The Last Wild Horses

by Maja Lunde, Rob Shapiro

Genres: Time Travel

Synopsis

Translated into 36 languages, winner of the Norwegian Bookseller’s Prize, and the most successful Norwegian author of her generation, Maja Lunde returns with a heart-wrenching tale, set in the distant past and the dystopian future, about extinction and survival, family and hope.

Mikhail lives in Russia in 1881. When a skeleton of a rare wild horse is brought to him, the zoologist plans an expedition to Mongolia to find the fabled Przewalski horse, a journey that tests not only his physicality, but his heart.In 1992, Karin, alongside her troubled son Mathias and several Przewalski horses, travels to Mongolia to re-introduce the magnificent horses to their native land. The veterinarian has dedicated her life to saving the breed from extinction, prioritizing the wild horses, even over her own son. 

Europe’s future is uncertain in 2064, but Eva is willing to sacrifice nearly everything to hold onto her family’s farm. Her teenage daughter implores Eva to leave the farm and Norway, but a pregnant wild mare Eva is tending is about to foal. Then, a young woman named Louise unexpectedly arrives on the farm, with mysterious intentions that will either bring them all together, or devastate them one by one.

Spanning continents and centuries, The Last Wild Horses is a powerful tale of survival and connection—of humans, animals, and the indestructible bonds that unite us all. 

Translated from the Norwegian by Diane Oatley

Release date: February 15, 2022

Publisher: HarperVia

Print pages: 448

Sample

Eva

Heiane, Viken, Norway, 2064

The stallion’s attraction to the mare verged on euphoria. The instinct was all-consuming, making him delirious, unpredictable. As a human being, I will never understand such an intense, physical craving. Well, there was a period of my life when I’d allowed myself to be pulled under the surface, where I’d let go, but only for a few minutes and that was long ago. I could no longer afford such a luxury. The only drive propelling my actions now was hunger. Hunger can make a person behave irrationally, too, in a manner resembling madness. Hunger can compel us to do just about anything.

There’s no arguing with an animal’s drives, so I had to protect Nike, my mare. Rimfaxe was relentless, although the fences around Nike and her foal Puma should have been enough to keep him at a safe distance. Nike was in heat and this lured him to the paddock no matter how much I yelled and gesticulated. She’d lost her partner, Hummel the stallion, last autumn. He’d been old and tired; I took pity on him. And now Nike was alone. I knew she would not find peace until she conceived. But she couldn’t have what she wanted because she was a takhi, one of the few remaining wild horses in the world, and Rimfaxe was just a wholly ordinary, tame horse Richard had freed before his departure from the neighboring farm one year ago. The foal of a wild horse and a tame horse would inherit predominantly the characteristics of the tame horse; the bloodline would die out after just two generations, and all our efforts to bring her here, the work invested to ensure the continued survival of her breed, would have been in vain.

“Get out of here, Rimfaxe!”

The stallion rubbed against the fence, thrust his muzzle toward Nike trying to reach her, and the mare encouraged him, lifting her tail and turning her hindquarters in his direction.

I ran closer waving my arms.

“Get out of here! Shoo!”

Rimfaxe whinnied at me, twisting and side-stepping a bit, before trotting away, his haunches expressing his indignation.

“Forget about it!” I shouted after him. “Go find a horse of your own kind!”

Soon, I would no longer need to guard them like this. It was September. Nike was about to commence her six-month anestrus period, six months of peace and quiet for both of us. During the winter, I had control over the animals’ behavior and my own situation. As long as the larder was full, as long as the winter storms kept their distance, as long as the power didn’t go out, life was manageable in the winter.

I walked all the way over to the fence, leaned against a pole, and reached my hands out to the wild horses.

“Good morning, Nike. Hi, Puma.”

They turned their heads toward me, recognizing my voice. Puma came over first, his skinny legs nimble against the ground. He was still new to the world, a little unsteady, and his movements had a kind of hesitancy. He poked his muzzle through the fence and snuffled softly.

“Do I have something for you?” I asked and smiled. “You think I have something for the two of you?”

I stuck my hand in my pocket.

“Okay, but just for today.”

Nike came over as well. Her nostrils flared when she discovered the carrots I’d taken out of my pocket.

“There you go, little one.” I gave the first carrot to Puma. A small carrot, because he was still too young to digest much of anything except the mare’s milk.

Nike stomped one hoof.

