She was very old. Old enough, Bill thought, to be his grandmother. Her long gray hair was long and straight, but raggedly cut around her pale, lined face. Years of wrinkles were in the corners of her eyes and her mouth. One eye was cloudy, as if a cataract was forming there. The other was as gray as her dress, and disturbingly alert and direct.
One of the old Soviets, Bill thought. A doctor or nurse who left her hospital or lost her job when the old system collapsed back in the nineties. He had read that there were many of them on the fringes of society in Putin's Russia, former professionals making do as best they could, living on the remains of their pensions and helping people when they needed it. Could she have seen our tent and called in a rescue for us?
She walked quickly up to the
