A Christmas Tale by Sarban (Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, 1951) opens with the narrator’s description of a group of ex-pats in Jeddah donning fancy dress before they go out carol singing on Christmas Eve. After several recitations they eventually end up in the house of Alexander Andreievitch, a displaced (Imperial) Russian who now runs the Saudi Air Force.
There, after the group have sung their carols, the narrator and the Russian start drinking their way through a bottle of Zubrovka. When the narrator notices that there is a drawing of a bison on the label of the bottle, he asks the Russian if he has ever seen one, perhaps in the wilder parts of his home country. Andreievitch says no, but adds that he once saw something even rarer.
So begins a story which takes us from the sticky heat of a Saudi evening to the cold beyond the Arctic Circle, where Andreievitch was once the observer of a two-man crew tasked to fly a seaplane from a navy ship to a distant settlement. After the pair got there and dropped their message, they turned for home—only to be caught out by worsening weather. Just before they ran out of fuel, the pilot force-landed in the marshes. The pair then struggled on their own for a number of days, before they came upon a small group of Samoyed hunters.
The natives feed the two starving men, but the meat makes them both sick—and the next day they discover that it half rotten and is covered with unfamiliar red wool or hair. The pair angrily quiz the natives about the source of the meat and, when they cannot understand the Samoyed’s replies, demand that are taken to the nearest settlement. Later, however, when the weather closes in, they find themselves taking shelter at what would appear to be the partially uncovered (but still frozen) burial grounds of an unknown creature—the source of the meat which provided their meal.
The story concludes (spoiler) with the group sheltering from the deteriorating weather under an overhanging bank, when they hear a noise in the distance:
Igor Palyashkin and I, we too shrank down against the earth; what we could hear then stilled us like an intenser frost, and I felt cold to the middle of my heart. Through the dead and awful silence of that pause before the snow we heard something coming across the blind waste towards us. All day in that dead world nothing had moved but ourselves; now, out there where the shadows advanced and retreated and the pallid gloom baffled our sight, something was coming with oh! such labour and such pain, foundering and fighting onwards through the half-solid marsh. In that absolute stillness of the frozen air we heard it when it was far away; it came so slowly and it took so long, and we dare not do anything but listen and strain our eyes into the darkening mist. In what shape of living beast could such purpose and such terrible strength be embodied? A creature mightier than any God has made to be seen by man was dragging itself through the morass. We heard the crunch of the surface ice, then the whining strain of frozen mud as the enormous bulk we could not picture bore slowly down on it; then a deep gasping sound as the marsh yielded beneath a weight its frostbonds could not bear. Then plungings of such violence and such a sound of agonised straining and moaning as constricted my heart; and, after that awful struggle, a long sucking and loud explosion of release as the beast prevailed and the marsh gave up its hold. Battle after battle, each more desperate than the last, that dreadful fight went on; we listened with such intentness that we suffered the agony of every yard of the creature’s struggle towards our little bank of earth. But as it drew nearer the pauses between its down-sinkings and its tremendous efforts to burst free grew longer, as if that inconceivable strength and tenacity of purpose were failing. In those pauses we heard the most dreadful sound of all: the beast crying with pain and the terror of death. Dear Lord God! I think no Christian men but we, Igor Palyashkin and I, have ever heard a voice like that. I know that no voice on all this earth could have answered that brute soul moaning in the mist of the lonely taiga that evening before the snow.
That beast was alone in all the world. p. 15-16
The creature never gets close to them, seemingly disappearing into the marsh or the gloom.
The final section sees the narrator’s carol-singing acquaintances get up to leave, whereupon the Russian tells him of the brief glimpse he caught of the creature: the great head, the long red-brown wool, the long curling teeth.
I liked this story—it’s an atmospheric piece with a lot of evocative descriptions (a result of its old-school literary writing). Even if the climax of the story does involve a creature that remains largely (and correctly) offstage, it is nevertheless an effective piece.
Worth reading.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6550 words. Amazon UK Look Inside. Amazon US Look Inside.