“Take it easy. There’s one for you, too.”

I gave her the biggest one. It vanished into her mouth in a flash and she crunched on it loudly.

“Don’t tell Isa,” I said.

Nike snorted, waving her tail.

“Isa’s strict? Yes, my daughter is strict.”

I stood there just watching them for a little while though they paid me no further attention, and then I turned and hurried back to the farm. It was Friday, shopping day, and I had to go down to the quay. Sometimes fishermen or hunters would still show up down there. The hens had laid many eggs in the past week and maybe somebody would come who’d be interested in them.

I hurried past the abandoned newsstand, where the windows were broken and the advertising posters bleached pale from the sun, walked up the hill around the enclosure that had sheltered cat species of all kinds, passed by the small wetland area that Grandfather had created as a refuge for endangered amphibians at the start of the new millennium, and the fenced-in grove where the wolves had hidden, the shyest species we’d had.

For all three generations during which my family ran the park, the animals had thrived in our care. They had demonstrated as much by giving us offspring. The public came to be entertained and to learn, and the highlight was the chance to see the baby animals. Then visitors would laugh and point and say look, look, how cute, how incredibly cute! Once the snow leopard had triplets; it caused a sensation. We never had as many visitors as we did that summer. But for us, new life was always a serious matter. I remember the other children at school thought we were strange, that it was embarrassing to have friends over. Breeding and impregnation were topics of conversation around the dinner table in our house. And when new, small creatures came into the world, we cared for them as if they were our own children. No, they’re not ours, they’re theirs, Daddy always said, and our job is to make sure they have the best possible living conditions so they will want to reproduce.

Now the snow leopards were gone, most of the other animals, too; only a few remained in my care. A small herd of Finnish forest reindeer lived in the large area previously inhabited by the wolves. The species was not endangered, but they managed more or less on their own down there, which was why I hadn’t yet released them. Two mangy peregrine falcons, both females, I still kept in a cage. They didn’t require much care, but I feared they would die if the day should come when I could no longer look after them. A single Scottish wildcat lived alone in the area of the park furthest west. I couldn’t bring myself to set him free; then he would just mate with a tame cat and his bloodline would die out. And of course, Nike and Puma—my most cherished animals. I protected them fiercely.

It was Anne, my sister, who’d taken on the responsibility of bringing wild horses here to Heiane. She’d been talking about them ever since she was a little girl. I remember how she watched the same films on YouTube over and over again, sat by herself with her iPad in her lap and headphones over her ears while the horses galloped across the screen in front of her. She worked for several years to buy a stallion and a mare from a sanctuary in France and finally she got Heiane accepted into an international breeding program. Nike and Hummel were some of the very last horses to be sold between parks. Horses like Rimfaxe would always survive, but there were far too few wild horses left in the world. I hoped that when all of this was over, when life had stabilized and it was possible to contact potential partners out there, it would be possible to acquire a new stallion for Nike. Because in Mongolia there might still be wild horses. They’d had so many. Some of them must still be alive?

Nike and Puma were named after running shoes. Anne came up with their names; she’d named all our animals. She named them after things that no longer existed: clothing, electric gadgets, watches, and cars. Isa thought it was funny; she still laughed at the names from time to time. Personally, they reminded me a little too much of Anne. Not just of her sense of humor, but of her drive. And her presence; those two things were perhaps connected. She was formidable and she was a person who got things done.

But Anne was gone—her strong voice, her body that never sat still. She’d left Heiane, she’d left us and the horses, said it was just for a few months, but she never came back. The last time I spoke to her she’d made it as far north as Trøndelag. That was almost one year ago. Then our telephone stopped working. The signals vanished and we were really alone. Isa started locking the door every night. We’re safe here, I said, and installed a dead bolt on the inside of the door.

“When will you be back?” Isa asked.

I was standing beside the pickup, ready to drive down to the quay.

“You know that I don’t know. Maybe nobody will be there today. Maybe nobody has anything to sell. The last time I had to wait for several hours.”

“Can’t I come with you? We can do the cows together when we come back.”

“It’s best if you stay here.”

“Alone.” She hunched her shoulders apprehensively. “Can’t you teach me to drive soon?”

“You’re only fourteen.”

“It’s not exactly like we’re going to be stopped.”

I took a chance and reached out my hand to ruffle her hair.

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

She didn’t twist away, let me pat her on the head.

“If any strangers should come, lock the door,” I said. “Remember the dead bolt, too.”

