The cold gradually seeped in through all the layers of thermals and fur. My feet were distinctly chilly and my toes started to feel numb, so I had to focus on keeping all my toes moving as well as hanging on, and every now and then I thrashed my legs up and down on the tarpaulin-covered sleigh, to encourage warm blood to flow down to my extremities.
After a few hours, the snowmobile stopped and I raised my goggles again. Darkness had properly fallen by now, and we were in a long, snowy valley with larch forest on each side. I drank some hot water from my thermos. After a few minutes, Piers and his reindeer herder arrived and stopped to check that I was all right. The air was thick with alcohol fumes: Piers’ driver seemed to be keeping himself going on the long, cold journey with the help of a couple of bottles of vodka. I got off the sledge and sat on the back of the snowmobile instead, and prepared myself for the final leg, even though we were still apparently at least two hours away from the camp. I had taken my gloves off for about two minutes to find things in my stiff, frozen rucksack, and my fingers were already hurting. I wriggled them inside my mitts, where I had also stuffed a small bag of hand-warmer granules, and my fingers started to sting and warm up.
Back in that dark grey space behind the iced-up goggles, I felt myself drifting into a strange internal world, as though one part of my brain was looking after the physical challenge of holding on while another part let me revisit earlier parts of my journey. In my head I was examining enormous, dusty bones in the vaults of the mammoth museum in St Petersburg, and drifting around rooms of French Impressionist, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings in the Hermitage. I thought about family and friends back home, and my garden where daffodils and primroses were coming into flower. I felt a very, very long way away.
We seemed to be going up and down over hills and very bumpy ground. Other snowmobiles – carrying more herders returning from the festival – would catch up and then overtake us; their headlights would turn my world a lighter grey as they approached, then it would go dark again when they passed. A couple more hours and we stopped. I hoped we had reached the camp, but when I pushed up my goggles we were still in the snowy woods. My driver had stopped for a cigarette. My hands and feet were very, very cold by now. I swapped my gloves for enormous boxing-glove-like down mittens. It would be harder to hold on, but my fingers would be less cold. Before we set off again, I looked up at the sky and saw skeins of bright light flowing and dancing across the backdrop of the stars. It was stunningly beautiful.
The last half-hour of that journey was the longest I have ever experienced, and in that time I started to despair. It was too cold, too far, and there was no way out of this situation. I couldn’t put my hand up and say, ‘All right, I’ve had enough now – take me home.’ I was very tired and very cold and my entire being was simply focused on getting through, minute by minute. My fingers and toes were numb, and I had started to shiver. I had reached the limit of my protection against the elements. There was nothing else I could put on. A polar expert had once advised me never to go further than one kilometre away from ‘base’ in the Arctic without some means of warming up: at the very least a sleeping bag, ideally a tent and stove. I had none of these, and I was effectively alone in the darkness; I couldn’t talk to my driver, and I was separated from Piers and Anatoly. I just had to hold on to the hope that we would arrive at the camp very soon.
We came to a sudden halt in darkness and silence. I pushed my goggles up: we had reached the camp. I stumbled into a tent where a recently lit stove was emitting a very dim light and a little heat. I had just endured the most extreme experience of my life. I understood the fragility of existence in such a harsh environment. I had never been so grateful for shelter and warmth.
The journey had taken six hours. For another two hours it was difficult to find out where I was meant to be sleeping – and then another Marina arrived: Marina Nikolaeva. This formidable woman ran the reindeer herders around Olenek. People suddenly started scuttling around to sort things out, then Marina found a tent for me, made sure a stove was lit, and I gratefully went off to bed, huddling into my down sleeping bag. The stove went out in the night, and I awoke a few times with ice on my eyelashes, and around the edges of my sleeping bag where the moisture in my breath had condensed and frozen. Each time, I pulled the cords of my sleeping bag tighter and snuggled further down.
