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A Novel
by Ramona Ausubel
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The next morning the expeditioners repacked and took their things back to the airport for the last Siberian flight.
The plane had had most of its seats removed to carry cargo. Vera noted cases of rice, beets, a green vegetable she did not recognize. The professor sat atop coolers with pictures of fish on them and Todd perched on a wheel of dark orange cheese. Vera kept waiting for these necessities for survival to collapse under the weight of the American visitors. "Four short hours in blissful comfort," Eve said in plastic-lady voice. "Where are you taking us?" But Jane was bright, visibly excited, and unbothered by her eldest's skepticism.
The region below was more than a million square miles of tundra, permafrost, the earth without human intervention.
Every hour, Todd stood and did a series of stretches, hands raised to the ceiling, his shirt pulled up to reveal a thin strip of pale, furred belly. Eve mouthed, "Ew," to Vera and Vera tried not to picture her hand on that stripe of skin. She did not want to want this crush, and yet ...
The last airport of the journey was a dirt strip lined with abandoned Soviet propeller planes that looked like a pack of grazing animals.
Thick gray beard and fisherman's hat, a man stood in the dirt beside a yellow car with no front bumper. "Dmitri," he said, squeezing each hand hard. He introduced another man so obviously Dmitri's son that he did not need to state it. "Aleksei," the younger said. Dmitri and the professor hugged and smacked each other's backs. Jane, Eve and Vera were greeted without eye contact. Aleksei took Eve's and Vera's roller bags by the handles and said, "We walk this way."
Vera liked it more than she let on, this faraway feeling, this edge-of-it-all place.
The professor and Dmitri walked together, with Todd and Aleksei behind. Eve and Vera were paired and Jane walked at the back, alone. She looked like the odd kid on a field trip, buddyless. If the girls' father had been alive he would have held Jane's hand as she walked into this mission. Or, if their father had been alive he would have stayed home with the children and Jane would have gone on her own. Either version prickled Vera. This level of parental humanity caused a very specific stomachache. She tried to catch her mother's eye but Jane's attention was toward the horizon.
Vera smelled the river before she saw it. Mud and silt and willows. To reach Dmitri's land on the northern coast of this northern land they would travel the rest of the way on water, a twenty-hour barge ride to the East Siberian Sea. The group had already gone most of the way around the globe yet they had another night and another day before they stopped moving.
The river opened so wide the banks disappeared. It was its own small, moving sea. As they traveled farther, the mosquitoes rose off the water like a living fog and found all the warm skin, this floating feast. The Americans put their jackets on even though it wasn't cold and they wore two pairs of socks and wrapped blankets around their legs and heads, leaving spaces to breathe. Todd zipped the legs to his pants back on and hopped to confuse the insects. The professor wrapped himself tightly in blankets and lay down on the deck like a mummy. If he had died like that no one would have been able to tell the difference. Vera felt like a cocooned creature preparing to be born as a new species. Even outfitted this way, they were bitten. Vera inhaled a mosquito that had found her small air hole. She felt its soft body in her mouth but instead of risking a naked hand to fish it out, she swallowed.
Even Vera, who wanted to be up for the task at hand, now wondered if this had been too much to ask. "I'm sorry," Jane said. She could have come alone. She could have risked missing them. Could have risked them missing her.
There were enough insects that they had weight. If Vera went uncovered she would be bloodless in moments, a sheet of skin.
Excerpted from The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2023 by Ramona Ausubel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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