A group of people set out from the wooden house earlier than planned. The sky above the coniferous forest became completely bright half an hour earlier. The light passed through the scales of the coniferous trees and was cut into pieces and scattered on the snow in the forest.
.The forest swept by the snowstorm is full of dead branches and leaves. From time to time, you can see coniferous trees lying on the ground, and the broken trunks are full of saw-like tear marks.
The old hunter's wooden house was built deep in the coniferous forest, about three hundred meters away from the main road paved with railway tracks. This also means that you can leave the forest and reach Verkhoyansk directly by crossing three hundred meters.
On the avenue.
The initial road plan discussed by everyone in the wooden house was to avoid the main road and walk all the way west through the coniferous forest until they reached the small town of Verkhoyansk after walking through the entire forest.
Because even without looking, you can tell that the snow on the road is serious. The level of snowstorm last night was enough to cover the uncovered road with snow up to the waist and crotch of a normal person. That kind of thickness of snow would make it almost impossible to walk.
If they insist on taking the high road, they may not be able to reach the town until dark. The Siberian cold at night is extremely cold, and even a small breeze can freeze people to death.
On the contrary, the snow in the coniferous forest was much shallower, and with the natural forest as a barrier, this dark forest road without daylight became their best choice.
The only fear now is getting lost and encountering something they fear. With Vika and the Huntress leading the way, they won't get lost, and the latter... can only be said to be a necessary risk. If they really encounter it, they can only go there.
I’ll tell you how to deal with it later.
Not far away was the hunter's cabin. The female hunter stopped at the edge of the coniferous forest, stepped into the snow up to her shins, and then looked back at the window of the cabin. Behind her, Adam walked over,
With a palpitating expression on her face, she looked at where she was standing, "This is where she was last night..."
He stopped talking because he saw the female hunter dig out an arrowhead from the snow. She could still smell the smell of fuel when the arrowhead held a burnt black waste cloth and brought it close to her nose.
"The footprints have been covered by the snowstorm. It is difficult to find them by following the tracks." The huntress glanced deep into the coniferous forest. "It can be said that there are almost no traces left."
"Do you still want to follow the traces to find them?" Adam had a strange face.
"To be honest, I would rather find them first...so that I don't think that what I saw last night was actually a nightmare hallucination." The huntress tore off the waste cloth on the arrow and recycled it.
The arrow was put into the quiver, and the mouth and nose covered by the thermal mask took a deep breath of the cold air that chilled the heart.
"I feel uncomfortable when I think that those things may still be hiding in the woods and watching us."
"You said...those things are really coming for...them?" Adam suddenly lowered his voice and looked back at the door of the cabin. Lieutenant Colonel and Vika were making stretchers at the window of the cabin.
Finally, I could vaguely see a small figure sitting on the table inside.
"I don't know." The female hunter shook her head, "It's you. You were the first one to discover them. How do you feel about this?"
"Why do I think..." Adam looked weird and hesitated for a long time before saying, "I don't know, I'm just a lost traveler. Why do I think... is it useful?"
"It's really useless." The female hunter thought for a while, nodded, and patted his shoulder, "But I think since you discovered them and brought them here, you saved their lives in disguise, otherwise Just save people to the end? Take the responsibility that a man should bear and protect them until they reach safety?"
"This..." Adam smiled bitterly, without giving any promise or answer.
The huntress looked at this young American who was about the same age as herself and shook her head and changed the subject, "How is the little girl's brother doing now? Is the situation better?"
"It's not very good, but I ate something. The lieutenant colonel didn't eat much himself. He gave all the fish and meat to the two children and the old man... The lieutenant colonel is really a good person." Adam sighed with emotion.
"Yeah." The female hunter looked at the KGB lieutenant colonel who was trying to tie up the stretcher, and then looked away after a while, "Be smart on the road and follow me closely. Don't get lost. I'm afraid you won't be so lucky if you get lost this time."
"Okay." Adam nodded quickly. When it comes to survival in the wilderness, following an elite hunter is always the best choice.
In less than fifteen minutes, the cuckoo wall clock in the wooden house chimed half past one again, and everyone was ready to hit the road. The old hunter, who was still unconscious on the fire bed, was given a magazine and tied up with hemp rope.
The little girl was still carrying her younger brother on her back. Both of them were wrapped in thick fur coats and looked like brown bear cubs. Adam also proposed to carry the boy on his back, but the little girl still refused.
"What a deep brother-sister relationship." Adam couldn't help but say.