I woke up in an orange tent, glowing with the sunshine outside but icy cold. Marina’s husband came in to light the stove, and I pulled on layers in preparation for emerging into the outdoors. When I did, the nightmarish dark wood of the night had gone and I was in a clearing in a sparse larch forest, in bright snow and brilliant sunshine. It was still less than –20 degrees, but the sun felt warm on my bare face. A thousand-strong herd of reindeer moved around in the forest close to the camp. Several reindeer for riding – uchakhs – were tied up in the camp itself. Men were sawing wood for fires and tinkering with sledges and snowmobiles; children were riding reindeer round the camp.
That afternoon I rode on a sledge pulled by two reindeer, with the camp leader, or brigadier, Vasily Stepanov. He had loaded his rifle and wedged it under a reindeer skin on the back of the sledge, and I perched quite nervously on top of it. We moved off down the hill from the camp, at the front of a small caravan of reindeer sledges, and went looking for traces of wild reindeer. Before long, Vasily halted the caravan and pointed out the mashed-up snow where wild reindeer had passed. As wild and domestic reindeer are essentially the same animals, I presumed he knew that these were wild tracks simply because we were far from the camp and his own herd. There were other tracks in the snow as well: Arctic hare and larger prints that may have been wolverine, as well as trails of birds’ feet, only just sunk into the top of the snow. (Stepping off the sledge, which formed a track about a foot deep in the snow, I plunged down to three or four feet.) A small flock of five white ptarmigan had flown off up the hill as we had stopped.
There were elements of the Evenki lifestyle that were still close to those of their hunter-gathering ancestors: they were still nomadic, and still hunting. But there were also modifications, some very recent. The Evenki were not just hunters of reindeer; they were reindeer herders as well. It is thought that domestication of reindeer happened relatively recently, perhaps in the last 3000 years.1 So why continue hunting reindeer if you already have domestic animals? The answer to this question seemed to lie in the fact that the impetus driving the domestication of reindeer was not to secure a food source, but rather to obtain a more efficient way of hunting food: the ancestors of the reindeer herders domesticated reindeer to ride them, in order to hunt wild reindeer. Piers thought this was probably the only example of a species being domesticated in order to hunt wild members of the same species.
Siberia became part of Russia in the seventeenth century. The Russians had moved in along the great rivers, building wooden forts as they went, suppressing the indigenous tribes and taking the whole of Siberia within a generation. Traditionally, domestic reindeer had been used for transport, milk, and as decoys to attract wild reindeer into ambushes,2 but now the herds were also used as livestock, although hunting of wild reindeer persisted.
The herding and hunting tradition went through the mill of Sovietisation in the twentieth century, when northern Siberia was seen as a huge meat farm. Indigenous reindeer herders were compelled to become large-scale meat producers: herds were expanded and clusters of nomadic ranges were incorporated into enormous ‘farms’ producing reindeer meat for industrial mining towns in the far north. Starting in the 1930s, villages, like Olenek, were set up to process the meat and to house the women and children. The reindeer herders had operated in family groups, but these were broken up according to Soviet principles: the men, as Soviet workers, would run the camps, as working collectives, or ‘brigades’ (of which there were three around Olenek), while women and children would live in the village. Some families had always tried to stay together, though that still meant that the women and children wou
ld be out in the camps during the school holidays and back in the village for the winter. I was fortunate to visit the Evenki camp in spring holiday time, when the camp felt very family orientated. The main family in our camp was the Stepanov family, of whom Vasily was the patriarch and brigadier.
In the post-Soviet era the need for reindeer meat had diminished as the industrial towns closed down and demand dissipated, but now Siberia was being mined for another commodity: diamonds. Diamond money meant new schools and community works in Olenek, and a renewed demand for reindeer meat on a commercial scale. The Stepanovs’ thousand-strong herd of reindeer was there to provide meat for sale and reindeer for riding, but reindeer meat for the camp itself was still mostly obtained from hunting wild reindeer. In fact, there had been a local decline in domestic reindeer numbers so that hunting of wild reindeer was actually on the increase. The balance between pastoralism and hunting had shifted back a little, but wild reindeer were a force to be reckoned with: the population was booming, with a huge wild herd building up on the Taimyr Peninsula to the east. Wild herds would occasionally sweep in and ‘abduct’ domestic reindeer. Spending time around the reindeer in the Stepanov herd, this was entirely understandable; the deer for riding were quite tame, but most of the herd seemed very much like wild animals, as though they could quite easily revert to that state in fullness, at any time.