“I will.”

“And pretend you’re not home.”

“I know, Mother.”

“And by the way, can you check and see if the cellar door is closed? I don’t want the rain to get inside.”

“Yes.”

“Bye now, sweetie.”

I gave her a quick hug. Isa hugged me back. Friday was the only day she would actually hug me back. She was as tall as me now and had pimples on her forehead, but her cheeks were still as smooth as a child’s. When I thought about Isa, it was a child I pictured, so every time I saw her now, it startled me. She was tall, thin, and gangly, had small breasts under her T-shirt and high, chiseled cheekbones. Just one year ago she was a child; now she swayed her hips a bit when she walked, her movements self-aware and studied, as if she were putting herself on display all the time, as if there were anyone here to show herself to. I wondered if, from now on, I would always be startled. If I would always be surprised at the sight of my child, and whether all parents had the same reaction.

Isa released me abruptly, realized that she was too old to hug me in this way. We fell silent; she looked away, embarrassed.

“You won’t forget the cellar door, will you?” I said to help her.

“No,” she said. “Go on, then.”

I got into the pickup, started the engine. The sky darkened and the first raindrops splattered loudly against the windshield. Isa was still waiting in the yard; I could see her in the rearview mirror. If I squinted, she still looked like she was seven or eight. She stood the way she’s always done, with her feet slightly turned out and one of her arms around the other, as if she were hugging herself. I swallowed and focused on the road.

I’d driven a couple of kilometers without seeing a soul when a small group suddenly appeared on the left side of the road. A mother, a father, two daughters. Each of them had a knapsack on their back and they were pushing a neon-yellow bicycle cart full of possessions in front of them. The rain poured off them, their faces hidden beneath large hoods, their clothing so wet it was dark. Only the bicycle cart’s letters shone undaunted: Sports Extreme. The father held out his thumb when he saw me, a lone, white finger, sticking up from a skinny hand, the universal sign that you were one of them, a wanderer.

I stomped on the gas pedal, sped past them as fast as I could, avoiding the rearview mirror so I’d be spared the sight of their reaction.

Isa wanted us to leave, to be like them, live on the road. Abandon Heiane and head north the way all the others had done in search of the small villages that still existed, in search of a human society where life resembled the life we’d had before. All of Europe was walking, in a state of disorientation, without a destination. For many years people had been displaced; the drought drove them into exile. The borders were closed in the north when I was still a child. Then The Collapse came. And the war. For seven years, they kept at it—the war over food, over water. Instead of investing their energy in preparations for what we knew was coming, they invested everything in winning. But nobody won; only losers remained.

Now nobody went to war any longer and everything we’d fought for was gone. Even the borders had disappeared.

We were lucky to live here. We were lucky never to have had the battlefields in our backyard, to have a well full of water. A farm, a home, something to cultivate, animals to breed. As long as we had the farm, we wouldn’t be forced to migrate. There should be no question about it. But something or other changed when Anne left us. And when Richard and his family also left immediately afterward, and Isa lost Agnes and Lars, her only friends, she started pestering me. She didn’t understand why we still lived here. She brought it up all the time, worried about it, claimed that the animals gave us less than before, that they were starting to get old, the cows and the hens and Boeing, the pig, who actually should have been slaughtered for Christmas last year. Richard and his family had gone in the direction of Nordland. They had family near Bodø, and they still lived well up there, they claimed. There were enough fish in the ocean for them to manage and the society still resembled a small city. It was to Nordland that Isa sometimes said she wanted to go when I asked what her plan was. As if we would manage to make it all the way up there; as if the little community still existed when all the others had disappeared. If we left, the highway would become our home.

Besides, Isa forgot about the animals. They weren’t here for us, after all; it was more that we were here for them. The few wild animals that remained in the park needed me. Especially Puma. We couldn’t leave him, particularly not now that the grass was withering and a whiff of decay hung in the air.

When I left the farm, the rain had been merely a drizzle, but as I approached the harbor the sky turned a dark gray, almost black. Several weeks had passed since the last heavy downpour, but the ground was still saturated with moisture. The water would have nowhere to go and I thought about the cellar, envisioned how the rain would leak through, cover the floor, and rise.

