the silver hands golden. Twenty minutes before he was due to check in. Staring down the trail of prints, he tried to follow its line through the birches and pines. Somewhere in that distance of frost and shadow, movement disrupted the stillness and the disturbance had carved a distance within him. He continued. The call couldn’t come late. Not even the sighting of an elk would excuse it.