by James Raffan
While in exile, Jochelson made two major expeditions to live among the people of Yakutia and learn their ways. Even at that time, Slava explained, the Yukaghir people and their languages, customs, and traditions were dwindling. Using the academic discipline he had acquired in Zurich, Jochelson made a special study not only of the language, manners, and folklore of the Tungus and Yakut peoples he met but also of the Yukaghirs, who, in nomadic and seminomadic fashion, fished and hunted bear, wild deer, and moose. He also met a separate group of tundra Yukaghirs who herded reindeer and moved more often than their taiga brethren. Jochelson was credited with discovering, on one of his expeditions, two Yukaghir dialects that, even then, were thought to be extinct, Slava said.
“Jochelson wrote a book,” Slava went on, “a very thick book that was first published in English in the 1920s but just six years ago was published in Russian. It is called The Yukaghir and Yukaghirized Tungus. As strange as it may sound, Jochelson’s book is the keeper of our culture. He is helping us remember who we are, who we were, who we will become. We have folklore ensembles in Nelemnoye and Andriushkino and in Yakutsk, and we have our artists, writers, poets, and musicians, but we also have many challenges as a people. With all of the development that is coming, I am not sure what will happen. You don’t see the future very clearly if your culture is not good. You talk of climate change. We speak of cultural survival.”
The following day, Slava returned to his world. Ruslan and I visited a school and that evening dined again at Igor and Marina Makarov’s home. They spoke of their desire to come to Canada, perhaps for an exhibition of some of Igor’s photographs of backcountry Sakha, perhaps one day to emigrate. But the intensity of all these travels and experiences in Sakha had taken their toll and I had to fight to stay focused and alert, especially through the vodka and fine wine that was served in equal measure to the Makarovs’ flowing hospitality. The Road of Bones had taken more out of me than I’d thought.
Ruslan and I said our thanks and goodbyes and headed back to the hotel in a cab. But Ruslan, instead of heading home in the cab, asked if we could spend a few moments talking in my room.
I was exhausted. My head was swimming. My bowels were still unsettled. My body had not really shaken off the hum of the Kolyma Road.
“Ten minutes, James. Ten minutes, that’s all it will take. You are leaving tomorrow. There is something I want to show you and something I would ask you to do.”
So up the stairs we went, Ruslan carrying a grey gym bag. Any desire I might have had at that time of night to muster energy for another conversation, after all that had happened in the last few days, was diminishing with each step. We sat down across from each other on twin beds and Ruslan unzipped the bag.
“First, James … First. A toast to our fathers with the drink of your ancestors.”
He reached into the bag and pulled out two glasses and a half-empty bottle of Famous Grouse Scotch whisky. He might as well have pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I was speechless.
“Like yours, my father has passed. But James, having been with you in the spring and again on this visit, I know that your father, who I feel I know through what you have said to people as they have asked about your family—I know that your father would be proud of what you are doing.”
The wash of exhaustion and resentment, and now guilt, that had followed me up the stairs dissolved into tears that quietly dripped on the bedspread between my legs as Ruslan poured two generous doses of blended malt. “To our fathers with the drink of your ancestors,” he said as we clinked glasses. “Cheh!”
Completely blindsided, I began to babble about how fortunate I felt to have met Slava and Ruslan and how these experiences—east, west, south, and north from Yakutsk following a line just south of the Arctic Circle in the Sakha Republic—had taken my research to places I could never have imagined. Ruslan reached again into his bag and took out a well-thumbed paperback book.
“James. James. As you … as you know … I am a translator by trade. I have here a seminal work in the Sakha tradition by Aleksei Yeliseevich Kulakovsky, one of our greatest writers. It is called Ouian’s Dream [The Shaman’s Dream] and it is a long-form poem, a prophecy really, written in 1910—illustrated, incidentally, by our friend Mandar Uus. The government contracted me to translate this book into English. I did that, to the best of my ability. But I have never heard my words, my translations, voiced in English.”
Now feeling a flush of remorse on top of regret, feeling like a total cad for even thinking of rebuffing Ruslan’s only request in the whole time I had known him, I began to read Ouian’s Dream, page by page, astonished at the veracity of the predictions of how indigenous people would be beaten down but then would rise up again and find their feet and their identities in a new world. Ruslan, for once, just sat quietly and listened.
“Is it a good translation?” he asked. “Is it a good translation?”
“I don’t know, “I said, laughing. “I haven’t seen the original text.”
“To Kulakovsky. Cheh!”
“To you, Ruslan, a fine translation. Cheh!”