The huntress thought for a while before setting off, then turned around and squatted in front of the little girl. She stretched out her hand and scratched her cheek, which had been frozen by the frost not long after leaving the cabin. She said, "Follow me on the road. If you feel tired, just follow me or that person." Uncle (lieutenant colonel) said, I will help you."
The light brown eyes of the little black-haired girl reflected the huntress's face. After a long time, she nodded, but said nothing else.
"Could he be autistic?" Adam beside him whispered.
"Hurry up." They immediately heard the lieutenant colonel's voice not far away.
In the open space under the wooden house, the lieutenant colonel and the silent Vika had already lifted up the stretcher. The old hunter's body was very light, and after falling ill, it seemed that some of his muscles and bones had been separated, and the two stretchers were connected. The man lifted it up without any burden, and when the stretcher lifted off the ground, it also marked the beginning of their journey to Verkhoyansk.
It is often sunny after a snowstorm. This law also applies in Siberia. Even if there is a coniferous forest overhead, there is still a lot of scattered sunlight shining through the gaps in the leaves on a group of people walking in the snow. The outdoor temperature has reached The pleasant temperature is minus 30℃.
After setting off and leaving the hunter's cabin, with the female hunter leading the way, they first walked about two hundred meters in the direction of the main road, then leaned against the main road and then walked forward deep in the coniferous forest.
After their discussion, this was the most reliable way forward, using the railway track as a revised path, which avoided the deep snow and prevented them from getting lost due to the complicated forest road conditions after the snowstorm.
Adam, who was not a local, was amazed at the condition of the coniferous forest along the way. The destructiveness of the snowstorm was far beyond everyone's imagination. Even the vast Siberian forest could not withstand the natural destructive force. The whole road was uprooted.
The coniferous trees and the huge rocks that seemed to have been moved out of thin air all showed the chaos of last night's snowstorm.
Anyone in this group of people would have been killed by the snowstorm in the ice and snow if they had not found the hunter's cabin, regardless of the group of weird "devils".
"We are really lucky." Adam looked around and sighed sincerely as he watched the huntress helping the little girl climb over the fallen tree trunk.
"Lucky?" Dusha sneered at this, "If you are really lucky, you will all die in the blizzard, and you will be really lucky."
"Dusa, stop saying a few words." Vika, who was carrying the stretcher, scolded in a low voice.
Dusha raised her eyebrows provocatively at the female hunter who was looking at her not far away and stopped talking. The female hunter also thought that there was something wrong with this guy, and she had become somewhat immune to such vixen-like taunts after hearing it too many times.
"So, what were those things last night? Are they really 'devils'? If they are 'devils', why are we still alive today?" Adam raised his hand to clean up the excessive snow and frost on his eyebrows that blocked his sight.
"It may be true as you said. They are all 'vampires' and similar things. They did not get our invitation so they cannot enter our house."
"Can vampires appear in a snowstorm? Sounds bizarre."
"The whole thing is already bizarre. If you think about it this way, it won't seem strange." Vika said expressionlessly while carrying a stretcher from behind.
"But there have never been any legends about similar monsters in the local area. If there is, I will definitely know about it." The female hunter walked in front and observed various traces in the coniferous forest, but unfortunately she did not find any large-scale monsters.
Animal tracks or paw prints on tree trunks, "they just appear out of thin air."
"Anyway, it's good that those things disappeared. There's no need to mention it again." There was restlessness in Vika's eyes, and he seemed to be avoiding the topic. It seemed that the dark shadows last night left him with a lot of psychological trouble.
shadow.
"I must write a book about this when I go back, and the title of the book is "Walking with Snow Monsters."" Adam sighed.
"...American, why did you travel to such a remote place? Is there something wrong with your head?" Dusha seemed to be a little uncomfortable with Adam's plastic Russian, and kept frowning every time the American spoke.
"I want to see what the real Soviet Union is like. Aren't there always tensions between my motherland and your country? The news reported on TV and the rumors among the people have portrayed you as heinous sinners, but I
I feel that sometimes seeing is believing, so I decided to travel to the Soviet Union and have been to Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk.”
"Later one time I lamented that the Soviet Union was really cold. No wonder Germany couldn't get in. Someone next to me told me that Moscow was cold. Northern Siberia was the coldest place in the Soviet Union. If you pee while standing there, you would pee.
It's frozen from the ground to your... ahem, you know what I mean."
After the crisis was over, Adam, an American, seemed to have finally opened up his chatterbox and let himself go. When no one in the team was talking, you could hear him talking, trying to stir up some enthusiasm for chatting. No one asked him to shut up because he was annoying.
Because walking in the dark coniferous forest is indeed a depressing and boring thing.