Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

by Sylvain Tesson

  I will have learned that one can live near a gigantic skating rink, feed on caviar, bear paws and moose liver, wear mink, stride through the woods with a rifle slung over one’s shoulder, witness each morning, when dawn touches the ice, one of the loveliest sights on the planet, and still dream of life in an apartment equipped with the latest robotics and high-tech gadgetry. The eremitic temptation follows an immutable cycle: one must first suffer from indigestion in the heart of the modern city in order to dream of a cosy cabin in a clearing. Bogged down in the grease of conformity and padded in the fat of comfort, one becomes attuned to the call of the forest.

  At noon I head for home. A dusting of snow covers the ice; slippery going for my boots. I’m eager for a solitary evening. Mist veils the slopes. The shore changes shape again and again.

  14 APRIL

  The winter just won’t quit. Last night, 5º F. No sign of a thaw. Snowflakes fall from dawn to dusk, making a silky rustling. I spend the day in my mother cabin, my egg, my lair, crossing the threshold gratefully, feeling myself enveloped in that good warmth. The hours pass slowly through the window. I’m a bit bored. This day is a slightly leaky tap from which every hour slowly drips. As a companion, boredom is passé, but one adjusts anyway, although time does start tasting a little like cod-liver oil. Then suddenly, that taste is gone and with it, all boredom: time has become once more that light-footed and invisible procession, making its way through Being.

  15 APRIL

  It takes me two and a half hours to get out of the forest. I’m heading up the second valley to the south of my cabin, looking for a bivouac. Despite my snowshoes, I sink in halfway up my thighs. Every step is a major battle. I reach the upper edge of the forest at seven in the evening, soaked. I choose a shelf at an altitude of 4,000 feet, above a scree slope. About 300 feet below me, I can make out the tracks of a wolverine. Wolverines don’t hibernate, and this one has trekked across the flank of the mountain. The cold is brutal. Dwarf pines exposed by the wind crawl up among some rust-coloured boulders. Buryatia is a red streak to the east. I cut armfuls of branches to make myself a mattress, and start a fire in the gathering darkness. I pitch the tent, toss in my mattress and sleeping bag. I cook some pasta over the fire, then lounge on my bed of branches, softer than a Byzantine sofa. My fire sits between two boulders about five feet high, and their sides reflect the heat. It’s minus ten or twenty degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m warm in my band-shell of rocks heated by the flames. And I stare at the precise spot where sparks from the fire, shooting into the sky, grow pale and glitter with a last brilliance before melting into the stars. It’s hard to convince myself to go inside my tent; I’m like a kid who doesn’t want to turn off the TV. From my sleeping bag, I can hear the wood crackling. Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

  16 APRIL

  I open the zip, blink in the raw sunshine, rejoice in the blue sky, sit up, and discover the image of the plain, gloriously empty at the bottom of its basin, 2,600 feet below. That’s how today begins. Last night a lynx visited my camp, leaving tracks around my tent.

  The euphoria of camping mornings! There you are, above the forest; you have survived the night and received a little lagniappe of life.

  I climb 1,300 feet higher, straight up from the campsite. At ten in the morning, I’m only 1,640 feet from the summit ridge. The lakeshore traces a sine wave: the capes for crests, the bays for hollows. The black scallops of the wooded salients bite into the icy plain, undulating like a battle diagram of enemy lines falling back and charging forward. I return to my fire, rekindle it, make tea, break camp and go home. The lynx checked out the wolverine’s tracks before heading into the forest. The snow is crisscrossed by the tracks of minks, hares and foxes. The forest thrums faintly with invisible life. Bushy lichens caress my face. I squint at the larches: they look like giants armed with bludgeons. If the desert hermits had retreated to the taigas, they would have invented religions peopled with joyous spirits and animal gods. The desert is desiccating, and I think about St Bernard congratulating himself, after a walk, for having noticed nothing of the outside world.

  I’m back in my cabin in three hours. It’s 28º F and I have lunch outdoors, at the lakeshore table. The titmice waltz, intoxicated with warmth. The first full-blown all-out day of spring is an important date in a man’s year.