“Now James, James … I want you to go back and read this part again because I think it relates to what we are doing here, what we have been doing during your visits here on your way around the world.”
And so I picked up the book and read again, as Kulakovsky wrote of his own quest to find truth in the craft of his channelling the shaman’s dream. He had foretold with astonishing detail the coming of electrical power, various wars, and the subjugation and eventual re-emergence of Russia’s indigenous peoples as a viable political force. With Ruslan hanging on my every word—his every word—I continued:
May my aspirations for good
Raise me like the most powerful feather
May my yearning for noble deeds
Lift me like the strongest wing feather
Purity of my thought
Has turned into the swiftest wing
Loftiness of my thought
Has become the mightiest wing
In anticipation of happiness
I have spread my wings
In anticipation of carnage
I am shooting upwards
This time, Ruslan could not contain his enthusiasm. At that point in the reading, he blurted, “James … James … this is … this is you, man. This is about circling the midnight sun. This is you who is going to ascend. This is you who is going to fly. Yes. You are escorted by the midnight storm. May your aspiration for good raise you like the most powerful wing feather. Purity of your thought has turned into the swiftest wing. That’s you, man, circling the midnight sun.”
At that point, the tears welled again, any lingering inhibitions stripped away by the Famous Grouse. After this effusive affirmation that had set my project on something of a pedestal, I couldn’t think what to say to this remarkable human being, knowing that my journey would have been impossible without the resolve and spirit of people like him who had helped along the way.
Up early the following morning, wondering if the whole Ouian’s Dream encounter was in itself a dream, I met Slava in the lobby and together we taxied to the airport. I told him about Ruslan and he just nodded and laughed. “Kulakovsky is someone you should pay attention to,” he said. “We do.”
But then, knowing this would be our last time together, he said, “Before you go, James, I need to tell you a story that I began on the ferry but didn’t get a chance to finish.” And so in the cab, and then on a bench in the tiny crowded Yakutsk airport, Slava said his goodbyes with his own tale.
“Fifty years ago, or so, in a place on the tundra near the sacred blue mountain, an old shaman died. There are two ways to become a shaman: to learn as a young man with a shaman teacher; or to spend time away from people, on the tundra, in isolation with the gods.
“Many or most shamans live as ordinary people. Around this time, a young man, who had a wife and family, a herder, an ordinary man, felt a calling to spend time alone on the tundra. Even
though he had a family, he did this,” Slava related.
“One fall, he went away to the tundra and did not come back. Effectively, he disappeared. That spring, wolves started coming around the reindeer herd. One wolf in particular was very aggressive, and so the elders conferred and decided that they should kill this wolf. They set about trying to trap him. Their best hunters tried, but every time their traps were foiled as if the wolf was one step ahead, as if he knew all the tricks.
“One time, they came to a trap that was sprung and noticed a human footprint mixed with the wolf tracks. They knew then that the man who had disappeared was living with the wolves. But his wife and family were missing him. They wanted him back. And maybe this would stop the wolves from attacking the reindeer.”
Slava continued, “So there was another shaman in the community who had stopped practising in the Soviet period. They said he should destroy his drum or he would be killed. He had destroyed his drum and returned to living as an ordinary man. The hunters went to this man and told him the problem of the wolf they couldn’t catch. And they asked him what they should do.
“The old shaman said that they should go to the sacred mountain on the night of the full moon. ‘The wolves will be there,’ he said. ‘You need to take the whole community and make a circle around the whole pack of wolves. When you get the wolves circled, make a break of one person in the circle. And then let the wolves out that gate. The last wolf will be the man who disappeared. When all the other wolves are gone, you can catch the last one, the man wolf. But don’t just use one lasso. Seven people must get their ropes on the wolf because he will be very strong.’
“So they did what the retired shaman said. They went to the mountain on the full moon and circled the wolves, and seven of their best hunters lassoed the wolf. He was very strong, as the shaman had told them to expect. With these seven ropes, they captured him and tied him tightly to a reindeer sled and took him back to the village.
“As instructed, they left the man wolf on the sled for three days, and at the end of the third day, the wolf spoke like a man and asked for a drink of water. When he drank the water, his metamorphosis back into a man was complete. The man then went back to his family and lived again normally with his wife and children. He helped people with healing from time to time. But mostly he lived a normal life.”
Slava watched me pass through security. Looking back through the front window of the airport I caught a glimpse of him heading to the cab. I looked again and the cab was there, but he was gone.
