CHAPTER III

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

Then I was alone.  Around me only the wood of eternally green cedars covered with snow, the bare bushes, the frozen river and, as far as I could see out through the branches and the trunks of the trees, only the great ocean of cedars and snow.  Siberian taiga!  How long shall I be forced to live here?  Will the Bolsheviki find me here or not?  Will my friends know where I am?  What is happening to my family?  These questions were constantly as burning fires in my brain.  Soon I understood why Ivan guided me so long.  We passed many secluded places on the journey, far away from all people, where Ivan could have safely left me but he always said that he would take me to a place where it would be easier to live.  And it was so.  The charm of my lone refuge was in the cedar wood and in the mountains covered with these forests which stretched to every horizon.  The cedar is a splendid, powerful tree with wide-spreading branches, an eternally green tent, attracting to its shelter every living being.  Among the cedars was always effervescent life.  There the squirrels were continually kicking up a row, jumping from tree to tree; the nut-jobbers cried shrilly; a flock of bullfinches with carmine breasts swept through the trees like a flame; or a small army of goldfinches broke in and filled the amphitheatre of trees with their whistling; a hare scooted from one tree trunk to another and behind him stole up the hardly visible shadow of a white ermine, crawling on the snow, and I watched for a long time the black spot which I knew to be the tip of his tail; carefully treading the hard crusted snow approached a noble deer; at last there visited me from the top of the mountain the king of the Siberian forest, the brown bear.  All this distracted me and carried away the black thoughts from my brain, encouraging me to persevere.  It was good for me also, though difficult, to climb to the top of my mountain, which reached up out of the forest and from which I could look away to the range of red on the horizon.  It was the red cliff on the farther bank of the Yenisei.  There lay the country, the towns, the enemies and the friends; and there was even the point which I located as the place of my family.  It was the reason why Ivan had guided me here.  And as the days in this solitude slipped by I began to miss sorely this companion who, though the murderer of Gavronsky, had taken care of me like a father, always saddling my horse for me, cutting the wood and doing everything to make me comfortable.  He had spent many winters alone with nothing except his thoughts, face to face with nature—­I should say, before the face of God.  He had tried the horrors of solitude and had acquired facility in bearing them.  I thought sometimes, if I had to meet my end in this place, that I would spend my last strength to drag myself to the top of the mountain to die there, looking away over the infinite sea of mountains and forest toward the point where my loved ones were.