The party came upon Guriy Mezhentsev's trading post where it should not have been: a hundred and fifty versts ahead of the survey itself.
At the confluence of two rivers, on a high bank, stood a new storehouse: fresh-hewn logs, a plank roof, a weather vane. Well-fed horses shifted at the hitching rail. The steward came out to meet the party in a clean sheepskin coat, as calmly as though the official survey were in his employ.
"Guriy Fomich be pleased," he said. "Guriy Fomich like the sovereign's men."
Guriy Mezhentsev proved to be a short, round man with a soft voice and eyes the colour of spent tea. He sat Kapiton down by the samovar, ordered rusks and lard for the party, and as Prokop carried sacks, he heard the entire conversation through the partition.
"You've ventured a long way beyond the register, Guriy Fomich," Kapiton said. "The survey won't reach this place before autumn."
"But I have not come to the survey," Mezhentsev answered gently. "I have come ahead of it. When these places become empty, somebody will have to take them into his care. An empty place with no master runs wild."
"The places aren't empty yet."
"Yet," Mezhentsev agreed. He was not making threats, merely setting out his calculations. "You are precise men; you will understand me. I take nothing that belongs to anyone else. I take what your register will already have declared ownerless. I simply arrive first. When there is a good burn here, I shall be the one who has it."
"You still have to wait for the burn."
"A burn, Kapiton Savvich, can always be arranged."
The samovar sang. Mezhentsev poured the tea himself, with the easy manner of a host at home, and his voice grew softer still.
"You think I am hurrying your survey. God forbid. I hurry no one. I do not even pay bonuses for early completion: the treasury pays those. I merely praise men who hurry. A man, you know, works faster for praise than for the whip, and much more cheaply." He blew across his saucer. "And haste, Kapiton Savvich, always drops something. I follow behind and pick it up. Is picking things up a sin?"
"That depends on what was dropped."
"A missed word," Mezhentsev said gently. "A household gone unnoticed. A trapline left uncounted. Each one is a trifle. But I am a patient man; I add trifles together. By the time the register is closed, my trifles will amount to a province."
Prokop set down the sack and straightened.
Mezhentsev spoke in the future tense. Of living forest, traplines and winter huts, as though they had already ceased to exist. He was merely waiting for the official papers to allow him to take these places.
Tyko was sitting in the entrance hall of the trading post, at a writing desk covered with papers.
Prokop immediately recognised the boy from Dry Portage who had stood behind Aiga during the hiring and stared at the compass with hungry curiosity. Now he was studying the account books with the same fascination. An open ledger lay before him; Tyko ran a finger along the lines and moved his lips.
"Learning your letters?" Prokop asked.
"Learning." The boy looked up, proud of his progress. "The steward gives me papers. Says my hand is even. Look how neat the writing is. Not one letter has slipped."
Prokop looked at the ledger.
The hand was even, it was true. The localities ran down the column: burn by Deaf Hollow, waste ground by Three-Elk Spring, burn by the old fire. Beside each stood a price and a note: to be taken into possession under the register.
Three-Elk Spring. A day's journey, running water, elk forage.
The ledger already listed the spring as waste ground, though the survey had not yet reached it and it had not entered the register. But a price had already been set.
"Whose places are these?" Prokop asked evenly.
"Nobody's," Tyko said by rote. "They will be nobody's. Guriy Fomich takes them in advance, so he doesn't have to bargain later."
He repeated someone else's words with the delight of a pupil entrusted with a grown man's phrase. Then, glancing at the door, he drew a clean sheet towards him and showed what he had learnt over the winter: Guriy Fomich's flourish, loop and tail, exact in every detail.
"Pretty?"
"It looks like it," Prokop said.
"The steward says my hand is good. They'll take me into the office for good. I'll sit in the warm and push a pen. I can't spend my whole life driving reindeer like Grandfather."
He said "like Grandfather" lightly, without rancour, and Prokop understood how quickly the boy was being drawn away from his own clan. Three-Elk Spring, a day's journey with running water and elk forage, had been valued in the ledger at less than the samovar in Mezhentsev's parlour. Tyko's even hand was turning someone else's hunting grounds into goods before the people who lived there had been asked a single question.
Then Prokop saw the familiar wording.
At the foot of the ledger, in a note, a clerk's hand had written: "locality: burn, small bog, waste ground by the old cutting, prepared for distribution."
Word for word.
The same phrase that had lain across his village in the district register. Not a similar one. The same one: the same order of words, the same "by the old cutting", the same cold "prepared".
Now it was clear where the line that had erased his village had come from. It had not been born in the district. It had been born here, in the office of a man accustomed to arriving before the law.
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