Blood and Salt Read Online Free

time he so much as lifts a forkful of the wretched stuff to his lips, it feels like barbed wire ripples and writhes under his skin. He considers just sitting there but knows he’d faint without food. After the beef and bread comes a dense yellow pudding in which Taras finds three rock-hard raisins that look like small, charred beetles. He eats it all; still hunger gnaws his stomach.
    “I see why people want to escape,” he says to Ihor as they drink the burnt coffee.
    “Food is a good reason. But remember, escaping is dangerous.”
    “Why? What are they going to do to me?”
    The black eyes gleam. “They are going to shoot you.”
    “Shoot me? Just like that?”
    “Tak. Just like that. And then bring you back.”
    Taras imagines a bullet slamming into his chest. The pain, the blood. “Do some people get away?”
    “Many do. Those who know someone outside. Like the coal miners from the Crowsnest Pass. Their old workmates help them.” Ihor explains that although he isn’t a coal miner himself, he worked on a ranch in southern Alberta before he came here, and he’s met a lot of miners.
    Taras’s old workmates are far away in Saskatchewan. Moses and some others would help him if he asked. But at least one of those workmates would run straight to the Mounties.

    The blanket’s dry now, the pallet almost so, but his muscles scream from all the digging and a thin layer of damp straw doesn’t do much against hard earth. Doesn’t let him forget his nearly empty stomach either. He remembers laying bricks in Spring Creek and can hardly believe he thought that was work. And in those days he got enough to eat. He turns and turns. As the light fails, the mountain breathes out cold. Men snore, cough, groan. Murmur prayers; curse bitterly; converse in low, intense tones. Can’t you shut up, he wants to say, I’m trying to sleep.
    One raspy voice catches his attention. It belongs to a man called Oleksa, one of the card players from the first night, who must be about forty-five. Oleksa doesn’t seem pleased to have one more man in the tent. He’s given Taras a few hard stares, although mostly he looks right through him. You’d think he’d be glad to have a little more body heat in the air, Taras thinks.
    “...no damn business putting us here,” Oleksa is saying. “We’ve done nothing wrong.” An echo of the voice on the train: “No bloody right.”
    Oleksa sits cross-legged on his blanket, staring straight ahead, as if he can see through the canvas wall. There’s a streak of white in his dark brown, close-cropped hair. His moustache, also clipped short, is a lighter red-brown, the colour of a sorrel horse, that seems to belong on some other face.
    “Nothing wrong,” he repeats. Taras pays attention. Maybe they’re going to explain why they’ve all been imprisoned.
    “Sure we have,” says his friend Kyrylo. “We’re Ukrainian.” Kyrylo’s thin lips almost disappear under a thick black moustache turned down at the corners that gives him a permanently gloomy look. A scar runs down his forehead and into one of his bushy dark eyebrows. Saloon fight? Taras wonders. Whatever happened, the thick brow must have saved his eye.
    “You can do what you like to Ukrainians,” says Toma, a short, stocky man with a quiet voice. “Just ask the Poles, the Austrians and the Russians.” Three peoples, as Taras knows, who have fought over, carved up and ruled Ukrainian territories for a very long time. But the other two aren’t listening to Toma.
    “The government likes having somebody close by for Canadians to hate.” Something in Oleksa’s voice tells Taras he’s said these words many times before.
    “Why do they want someone to hate?” he asks, forgetting he’s not part of their group.
    Oleksa looks pained, runs his hand through his stiff hair. “Canada’s at war with Austria and Germany. Wars cost money. Men die. The government wants people to keep supporting the war. So it gives them someone to blame.