Hopefully, Isa had remembered to close the cellar door. The outside stairway turned into a brook in a downpour and if the door was open, the damage would be even greater. We kept our flour down there—last summer I’d bartered my way to two hundred kilos of wholemeal flour—and the vegetables, even though there were less than I’d hoped after the wet summer, and ten kilos of rice I’d been fortunate enough to get hold of a few weeks ago. The last time there was a downpour, I’d moved the sacks onto shelves higher up. But maybe not high enough.

It was raining harder and harder, the sky coming closer, an enormous, threatening body that descended upon the landscape. The drops pounded against the roof of the cab and flatbed. While last summer was so dry and hot that nothing would grow and I went around with a constant fear of a fire outbreak, we’d hardly seen the sun this year. I was wearing a rain jacket, rain pants, and boots, but was clammy through and through, even inside the pickup. The damp permeated everything. When I was a little girl we distinguished between rainy spells and dry spells. Now we distinguished between the many different kinds of precipitation. The lightest kind that hung like mist in the air, so you didn’t notice it was raining until you saw the water beading on your jacket. Drizzle and light rain, in my opinion, were the same thing, but Isa insisted that drizzle was finer than light rain. Then there was heavy rainfall, this despondent precipitation that fell straight down on windless days. Squalls of rain stirred up by the wind. And the most intense downpours, when the sluices of the heavens opened, the world became an ocean, and I couldn’t help but think of Noah.

I drove all the way down to the water and parked just a few meters from the quay. Heiane had been a trading post for fifteen hundred years. We used to be proud of our history, even had a small museum where visitors could see old jewelry and tools from the time when the Vikings met here and traded their wares. The jewelry was stolen a long time ago, and otherwise, there were no visible traces of the past in the village. Heiane was but a collection of houses and summer cabins around the quay; the settlement spread upward across gently rolling hillsides. The houses that had once had uniform red and white surfaces were now full of nuances, like tie-dye. People still lived in some of them, but fewer and fewer all the time. Everyone I’d had contact with had long since moved away. Everyone except Einar. He lived with his buddies in one of the village’s most beautiful cabins, an old sea captain’s dwelling with a huge annex, the paint peeling off the walls, and punctured glass in the picture windows. The cabin’s waterfront location would have once been worth millions, but, in recent years, the water’s edge had crept steadily closer as the ocean rose indiscernibly, a few millimeters annually. I couldn’t see anyone outside, nor any lights in the windows. As long as I didn’t run into Einar, everything would be fine. I was afraid of the wanderers, too, the hungry desperation that drove them, but still nobody had found our farm. Nobody could imagine that the almost overgrown gravel road actually led somewhere, to someone. Nobody except Einar. So it was his tired, rough face I saw when I turned the key in the lock and threw the dead bolt every evening.

I didn’t get out of the pickup right away, but, instead, sat for a moment surveying my surroundings. The harbor was quiet. It’s been several years since the stores closed. Several years since I stopped using money. I paid mostly with milk and eggs, which we had enough of year-round. In the summer and autumn, we also often had corn and some vegetables and fruit, but this season a lot had been washed away by the rain. The vegetables and fruit we harvested we always kept for ourselves. They were precious; the blossoms had to be fertilized by hand. There were still some wild insects that helped out, but I had long since given up on the beehives. The bee boxes were in the barn now. The sweet aroma of honey and beeswax still clung to them, a faint presence that inhabited the entire huge interior, and sometimes I would go over to the corner where the hives were, inhale deeply, feel how the scent filled me, amazed at how long it lingered, the scent that was the memory of everything we’d lost.

I usually traded for meat or fish. Protein for Isa. Sometimes hunters came to the quay. They brought with them game from the forest: squirrel, wild boar, and fox, sometimes deer and wolves, but also farm animals that had escaped, wild dogs and cats. And magpies; you could always shoot magpies.

During the first years following The Collapse, people had talked about how all the animals would die because the ecosystem was in turmoil. When one thing came to a halt, everything came to a halt. But they forgot that there are always species that take over, that step in, that adapt. And they forgot that we human beings no longer occupied as much space.

The species that pulled through were better off than ever before. Not all species of birds could survive without insects, but the omnivores, like the crows and the magpies, continued to flourish in increasing numbers. They ate whatever they could find—nuts, compost, small birds, carcasses, Spanish slugs, worms, the eggs of other birds; they fed screaming offspring in full nests, reproduced again and again. They grew larger and larger, sliding across the sky with their screaming, hoarse cries, always hanging up there above us as if they owned the world.