  Shadows descend and, nibbling at the white plain, cross the lake to enshroud the Buryat mountains lounging on the opposite shore, convinced that sunset would pass them by.

  17 APRIL

  A hermit does not threaten human society, of which he is at most the living critique.

  The vagabond steals and scrounges. The rebel-of-the-moment declaims on TV. The anarchist dreams of destroying the society in which he conceals himself. Today’s hacker plots the collapse of virtual citadels in his bedroom. The anarchist tinkers with his bombs in saloons, while the hacker arms his programs at his computer, but both need the society they deplore and target for destruction – which is their raison d’être.

  The hermit stays off to one side in polite refusal, like a guest who, with a gentle gesture, declines the proffered dish. If society disappeared, the hermit would go on living as a hermit. Those in revolt against society, however, would find themselves technically out of work. The hermit does not oppose, but espouses a way of life. He seeks not to denounce a lie, but to find a truth. He is physically inoffensive and is tolerated as if he belonged to an intermediate order, a caste halfway between barbarians and civilized people. The chivalrous hero of the twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, driven mad by the loss of his lady-love, wanders naked in a forest until he is taken in and cared for by a hermit, who restores his reason and leads him back to civilization. The hermit: a passeur, a go-between of worlds.

  At four in the afternoon, I close Chrétien de Troyes and set off to fish at hole no. 2, an hour’s slog to the north. (Hole no. 1 is the spot out in front of the cabin.) The shore slips by, harsh and austere. There is joy in these woods, but not an ounce of humour. Maybe that’s what makes the faces of hermits so stern and Thoreau’s writings so serious. I catch three char just under eight inches. They wind up on the stove, stuffed with blueberries, in a drizzle of oil. The flesh is tasty. Fresh, it goes well with vodka. Everything goes well with vodka. Except a woman’s kisses. No danger of that.

  18 APRIL

  Sergei arrives at my cabin at eight in the morning. He’s been visiting the Volodya up in Elohin, and I didn’t hear his car out on the lake. As usual, he pops in without knocking – and I let out a yell, then take a long minute to recover my inner equilibrium, upended by the intrusion. My tea isn’t even ready, so at least I didn’t spill that.

  ‘Your cabin, you keep it nice. With Volodya, it’s what we call a German cabin.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘You want to come to Pokoyniki? I’ll bring you home again.’

  ‘Okay … We’ll have some tea, though?’

  ‘No, just come, we’re in a hurry.’

  Ten minutes later, I shut the padlock and climb into the car. We slip off to the south. In Russia, everything happens in a hurry: life is a drowsy thing shaken by spasms.

  In Pokoyniki, big doings. Sergei and Yura-with-the-pale-eyes have taken advantage of the frozen lake to build a pontoon on pilings – a platform baptized ‘the island’ – out in the big marsh that prolongs the bay on its northern flank. With wooden levers, jacks and ropes, we spend the afternoon hoisting a metal railway car onto the wooden platform. Inside: a bed and a stove.

  ‘The shoreline marks the boundary of the reserve, and the limit of its jurisdiction,’ anno
unces Sergei. ‘So the island will be independent territory.’

  ‘Free?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, free and independent. We have just created the free and autonomous territory of Pokoyniki.’

  In the forest, shadows slip through the larches: horses are moving fluidly among the tree trunks. Their hooves crunch through the snow crust with the sound of a fist punching a feather pillow, and their nostrils give off plumes of vapour. These animals belonged to a herd maintained by the employees of the meteorological station at Solnechnaya, a little over a mile north of Pokoyniki, but they returned to the wild in 1991, when their caretakers abandoned the station at the collapse of the Soviet Union. At dusk, a four- or five-year-old horse comes wandering among the cabins, his head hanging. He has left the herd to die, and lies down facing the lake. Sergei heaves a sigh, then dispatches him with a dagger thrust to the carotid. We chop him up with axes. Jays take their posts at the tops of the pines, and the entrails tumble out with a slurp, silky and perfectly coiled together, steaming in the cold. Night falls on this bloody affair. The dogs, who had been awaiting their turn, are given the go-ahead.