Piers had spent the last twenty years studying Anatoly’s people, the Eveny, a sister group to the Evenki, both indigenous tribes of Siberia and the Altai. All of these tribes in northern Asia shared a common pattern of subsistence, being nomadic or semi-nomadic hunters and herders. Some of the tribes, like the neighbouring Yakuts, were traditionally semi-nomadic horse and cattle breeders and spoke a Turkic language. The Yakuts, with their southern Siberian cattle-breeding style of subsistence and Turkic language, are probably the remnants of a recent northwards migration of a southern Siberian steppe population, impelled to move north as the Mongol empire expanded in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries ad.3, 4
The Eveny and Evenki people traditionally spoke Tungusic languages (although most we spoke to were now using the more widespread Yakut language), and were herders and hunters of reindeer. Genetic analyses have shown that indigenous Asian and American populations are a separate branch from European and African populations, and, furthermore, that the Asian population has two main branches: one grouping Siberian populations (including the Evenki) with indigenous Americans, and the other relating to people in Central and South-East Asia. These two branches seem to have diverged between 21,000 and 24,000 years ago, although this seems too late to reflect the earliest colonisation of north and Central Asia.5
Having spent so much time living with reindeer herders in Siberia, Piers was able to tell me that I shouldn’t ask Vasily about his hopes for the hunt. And in the end it seemed that the wild reindeer were too far away, and we were too late to be able to catch up with them that day, so we all returned to camp.
When a hunt was unsuccessful, meat could be obtained from the domestic herd. I found this quite difficult. There was an incredible sense of life and death in this place. The reindeer were such beautiful creatures that it seemed awful to consider killing them. But of course I knew that was exactly what the Evenki depended on for survival in this climate. This dreadful battle between surviving and dying, respect and killing, was deeply embedded in their culture. The Evenki revered reindeer, especially wild ones. Later that evening, Vasily described to me some of the rituals associated with the hunt.
‘Before going on a hunt, I always feed the fire and feed the spirit of the locality, before setting out. When a hunt has been successful, I give some of the meat to the spirits and after we finish the deer, all the bones, and the head and the antlers go up on a platform.’
The bones would be placed up high, facing east to ensure reincarnation, like a smaller version of the sky burial for dead humans.
‘The animals should be reborn again and again, so that our children and grandchildren have enough to eat.’
The ethics and morals attached to hunting extended to other members of the group, as well as to the animals being hunted. There was an element of karma, of ‘what goes around, comes around’ as well. Marina said, ‘You must be respectful to nature, or you won’t be successful next time. You should also always share your catch with people close to you, or people who don’t have much. Whoever does this is guaranteed success [in the hunt].’
I was well aware that my survival on the sleigh ride through the night, and the integrity of my fingers and toes, had depended on my reindeer coat, hood, mitts and – perhaps most importantly – boots, and the generosity of the Evenki villagers who had lent me these clothes. Here I was: a vegetarian who would never buy fur, standing in the snow in Siberia dressed almost entirely, from head to foot, in the skin of a dead animal. But I was borrowing these clothes, and the deer had not been killed for me. Neither was the one that was about to meet its end. I walked over to the opposite end of the camp while a reindeer was lassoed, gently pressed to the ground, then stabbed swiftly through the heart.
I waited, then went over just as the Evenki men were starting to expertly skin the deer. Its eyes were still bright. But very quickly, it was changed from dead animal into a pile of meat: gutted and jointed with surgical precision. Anatoly took a metal mug and dipped it into the cavity of the reindeer’s abdomen, bringing up a cupful of fresh, warm reindeer blood to his lips. He offered it to me; I refused as politely as I could.