During the past half year, the number of people who came here on Fridays declined steadily; now the quay was sometimes even deserted. Today a lone fisherman sat beside his boat. A man, they were always men, those who came alone. I couldn’t see anyone but him and therefore chanced opening the door of the pickup, taking my basket with me, and walked over to him.

A codfish stared up at me out of a cracked Styrofoam crate. It couldn’t have been larger than a couple of kilos, but that was enough for Isa and me. I said I wanted to buy it and offered him the three eggs I had with me.

“Four,” he said.

“Three,” I said. “That’s all I have.”

“The cod is worth more than three. You know that.”

“I bet you’re sick of fish,” I said. “I bet you really have a craving for eggs.”

He stared at me, his eyes narrowing.

“I have a couple of crows,” he said. “You can have one of them in exchange for your eggs.”

He pointed down at the deck. Two dead birds lay there, shot, both bloody. Some of their sisters and brothers sailed across the sky and swerved toward the boat as if insulted by the killings.

“We don’t eat crows,” I said. “There are too few of them. You have to stop shooting them. Besides, they taste awful.”

“You just have to add a lot of spices, then you can’t taste the cod liver oil.”

“I’d rather have your fish.”

“I get that. It’s fresh. I caught it yesterday. Fresh and clean.”

“It’s not clean. You know that as well as I do. I’ll give you three eggs.”

“I want four.”

“Listen here,” I said. “I have a daughter. She’s a growing girl. We need the eggs for ourselves.”

“I have two sons,” he said. “Eight-year-old twins. I don’t see them often, am out fishing all week long . . . there’s so little fish now that soon I’ll have to go out on the weekends, too.”

“I have a son, too,” I said. “And a husband. There are four of us sharing our food supplies.”

I noticed a few drops of moisture trickling down my neck. I just wanted to go home, peel off my rainwear, fry the fish, share it with Isa, feel properly full.

“Three eggs,” I insisted, one last time. “Please, that’s all I have with me.”

I lifted my hand to my throat, tried to dry myself off and maybe it was the movement that caused his eyes to start wandering. Downward, toward my breasts, hips, everything hidden by the shapeless rain garments.

“How old are you?” he asked.

So, he was one of those. I regretted the hand movement, that I had failed to stand completely still.

“Too old for you,” I said.

I tried to stand tall, straighten my back.

“You can have the fish for free,” he said. “The cabin is warm.”

He kept looking at me. I stared back at him, forcing him to meet my gaze. I’m not the one who’s supposed to regret this, who’s supposed to feel ashamed, you should. The drops continued downward, ran over my collar bone, and down between my breasts. The damp woolen undershirt irritated my skin and I stood completely still.

Suddenly he looked down and squirmed; maybe he was embarrassed. That gave me courage. I quickly took an old newspaper out of the basket, leaned down toward the fish, and lifted it onto the paper.

“I’ll take the fish. Because you were a jerk.”

I noticed his astonishment but didn’t look at him, just wrapped up the cod as rapidly as I could; it was slippery against the paper, making it hard to hold it in place. I placed the fish in the basket, getting slime and blood on my fingers, and wiped my forehead with one hand, maybe leaving a bit behind there as well.

“Fine,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Drop it,” I said.

“I don’t know why I suggested it,” he said. “I’ve heard that others do it . . . so I thought . . . ”

“Don’t do it again,” I said. “Don’t suggest it again, not to anyone.”

“I won’t,” he mumbled. “Got it.”

Where did he even find the desire? I knew how I looked. My damp hair was plastered against my skull, my skin had become coarse in recent years, my face was lined, my jaw protruded, giving me the look of an animal, a lynx, my chewing muscles the strongest in my body. An aging animal. It had been a long time since I’d dyed my hair, a long time since there was any hair dye to be had, strands of steely gray hair pushed their way through my scalp all the time. I probably looked older than my forty-three years.

I ran my fingers across my forehead again, wanted to wipe off the blood I didn’t know for sure was there. Then I stepped away, about to leave.

“But I would like to have the eggs,” he said.

“I’m sure you would.”

I put my hand in the basket and took out three eggs, two brown and one white. I tried not to think about his eight-year-old boys, though I wasn’t certain they existed; they were maybe just something he invented, the way I also lied about a husband and another child.

He accepted the eggs carefully. Three eggs for one fish. I’d won; the fish was worth four eggs, at least. He’d wanted to steal something from me, but I was the one who ended up stealing from him.

