The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Yermak leveled the piece and steadied his breath. He pressed the trigger, indenting it to the firing point. The beast stepped out. Yermak released the trigger and lowered the weapon.
    It wasn’t a wolf. It was a dog. A huge dog. An Ovcharka. And it was limping. Yermak put the gun back against the doorframe and stepped out. The dog turned to run, stopped, hesitated, turned back again, sniffed the wind, and lowered its head. It looked at Yermak. He walked slowly over to the fire, tore a piece from the rabbit, and tossed it to the dog. The dog limped forward, then stopped and hesitated again. Yermak crooned to it soothingly. The dog ran up, snatched the piece of flesh, and dashed back into the tree line. Yermak smiled and went back to his pipe. As he sat, the dog was watching him. He smiled again.
    That night, when he curled up in his pile of skins on the rough board floor, the dog was lying next to him. The dog had been shot. With a shotgun. Yermak meticulously and carefully removed the pellets one by one. The dog began to follow him wherever he went, and after a week it had stopped limping. Yermak was still trying to think of a name for the dog when the hateful bitches swooped down to perch in the pines and gloat as the silent men waded up to the cabin in the first pearl light to look for the animal.
    They were four in number. Apocalyptic raptors. Bearded, with high cheekbones and beaked noses and piercing fierce eyes. The dog whined when it saw them. It cowered and allowed itself to be tethered.
    Yermak stepped out of the cabin. He held his rifle. “What are you doing?”
    The men said nothing. Yermak raised the rifle. One of the men pulled a pistol from the pocket of his Astrakhan coat and shot Yermak through the shoulder. The rifle went off. One of the men fell. His ushanka rolled in the clay. The men moved in. Yermak was immensely strong, but he was only fourteen. And he had been shot. And they were three.
    Things were done to him. They left him for dead, naked and bleeding and broken, lying in the dirt illuminated by the flames from the burning cabin. They took the sheep. And they took the dog. The rain saved him. An unlikely and unseasonal storm came, and it roused him and doused the flames, and he was able to crawl inside the smoking ruins and secrete himself inside of pile of smoldering skins. He lay there, whimpering inside a warm furry womb until the dawn came.
    He had suffered injuries that would have killed a lesser man, let alone a boy, but some animal vigor clung to him and sustained him, and the ghost would not leave him even though he was in such pain that he wished it would and could not understand why it would not. At first light, he crawled to the stream and drank and crawled back again and lay back in the furs, and he did this for several days until he was at last able to walk. Then he gathered what was left and began the slow, painful trek across the valleys and plains to where the railway track lay. It took him four days to reach it, scavenging what he could, and he waited another two days before a train rumbled past up the long gradient and he was able to haul himself aboard.
    Later, as he lay sore and shivering in the straw scattered onto the floor of the box car, as the freight train slowly rattled and clanked on its long journey to Rostov, and as he tried to peer at the brittle stars through his swollen eyes, it occurred to him how essentially simple life is. Everything has a balance. Light and dark, hot and cold, love and hate, good and evil. But you can neither have, nor be, both.
    In some things you had no choice. It was night; therefore there was no light, save the distant stars. There was no sun; therefore it was cold. He could not love, because no one would love him in return. Goodness leads to pain, and evil triumphs. So, there it was. He was loveless, cold, and hateful. And he would be evil. He had only one choice, and that choice had already been made for him. By the hateful twisted god