Free Riders of the Pale Horse by T. Davis Bunn Page B

have ground the road’s surface to a trail of cracks and bumps and gravel and dust. But at least we should be safe. Russian military convoys travel its length, followed by civilians who bribe the transport officers for the right...”
    A swiftly moving cloud brought them all around. Wade searched the windless horizon and realized with a start that the approaching cloud was alive. A sound of honking strengthened as the cloud became hundreds of thousands of migrating waterbirds.
    Robards looked an astonished question at Mikhail, who replied through Wade, “North of our campsite is the Volga Delta, a remnant of the wilderness that once held all of Russia in its grasp. Where the great river joins the Caspian Sea, there lies a maze of marshes and streams. Three hundred species of birds live there. Plus the saiga antelope. Wolves. Wild boar. Steppe eagles.”
    The cloud of birds arrived overhead, throwing their campsite into fleeting shadows. The bird cries became so loud that the old man had to shout to be heard. “In my father’s time, the birds formed flying walls that went on for hours and days on end. Now the flocks pass only in the morning and in the evening, and only for a week at most.”
    Robards listened, nodded, and watched the sky. There was nothing to see save the cloud of birds. He called the question, “Same time every year?”
    When Wade had translated the old man shook his head emphatically. “There is no set time to their pattern, no date upon which the giant gatherings begin. Yet the birds know, as do the saiga antelope. On a certain day each autumn, as early as the first week in September or as late as November, the herds join and begin to move. And then, a few days later, the first Siberian wind arrives.”
    As quickly as it began, it ended. The last of the birdspassed overhead, and within a few seconds their raucous cries blended with the gathering wind.
    â€œIn the autumn,” Mikhail continued in a quieter tone, “the steppe’s silver featherwood stands burnished by the sun like ripening wheat. It shivers in these gathering winds as though knowing what the birds and the animals know—that soon the wind will turn and howl in icy fury from the north. Here in the south we have only the slightest taste of Russian winter. But I have traveled. I know. Not so far to the north, the land will soon turn to iron, its coat of ice so hard and jagged that tires can be cut to shreds. Then the land is empty as only a Russian steppe can be, lost to the vacuum of unconquered winter, its isolation accented by a lone wolf’s howl.”
    â€œA good time to be somewhere else.” Robards raised his boot and deliberately erased the map scratched into the earth.
    â€œLet’s move out.”

    The Caucasus Mountains, one of the world’s youngest ranges, were not yet worn down and softened by nature. They did not rise gradually from plains to foothills to high reaches. Instead, they leapt into being. The world was flat, an endless steppe, and then came the walls of rock crowned by ice and snow. Waterfalls thundered down from all sides. Among the silent giants loomed a dozen peaks higher than Mont Blanc, Europe’s tallest mountain. Two thousand glaciers locked the highlands beneath frozen seas a mile and more in depth.
    The southern Kalmyk Steppe was a sweeping earthen sea, bound on the south by the Caucasus Mountains, rimmed to the east and west by the Caspian and Black Seas. To the north there was no boundary, no ending, no rise nor fall nor physical landmark. The name changed with distance, from southern to central to northern, yet in truth the steppe continued in one flat empty stretch from the Caucasus to the Arctic wastelands, a distance of over three thousand kilometers. Winter winds generated in the depths of Siberia howled uncheckeddown its length until they crashed in frustrated fury against the unyielding Caucasus range.
    Today, however, the weather