The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon Page B

through tangles of thorns. He toppled into a gulley, got up, and scrambled out, heading deeper into the wilderness.
    “Come on!” Schedrin told the others. “We can’t let the little bastard get away!” He dug his heels into his mount’s flanks and entered the forest with Anton and Danalov riding just behind him.
    Mikhail heard the thunder of hooves. He clambered up a rocky hillside and half ran, half slid down the descending side. “Over there!” he heard one of the men shout. “I saw him! This way!”
    Thorns whipped Mikhail in the face and tore across his shirt. He blinked back tears, his legs pumping. A shot rang out, and hit a tree trunk five feet away. “Save your bullets, idiot!” Schedrin commanded, getting a quick glimpse of the boy’s back before the branches covered his flight.
    Mikhail ran on, his shoulders hunched against the expected impact of a lead slug. His lungs were burning, his heart hammering through his chest. He dared to glance back. The horses and men raced after him, dead leaves flying up in their wake. He looked ahead again, angled to the left, and ran into thick green undergrowth laced with creepers.
    Anton’s horse stepped into a gopher hole. The animal bellowed and fell, and Anton’s right knee burst open like an overripe fruit as he landed on a sharp-edged rock. He screamed in agony, the horse writhing and trying to get up, but both Schedrin and Danalov kept up their pursuit.
    Mikhail fought through the undergrowth, slanting down into a valley cloaked with green. He knew full well what would happen if the killers caught him, and fear gave him wings. His feet slipped out from beneath him on a bed of pine needles, and he slid through a place where the shadows had grown crimson mushrooms. Then he was up and running again, and behind him he heard a horse’s whinny and a man shouting, “He’s over here! Going downhill!”
    Ahead was dense forest, close-packed evergreens and thick coils of thorn bushes and stands of wild red berries. He headed for the thickest of it, hoping to leap into the coils and fight his way to the bottom, to a place where the horsemen couldn’t follow. He reached out, parted the emerald growth with bleeding hands-and came face to muzzle with the beast.
    It was a wolf, with dark brown eyes and sleek russet fur. Mikhail fell backward, his mouth open but the scream shocked out of him.
    The wolf leaped.
    Its jaws opened, and the teeth gouged furrows across Mikhail’s left shoulder as it slammed him to the earth. The breath was knocked out of him, as was all sense. The wolf’s teeth clamped on his shoulder, about to tear through the I flesh and crush the bones; and then the horse bearing Sergei Schedrin burst through the brush and reared, its eyes flaring with terror. Schedrin lost his rifle, and he cried out, clinging I to the horse’s neck as he saw the wolf beneath his boots.
    The animal released Mikhail’s shoulder, spun around in a smooth, graceful motion, and bit deeply into the horse’s stomach. The horse made a strangled moan, kicked wildly, and fell onto its side, trapping Schedrin’s legs beneath.
    “Holy Jesus!” Danalov shouted, reining in his horse on the hillside. Two seconds after he’d spoken, the large gray wolf that had been tracking him leaped onto the horse’s flank, clawed up over it into the saddle, and clamped its fangs into the back of Danalov’s neck. It shook Danalov like a rag doll, snapping his spine and driving him out of the saddle to the ground. The horse thrashed and tumbled, rolling down the hillside in a flurry of dead leaves and pine needles.
    A third wolf, this one blond with ice-blue eyes, darted in and grasped Danalov’s flailing right arm. With a savage twist, the beast broke it at the elbow and the splintered bones tore through the man’s flesh. Danalov’s body jerked and writhed. The gray wolf that had knocked him out of the saddle closed its jaws on Danalov’s throat and crushed the windpipe with a casual