One Crow Alone Read Online Free Page A

tree. Up, up, up. Out of the drifts. It had been madness to try to take the low road. If she could just reach that firmer ground higher up, then she would be able to get to the shelter of the forest—and over the hill to Karlikov before nightfall. She pushed Kowalski’s tales of wolves to the back of her mind.
    *   *   *
    At last she came in among the trees.
    Two jays set up a racketing clatter high in the branches. The blizzard lashed the treetops, swaying and creaking overhead, but there was a kind of calm on the forest floor, and she stopped for a moment to catch her breath.
    The weather is impossible. You should have waited. Should have sat by the stove with a plate of hot food for a day more.
    The dog wagged its snow-crusted tail. Well, there was no understanding dogs.
    And if she found the foresters’ track she was certain she could reach the northern edge of the forest before nightfall. Wolves indeed, you foolish girl! She picked her way under the sheltering boughs with growing confidence.
    But she hadn’t realized how long it had taken her to climb the hill. By four o’clock the winter sun began to drop below the horizon. The gray sky, shrouded already by the forest, grew dim and bleak.
    Yes, dusk came quickly. All of a sudden she could barely see the trees looming around her.
    â€œAzor.” She wanted him close.
    She tried to calm her rapidly beating heart. It’s not far to Karlikov. It is only the sinking sun that has changed everything. The world hasn’t changed. It hasn’t disappeared. It is only the coming nighttime.
    But she found that the heartbeat of the dusk-fallen forest was stronger than her prayers. The dark dropped like a curtain. There was something in it that gripped her innards. The twisted tree trunks seemed grim specters. Reaching out from dusky shadows. There was no safe corner to put her back against.
    â€œAagh!” Her shins hit a fallen branch. She stumbled down onto her knees. Up ahead was a bright swathe under the trees. She clutched the pony’s rope and pulled herself up. The night sky rushed with unseen clouds and the shuttered moon appeared briefly from behind them and lit the edge of a clearing. She stepped out with loud breaths, her boots crunching across a glowing ribbon of open snow.
    On the other side of the track was something square and solid in the gloom.
    A twig snapped.
    She stopped as still as a post. The wind rattled the treetops.
    It was a broken-down foresters’ hut, the door hanging open—weathered boards roughly nailed to the walls under a snowy tin roof. A fallen branch lay over one side.
    Magda lashed the pony to a tree and pulled at the stiff wooden door, leapt back in fright as a clutch of twigs fell at her feet.
    The hut smelled damp. It smelled of earth. She peeled the rucksack from her shoulder and dug about for the matches. Struck one.
    The interior appeared in its guttering flame. Dusty cobwebs sagged in the corners. Ivy had grown in through the walls—snaking up through gaps in the boards. Along the back wall was a low bench with dead leaves heaped in mounds on top of it, an untidy pile of sticks beneath, and a small flat-topped stove rusting in the corner.
    Kneeling down, Magda opened the stove and piled a handful of dry leaves on top of the congealed char inside it, and shielding the match with her hand she lit the tinder.
    Soon the fire was burning strong. She crouched down with her arms around her knees. Tried to forget the fears hammering inside her head— claang claang claang —like a blacksmith at his anvil. Struggling to make sense of it all somehow.
    It was true the villagers had begun to talk. Even Babula. These are the hardest winters I have ever seen, Magda. And now too in Paris? In Rome? Those are places! God help your mother. Maybe it is bad in London too?—You must call her.
    Standing by Stopko’s door holding out a bowl of strawberries. “I want to use your