I turned away from him, a little ashamed, but still angry. I had to get home, away from him, home to Isa.

That was when I saw her.

A woman alone at the bus stop. A wanderer.

She had a small knapsack on her back, no other luggage. And she was holding an umbrella in her hand.

An umbrella. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen somebody with an umbrella—a meaningless little roof that she tried to hold up against the wind so it wouldn’t flip inside out. She was already soaking wet, her jeans dark with water, it was dripping from the straps on her backpack.

I started walking toward the pickup. The woman with the umbrella was not my responsibility; the fisherman’s sons were not my responsibility.

But I was unable to refrain from turning around again, from looking at her one more time.

A moment of calm between gusts of wind allowed her to relax. She stood tall, waiting, although the timetable had been torn down long ago and it had to be obvious that no bus would be stopping there.

The fisherman was in the process of undoing the moorings. He wouldn’t touch her. But there were others. Einar, his buddies, their filthy hands, and the aggression that arose when intoxication met with hunger. They were stupid and ridiculous, but they were stronger than her.

The rain intensified. The wind rushed across the landscape, driving the rain up underneath the umbrella.

I thought about the cellar door again; I bet Isa forgot about it. The rice could be ruined.

I took out the key, stuck it in the lock. The woman was maybe ten meters away from me and now her eyes met mine. Her face was in the shadow of the umbrella, but I could still see her clearly. Motionless, she didn’t blink, it was a gaze from which I couldn’t hide.

I could smell the stench of the fish in the basket. I had gotten it for three eggs; it was worth five.

I raised my hand. It stunk, too, of fish blood and slime, and I probably had flecks of blood on my face.

“Do you need help?”

“No,” the woman said.

She answered so quickly that I didn’t believe her.

“Where you headed?” I asked.

She shrugged. “North.”

“The bus isn’t running.”

“I know.”

“It hasn’t run for several years.”

“Yes.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“The south.”

“Did you hitch with a boat?”

“I hitched, yeah. With a car, a truck, another car, a boat, a car, then another boat. Maybe there were more. I can’t remember.”

“And now?”

She made a face. “Like I said, probably north. If I wait here, maybe somebody will stop and give me a ride.”

“You should go onto the main road,” I said. “More cars pass through there.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

I opened the door to the pickup. She stayed where she was. She was frail, shifted her weight a bit from side to side even when she was standing still. Not much taller than Isa but, although she was small, or maybe precisely because of that, her cheeks were round. She didn’t have to eat much to maintain her weight, or perhaps she was better than most people at finding what she needed. Besides, she was apparently on her own; she didn’t have to slide the best, most fatty morsels across the table to someone else. Her eyes were also round, a bit wide-eyed, vigilant, as if nothing escaped her notice.

I got into the pickup, started the engine, drove slowly forward. The power gauge was almost at zero, so I didn’t switch on the fan or the windshield wipers, hoping the battery would last all the way home.

I peeked in the rearview mirror. She’d started walking. A slender female body on the road.

She’s not your problem.

A whole fish for three eggs.

We needed the fish. Isa needed it. And besides . . . a wanderer.

But a woman alone, so easy to grab, restrain, force to the ground.

I stopped the pickup and opened the door.

“Hop in,” I said. “It’s warm and dry in here.”

She glanced at the seat beside me, toward the warmth inside the pickup.

“No. I don’t need any help,” she said.

“Hop in anyway.”

She hesitated. The rain fell even harder. The drops of water bounced against her umbrella, it looked like it would soon be destroyed by the weight of it, as if the seams in the thin fabric would tear. She was starting to shake from the cold.

“No. I’m moving on,” she said. “I don’t need any help.”

Even though she held her head high and I saw that she was trying to come across as strong, the little crack in her voice gave her away.

“Maybe I need help,” I said.

She squirmed, the umbrella trembled feebly in her hand, sending small waterfalls tumbling to the ground. She looked at me, at the pickup.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Just me and my daughter.”

The woman nodded slightly, as if this reassured her.

“Maybe I could stay for one night,” she said. “Just until my clothes are dry.”

“We have an available bed for one night,” I said. “We have eggs and milk, too.”

“Thanks,” she said softly and got into the pickup.

