– Only our Timoshka was lucky with lunch! – Igor laughed at today’s catch.
The package contained a couple of small redheads, and three small crucians – just for the cat.
– I hope there will be more mushrooms! He smiled at his father, who patted him lightly on the shoulder in response.
After lunch, taking a large basket and attaching it to the trunk of a bicycle, Igor pedaled along the path towards the forest.
When he reached the edge of the forest thicket, he left his vehicle under the canopy of an unfinished hut.
The place there was secret, invisible to prying eyes, and there was no need to worry about an unattended bicycle.
Making his way through the forest, saturated with the smell of pine needles and mushrooms, he once again looked back, admiring what he and the guys had managed to build in a short summer, and inspired by what he saw, went hunting for a harvest of mushrooms.
It was getting dark when Igor’s mom was cooking dinner.
Every now and then she dialed the mobile phone number of her ten-year-old son, experiencing intense anxiety, which she had never experienced before.
Igor’s phone remained out of the network coverage area.
Terrible thoughts and images of what had happened came to her mind, but she tried to drive them away.
She understood that the phone could simply run out of battery. When it became completely dark, she was seized with horror.
She dialed the number of her husband, who went out to the neighbors nearby.
– Misha! – Almost crying, she said into the phone in a broken voice.
– Our son is still not at home! I’ll go to the boys, ask around, and you run to the forest, just grab a flashlight!
– He hasn’t come back yet! My father was alarmed.
– No! I’m already exhausted! And he doesn’t answer the phone! Oh, and he’ll get it from me when he comes back! After all, I promised – before dark!
– Okay. Don’t cry dear! Everything will be fine! There will be our vagrant mushroom picker. Maybe the boys got stuck – picking mushrooms and forgot about the time.
After a telephone conversation with his wife, Mikhail, without hesitation, went in search of his son, while his mother interviewed all the boys she knew, hoping to find him at their house.
Unfortunately, Igor was nowhere to be found. Some guys didn’t see him at all all day, only Dimka said that Igor persuaded him to go together.
Suddenly there was a phone call, from which the soul froze. It was my husband who called.
He said he found his son’s bicycle and a basket of mushrooms in the hut. When he found out that Igor was nowhere to be found, he gave instructions with alarm in his voice.
– Raise the Andropovs, Demidovs and whoever else agrees.
And I’ll go on my own, I’ll call. We will comb the forest.
But, fortunately, the neighbors did not have to be persuaded. They understood how dangerous it could be for a child to stay at night in a forest inhabited by wild animals.
The nights in September are quite cool, you can get hypothermia. Everyone dressed up with warm clothes, flashlights and went in search of the student.
When they realized that the search radius was expanding by kilometers, one of the neighbors connected the police. The search continued all night. Closer to dawn it was clear that something very serious had happened to the boy. No one answered the call, the tracks got confused, and people lost their feet.
– My God! Help us find our son! – the desperate mother prayed.
Her husband tried to calm her down, although a heavy weight of loss hung on his soul.
– We will definitely find him! Do you hear! I promise you! We will not give up. We’ll connect everyone, and we’ll find them!
It was the ninth day of the search, and it was already clear that Igor could hardly be found alive.
His search has become the largest and most numerous in history. People gathered from all over the country who were not indifferent to the fate of a ten-year-old child and the grief of his parents.
All social networks were full of announcements about the missing schoolboy, which had a photo of a smiling Igor.
Television, radio, billboards in elevators of houses and public buildings shouted for help in finding a child.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations and special purpose search teams, the police and the military, ordinary volunteer citizens, meter by meter, examined all the surroundings, basements, abandoned structures and hunting lodges, divers searched the bottom of the nearest reservoir, where, ironically, Igor and his father were fishing just before his disappearance, but the search did not yield any results.
No traces of the missing boy, except for the bicycle left in the hut, were found.
The basket of mushrooms found there belonged to another person. Even a specially trained dog lost Igor’s trail as soon as he was in the forest.
On the tenth day of the search, a criminal case was opened in the case of the disappearance. The hope of finding the missing child was fading every day.
Grief-stricken parents turned to magicians and psychics. Those, all as one, in spite of everything that was happening, insisted that Igor was alive.
One day, on the thirteenth day after the disappearance, the Belarusian side reported about some child who secretly crossed the border on a passing road train, climbing into the salon at a gas station and hiding under a blanket in a sleeping place. After he was discovered by a surprised Belarusian driver, the boy ran away at the nearest stop, fearing that he would be handed over to the police station.
This event gave a fragile hope to find Igor, who allegedly could escape from home in this way, although there was no reason to escape.
When the driver of the road train was shown a photo of the missing boy, he dispelled the parents’ last hope of ever seeing their ten-year-old son alive.
As soon as Igor turned off the path into the thick of the forest, it became dark abruptly, as if it was late evening or a thundercloud had come, and a downpour was going to start. He looked up at the sky.
It was dark, but the clouds weren’t too thick to cast such a shadow on the ground. He remembered how they had told him about the solar eclipse in class, only the sun was not visible behind the treetops now. The boy was a little scared, and was about to return home, but the sky cleared up again and it became light in the forest as before.
– I’ll tell the guys how I saw the solar eclipse – he thought, and walked forward into the forest.
– They probably saw him too, and were also scared, but it’s much scarier in the forest!
Igor has never seen so many porcini mushrooms in one place in his life. After walking very close, he found a clearing completely strewn with boletus.
At first, he rushed to cut them and put them in a basket, then decided to take a memorable photo to show the forest miracle to mom and dad. He also praised himself for putting several large cellophane bags like «T-shirt» from the store in the pockets of his jeans, because each of them could fit a whole bucket of mushrooms.
– Wow! Oh, the guys should come here!
There were big trees growing around, and they had very small ones near the stadium!