  That evening, Pokoyniki is the scene of considerable excitement: the new director of the nature reserve, S.A., has come to visit his rangers, accompanied by his henchmen, who busily unload the vodka and cognac. I look longingly at those crates, because there’s enough there to erase from my memory the sight of that horse panting hard as it gave up the ghost. Natasha has prepared some venison soup. A buffet in the Russian style is spread out on the table: a pell-mell of grilled catfish fillets, a haunch of moose and Siberian sausages. Everyone drinks into oblivion.

  ‘Where were you born, director?’ I ask.

  ‘In the Republic of Tuva.’

  ‘That’s Lenin’s native region,’ says Sergei.

  ‘Well, then,’ I suggest, ‘let’s drink to dictators who govern empires and nature reserves.’

  ‘And also to Tupolevs,’ adds one of S.A.’s thugs.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘The best plane in the world: the Poles just bit the dust in one.’

  Natasha offers the director a bag of frozen fish. Businessman though he may be, S.A. can’t conceal the twinkle of delight in his eyes. Hereabouts people still haven’t forgotten the hard times of the past.

  19 APRIL

  The cognac didn’t agree with me. It’s nine in the morning and I have a railway tie stuck crosswise in my head. Yura with the fog-grey eyes awakens me: we have to go pull in the nets. Sasha of the missing fingers accompanies us. I nurse my hangover in the van, collapsed on some coils of rope, and listen to the two men rattle on about their favourite theme:

  ‘Why are there so many Muslims in your country?’

  For a muzhik, France offers two subjects of astonishment: that the people of Napoleon’s Grande Armée beg for government help when faced with not even an inch of snow, and that they let their cities burn while they have 3,000 soldiers deployed in the mountains of Afghanistan. Sasha asks me about these things every single time we meet.

  The ice-fishing shelter is nine miles from Pokoyniki. Inside the corrugated metal cabin, a wooden floor with a cut-out allows access to the fishing hole below. A gas stove heats the place, and we work in woollen shirts. We begin by raising many hundreds of feet of cordage with a hand winch that creaks at each turn. For two hours, Yura turns the handle, staring into space. The net surges up from the depths. The two Russians haul the nylon tresses from the water and harvest the omul, a freshwater whitefish endemic to Lake Baikal. The plastic tubs fill with hundreds of fish. In the eerie turquoise light, the lake offers its treasures. The strangest thing is that it keeps giving them to us on demand after thousands of years. Lunch: five fish tossed into a pot and sluiced with three glasses of samogon, the caramel-coloured moonshine Sasha makes himself in his dacha at Severobaikalsk. Sergei drives me back home. We sit silently, gliding slowly over a surface worthy of an artist’s brush: the marbling of the ice, the chaotic sculptures, the army of pines beneath their snowy burden, and the black granite draperies compose on the canvas of the sky a tortured tableau compared to which the desolate landscapes of the nineteenth-century German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich look like Haitian folk art.

  We’re stopped short by a crevasse.

  ‘This one opened up today,’ Sergei announces.

  ‘How will we get past?’ I ask.

  ‘A “trampoline” …’

  ‘And for your return trip?’

  ‘A detour.’

  The two edges of a fracture are not always on the same level. As it shifts, the ice may raise one of the lips, and by using this discrepancy, drivers sometimes succeed in launching their vehicles over such obstacles. I have confidence in Sergei, but I feel a twinge when, going full blast from a head start of a good 160 feet, he crosses himself.

  We make it.

  20 APRIL

  Here the journal breaks off for eight days for administrative reasons. The Russian authorities require my return to civilization to seek an extension of my visa. I tear myself away from the lake, take planes, besiege diplomatic and cultural officials who hibernate year-round more deeply than bears, obtain the stamp I covet, batten down my hatches so I won’t get sucked into the big city, sleep five tense hours a night, get horribly drunk, heave another load of provisions and summer equipment into the back of a truck, retrace my steps, arrive at the lakeshore off the southern tip of Olkhon Island, and find the hydrofoil that had recently delivered me waiting for me there.