 

THE STORY OF MY VOYAGE TO MONGOLIA AND WHAT I FOUND THERE

Written in St. Petersburg, September 1882

Chapter 1

An Extraordinary Discovery

The house is silent except for the sound of the maid rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. I am sitting at my desk and have decided to write my story. I have been trying to put words down on paper for a long time, have written long letters, all of them to the same man, but every single one of them ended up like a hard-packed snowball in the wastepaper basket. Today, after a stroll through the Summer Garden, I finally understood that my attempts at correspondence are futile. I am not supposed to be writing letters; Wolff isn’t supposed to be my reader. This story is not about him and me, it is about the wild horses. This is their story, and somebody has to tell it before too many of the details fade into oblivion.

Hopefully, my text will find its way to a reader or two, the story of our search for the wild horses and about the life lived by both animals and humans on the steppes. It should capture the interest of all those with even a modest interest in zoology and ethnography and, if you are one of these readers, I would request your forbearance with any superfluous details or tedious digressions. Out of respect for the actual events, I haven’t dared omit much, because who knows what may prove to be of significance for posterity?

My tale begins on an ordinary Monday morning in May of 1880 with the sound of iron horseshoes clattering against cobblestones slick with rain on the street outside the apartment and the coachman’s loud ptro. I then heard the sound of the carriage door being opened and footsteps against the ground and, in the next second, three loud raps of the front door knocker.

On that day, as now, I was at my desk in my study on the second floor. Mother had just gone out to do run some errands. I was alone and was intending to review the accounts one more time before leaving for work. I felt a slight irritation over the metallic pounding of the knocker against the front door, but also a certain sense of relief. The accounts for the zoological garden were anything but jolly reading. No matter how many times I examined them, the figures showed no signs of improvement. I caught myself hoping they might move around, change places, that plus might become minus and minus plus, that they could live, become equals, as spontaneous and warm-blooded as the animals they represented. The evening before, I had, in fact, studied the account books after four stiff drams in hopes that the inebriation might cause them to start dancing. But not this time, either. My field is the natural sciences and mathematics is considered a part of this, but the path from the living creatures to which I, as assistant director of Petersburg’s zoological garden, had dedicated my life, to these blue lines of ink on grayish-white paper was as long as from here to Mercury.

The problem was Berta, a hippopotamus I had insisted we purchase from Germany a few months ago. The director left the acquisitions to me; he took care of operations and staff, while the animals were my affair, and Berta, therefore, my responsibility, including the challenges the acquisition entailed. She did indeed attract visitors; yes, in fact, the Petersburgians loved this colossal, slow-moving animal. There was always a small throng of people standing outside her cage and the public cheered every time she emitted the smallest snort or grunt. For my own part, it had been a long time since I had cheered about Berta. Yes, she was, what should one say, a striking animal—many even called her magnificent—but the cost of shipping her here from Hamburg had been even more magnificent.

Piotr, the houseboy, entered the room and placed a silver tray bearing a business card in front of me, while informing me in his aloof manner that I had a visitor.

I picked up the card and studied it. Ivan Poliakov, Zoological Institute.

“If sir permits,” Piotr said, “I would like to mention that Poliakov was red in the face and out of breath, as if it were a matter of some urgency.”

“Thank you, Piotr. Please show him in.”

A minute later, the door opened and Poliakov, my closest colleague at the institute, stood before me. I did not see the biologist often. From time to time, he might contact me with news concerning large animal shipments to Europe with an eye to new acquisitions for the zoo but he had never come to see me at home before. He was, indeed, both red in the face and out of breath, but what Piotr had neglected to mention was that Poliakov was also smiling so broadly that his face was virtually straining at the seams, revealing two full rows of brown teeth.

“Welcome,” I said.

“My dear Mikhail Alexandrovich,” Poliakov said. “My good friend.”

“Ivan Poliakov,” I replied. “I hope all is well with you, with your wonderful family. Your lovely wife and beautiful children.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed.”

I had apparently overdone it. Situations such as this, where I found myself one-on-one with other men, often knocked me off balance. I took care not to appear arrogant and cool, but also feared that my behavior would be perceived as fawning.

Poliakov, however, did not seem to notice my uneasiness. Without waiting to be asked, he took a seat by the coffee table. Then he corrected himself, got to his feet again as if the chair had nipped him in the behind.

“My dear friend, have a seat, please,” I said. “I apologize for my lack of manners. I am a bit distracted. It’s the accounts. It’s that time of year. You know how it is . . . ”

I didn’t finish the sentence. He knew absolutely nothing about the state of the finances, ...