The Sinistra Zone

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Two weeks before he died, Colonel Borcan took me with him on reconnaissance to one of the barren heights in the Dobrin forest district. He asked me to keep my eyes open, especially on the mountain ash trees, whose clusters of little red berries stood out in the roadside scrub, to see if the waxwings had yet arrived. It was mid-autumn, and the brush was abuzz with unfamiliar sounds.

Such patrols by the forest commissioner began with a visit each morning to the bear reserve, where he sized things up. On the way home — while ambling along some mountain ridge, breathing in the intoxicating silence of the preserve, and perking his ears to the babbling brooks in the valleys below — he would formulate a report on what he had seen. Now, though, making his way along all but impassable trails by following markers left by the mountain infantrymen, he was headed straight for a secret lookout. Word had it that the waxwings had indeed arrived, and in their wake so too had the fever that visited this forested region each winter and that, in the Sinistra Zone, was for some odd reason called the Tungusic Flu.

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