The skin was laid out, fur down, on the snow. I noticed strange, bean-sized objects stuck to the inside of the hide around the shoulders; Piers later told me that these were the grubs of warbleflies, which lay their eggs under reindeers’ skin. Later that afternoon, I watched three Evenki women, Valya, Tanya and Zoya, making reindeer boots from a prepared skin. They chose the fur from the legs of the reindeer to make the upper part of the boot, and sewed together patches from the reindeers’ feet to create the soles. The sewing thread was also from the reindeer – long fibres pulled from a dried ligament.
The finished boots were both pieces of art and functionally formidable. It seemed amazing that these relatively simple fabrications could outperform my Baffin boots – but they did. Reindeer fur provides fantastic insulation: there is an outer coat of long guard hairs, and dense under-wool next to the skin. The guard hairs contain cells with such large air spaces within them that they appear to be hollow under the microscope – and this is what makes reindeer fur so effective.6
The meat from the slaughtered reindeer was swiftly converted into dinner. Marina was very sanguine about the slaughter.
‘Whoever likes the blood can drink it,’ she said. ‘The liver is also good hot, and you can eat the eyes, which are delicious and good for you. We always eat the raw brains – they’re very tasty and healthy, too.’
Meals with the Evenki consisted of a lot of reindeer meat, mostly boiled, with the water forming a sort of fatty, reindeer broth. Sometimes there were also bowls of chopped reindeer fat and, once, a bowl of pieces of frozen reindeer milk. I was lucky in that there was also some bread, small triangles of processed soft cheese in foil wrappers, and bowls of bon bons (which I suspect were laid on for guests). I had brought some packet meals with me, and the Evenki looked on in mild disgust as I poured boiling water into these concoctions. One of the children was brave enough to try some – and the other children ran away from him, screaming.
The meat-rich diet of the Evenki seems somewhat bizarre and unhealthy from a Western perspective, but there’s evidence that it’s just what the Evenki need in their extreme environment. Our bodies produce heat all the time, as a by-product of metabolism, and the Evenki have been found to have a very high metabolic rate, probably due to high levels of thyroid hormones. A study of thyroid hormone levels in the Evenki suggested that there was a correlation with total energy and protein intake. A high proportion of the Evenki’s energy intake came in the form of protein and fat, not surprising given their
reindeer-rich diet. It seems that eating a lot – in particular, a lot of meat – may spur the thyroid gland into producing more hormones. The result: raised metabolic rate and heat production. It’s as though the body is so well supplied with fuel that it can afford to ‘waste’ some as heat – except that, in northern Siberia, that ‘wastefulness’ is itself important to survival.7, 8
A diet like the Evenki’s should set the heart disease alarm bells ringing, but, in spite of their meat-rich diet, the Evenki appear to have paradoxically low levels of ‘bad cholesterol’ in their blood. There are probably a number of reasons for this, including a genetic predisposition to low cholesterol, a high metabolic rate and a physically active lifestyle, all of which should help to keep ‘bad cholesterol’ down. Studies of other northern indigenous people have also shown strangely low rates of heart disease; a high consumption of fish containing omega-3 fatty acids may also play a role. However, very sadly, there have been recent reports of rising rates of heart disease in Siberian and Alaskan natives, as they move away from traditional lifestyles. The modern lifestyle diseases of heart disease and diabetes are spreading into the far north.9
That night, Marina and her two children shared the tent with me. There was plenty of room; we slept close to the edges (but not too close as it would drop to –40 degrees outside during the night), on a raised floor of slim larch logs. The stove occupied an off-centre position. Marina’s husband was sleeping somewhere else but he would dutifully come in periodically to check on the stove and replenish the pile of larch logs. We fell asleep in such warmth, with our faces almost roasting in the heat from the stove, that I stripped off most of my layers inside my down sleeping bag, but left them in the bag in case I needed them later in the night. I did.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 21