Finally, we get fed up with the useless search, and our leader admits that he can’t not find the promised raspberries, for which news he gets the multi-voiced “eew! you!”, and our wandering thru the forest goes on until we come across 2 threads of barbed wire nailed to the trees, one above the other, to form a fence.

Following the prickly guidance of the camp fencing, we come up to the already familiar footpath and our perked-up leader commands to fall in. Looks like we’re going to play War-Mommy. The order is executed eagerly, we line up along the footpath, pressing the dried boughs of our assault rifles to our stomachs.

But suddenly, two grown-up women—the camp caretakers—jump out from behind a thick bush with a loud yell, “Drop weapons down!” We let our sticks fall and, in the already formed file, are convoyed to the camp gate. One of the captors walks ahead of us, the other closes the formation…

At the evening all-out line-up, Camp Director announced that there happened a disruptive incident at the camp, and the parents of those involved would be informed, besides, there would be raised the question of expelling the escapers from the camp.

After the line-up dispersed, my brother-’n’-sister came to me from their junior platoon, “Now, you’ll sure get hell!”

“Ah!” dismissively waved I, trying to conceal the fear caused by the uncertainty of the punishment for getting raised the question of expelling. That uncertainty nagged me till the end of the week with the Parents’ Day on Sunday…

Our parents came as usual, and Mom shared between us condensed milk and biscuits, but she never mentioned my involvement in the disruptive occurrence. A beam of hope flicked for me—perhaps, Camp Director forgot to inform my parents!

When they left, Natasha told me that Mom new about the incident all along and, in my absence, asked her who else was among the runaways.

On getting the exhaustive report, she turned to Dad and said, “Well, you bet, the kids of those aren’t going to be expelled.”

~ ~ ~

At the end of that same summer, there occurred a drastic change in our Block’s way of life. Now, every morning and evening, a slow-go garbage truck entered the Courtyard, honked loudly and waited for the tenants of the houses to bring their garbage buckets and empty them into its dump. Besides, they took away the rusty boxes from the garbage bins enclosure and nailed up its gate.

In September in the field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the defunct enclosure, there for several days roared and clattered a bulldozer moving mountains of earth. Then it disappeared, leaving behind a wide field leveled two meters lower than the one we used to play football, yet without a single grass blade crisscrossed instead by footprints of its caterpillar tracks in the raw ground…

A month later, they organized a Sunday of Collective Free Work for adults only, but my Dad allowed me to go with him too. On the edge of the wood behind the next block, there stood a long building very much alike to the barrack in the pioneer camp, and the people who participated in the Sunday of Collective Free Work attacked it from all ends and started to demolish.

My Dad climbed to the very top. He tore away whole chunks of the roof and sent them down shouting his farewell, “Eh! Pulling down differs from building up – no blueprints needed!”

I liked that Sunday of Collective Free Work very little because they would drive you away everywhere, “Don’t come closer!” And simply listening to the screams of nails being torn from the beams and boards, becomes boring quite soon…

(…I cannot now recollect if it was it on the eve of that Sunday or immediately after it, that Nikita Khrushchev got deposed and Leonid Brezhnev became the ruler of the USSR in his place.

Ew! So untimely! When there remained just 18 years before Communism get built in our country!.)

In his very practical book, Ernest Seton-Thompson insists that bows have to be made of Ash-tree boughs. But could you find an Ash-tree at the Object, please?

The woods around the Block were populated by Pines and Fir-trees, as well as deciduous Birch and Aspen, and all the rest might be considered just shrubs. That’s why, following the advice of the neighbor at our landing, Stepan Zimin, my bows were made of Juniper.

It’s important to make the right choice because the Juniper for a bow should not be too old, having lots of side branches, neither too thick which would be impossible to bend. A tree of about one-and-a-half-meter tall would be the thing, both springy and strong. The arrow shot with the bow made of such a Juniper would rise in the gray autumn sky about thirty meters or so, you’d barely see it before its precipitous down-fall to stick the ground by the arrowhead of a nail fixed, as tight as you can, with electrical tape.