  28 APRIL

  Hydrofoils are the gem of Russian iron and steel metallurgy. Powered by a propeller, the machine moves on a cushion of air. So it couldn’t care less about the fissures that scar the ice this late in April. Within four hours, we reach Pokoyniki, making as much noise as a massive Antonov airlifter. While I was gone, the lake surface has turned milky: melting slightly, the ice now has a nacreous crêpe surface that crackles faintly underfoot. Passing the hamlet of Zavorotni, I stop in to visit V.E., who entrusts two of his twelve dogs to me. Aika is a black female; Bek, a white male. They are four months old. They will bark if bears begin approaching the cabin towards the end of May. I also have my distress flare gun. If attacked, you just fire at the animal’s paws: the detonation and fireworks usually persuade the bear to buzz off.

  I regain the cabin as happy as a foot-soldier diving into his bunker. Depending on my mood, my shelter is an egg, a womb, a coffin or a wooden ship. I bid farewell to my friends. Oh, the happiness that wells up as the rumbling of their engine dies away …

  29 APRIL

  Winter is still here. Only the pale face of the lake signals that spring is waiting in the wings.

  Some snow has melted in the clearing, revealing the detritus my predecessor accumulated over twenty years. Capable of superhuman efforts to repel an enemy, Russians can’t summon the energy to throw rubbish into a ditch. I cart tyres, wrecked engines and damaged motor parts off behind the banya. I restore the clearing to emptiness. A mist runs along the shores, snagging itself on the pines, sometimes dawdling enough to let a beam of sunshine slip through. Surrounded by fairyland, I go fishing. The dogs follow me everywhere. My shadow has become a dog. The two little creatures have placed themselves in my hands. A humanist animal, the dog believes in us. Wherever water seeps onto the ice, lapis-blue reflections bloom on the creamy glaze. The dogs wait patiently by the ice-hole. I give them the guts of the three char I catch.

  My round trip to the city has reinforced my love of cabin life. Cabins are the votive lights hung on the roof of the night.

  30 APRIL

  The taiga is black. The trees are shedding their snow. Dark patches appear on the moun
tains. Aika and Bek rush up outside the window at first light. When two little dogs celebrate your advent in the morning, night takes on a flavour of expectation. A dog’s fidelity demands nothing, not a single duty. Canine love is satisfied with a bone. Dogs? We make them sleep outdoors, we speak roughly to them, snap at them, feed them on scraps, and now and then – whap! A kick in the ribs. What we deal out to them in blows, they give back to us in drooling adoration. And suddenly I see why man has made the dog his best friend: this is a poor beast whose submission demands nothing in return, a creature corresponding perfectly, in other words, to what man is capable of giving.

  We’re playing on the lakeshore. Aika has found a deer bone, and I’m throwing it for them. They never tire of bringing it back to me, they’d keep going till they dropped dead. These masters teach me to inhabit the only country worth living in: the moment. Man’s particular sin is to have lost this frenzy the dog has for retrieving the same bone. For us to be happy, we have to cram our homes with dozens of more and more sophisticated objects. Advertising urges us to ‘Go fetch!’ The dog has admirably solved the problem of desire.

  A long trek to South Cedar Cape with the little chaps. The wind has come up and the sky is in shreds. Shafts of sunlight strafe the taiga through the clouds with tawny streaks and stamp it with yokes of gold; sometimes the light strikes a section of mouldered cliff face, bathing it in brightness. Old ice faults can be treacherous where they haven’t refrozen solid, because the eye cannot gauge the thickness of the surface. The dogs stop short, whimpering, before an area gorged with water, and I must advance carefully to show them they can follow. An eagle wheels high overhead. The wind kicks up sheaves of spangles, which turn into pyrite dust when they hit a sunbeam. The forest grumbles at the gusts. Spring has marshalled its forces here; I feel them, ready to attack, not yet daring to retake the territory.