13: ARCTIC GOLD
Next stop along the Arctic Circle from Yakutsk was a gold mine in the Chukotka district of the Russian Far East. And, as had happened so many times in Russia, it was anything but an easy proposition to get there. Fortunately, Lou Naumovski, the Canadian who is vice president of Kinross—the Canadian company that owns the mine—and head of its Moscow office, had attended my presentation at the embassy in Moscow in the early days of my research. When he offered to help, I explained that help in getting to this gold mine, called Kupol, in the middle of nowhere in eastern Siberia, would be just the ticket.
Nearly a year after saying goodbye to Slava, I had managed to get a permit to enter Chukotka—a process, it seemed, even more complicated and fraught with delays and setbacks than getting my Russian visa. On the one day of the week when you can travel east by actually flying east, without backtracking to Moscow or another Russian hub, I passed through Yakutsk again en route to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, not far from where Sir George made landfall in 1841.
I found myself sitting with a dozen or so people in the back of an ancient Antonov turboprop. Designed in the 1950s for service on short gravel airstrips in the Russian outback, like the Beavers, Otters, Twin Otters, Dash-7s, and Dash-8s made by the de Havilland Aircraft Company in Canada, the AN-24 had wings set over the fuselage to prevent gravel, ice, and snow from being sucked into the air intakes or damaging the propellers. This one had been kitted out for cargo in the front. Behind a movable bulkhead, there were a few rows of tatty canvas seats in the back, complete with a bored flight attendant. Ancient ex-air-force khaki emergency oxygen masks, or maybe they were life preservers—one couldn’t be sure—were stuffed into the pockets for good measure.
Among the great trials—and joys—of travelling are moments when circumstances collide to propel the traveller into an existential crisis of one sort or another. In this instance, just as I was thinking how good it would be to leave this twin-engined museum piece, the plane bumped down and rumbled along a cracked asphalt strip at Sokol Airport near Magadan. My phone, which had never really found a service to which it could relate anywhere in Yakutia, suddenly lit up with an incoming text message: “Hey Daddy, I don’t know where you are or if you’ll even get this but you should know that your friend Marty Bergmann was killed in an Arctic plane crash a couple of days ago. So sorry. xo Molly.”
And there it was. The guy flying in a new (relatively speaking) Boeing 737-200 on First Air Flight 6560, making its final approach to the controlled airstrip at Resolute Bay, Nunavut—a place I had landed on occasion with Marty, who headed the Canadian government’s Polar Continental Shelf northern research support program and had a deep passion for the North—had come to the end of the line when his skilled and certified Canadian pilots had flown into a hillside, temporarily blinded by low-lying fog over the airstrip. Meanwhile the guy flying in the back end of Siberia, in the hands of unemployed Russian fighter pilots on a plane held together with pop rivets and tin cans, survived. I felt slapped in the face with circumstance. Work in the North involved risk. I ached for his family.
Inside the terminal, a swarthy fellow in a leather cap held a piece of paper with my name on it. “Dobriy vyechyer! Good evening!” I said, unleashing 50 percent of my vast repertoire of Russian greetings, pleased that the connection had been made so surely and promptly. He just nodded and pointed to a hole in the wall where, apparently, the luggage would be appearing.
My case arrived, complete with Mandar’s knife and my own, which of course had tripped the security alarms on the way out of Yakutsk. But, as Mandar had promised, they were allowed through as cultural artifacts on the strength of an official certificate he’d given me when we left Bayaga. Still without saying a word, the Kinross man hefted my cases up into the back of a new Toyota sport utility vehicle, opened the back door, and gestured for me to get in.
As we turned right onto a two-lane paved road, I saw a sign indicating that we were on Highway M56, the Kolyma Road. Instantly, I flashed back to those long hours with Slava and the others on the Yakutsk half of this notorious two thousand kilometres of pain and suffering. That reverie popped when the Kinross fellow reached back over the seat and handed me an envelope.
In it was a big brass key, like something from a medieval castle, and a typed note that said:
Dear Mr. Raffan: Welcome to Magadan. You are on your way to the Kupol site! TODAY IT IS Tuesday, August 23 IN MAGADAN. Today you will overnight in Magadan. The driver will take you to an apartment on Karl Marx Street. On Wednesday, August 24 at 7:30 a.m. the driver will pick you up from the apartment and take you to the airport for Kupol charter. Welcome to Kupol!
When we were stopped at a police checkpoint near what appeared to be an abandoned military airport, the whole arrival scenario started to take on a shadowy Mission Impossible cast. As I sat in the back seat of an anonymous late-model black vehicle with tinted windows, my imagination ran rampant. I began to wonder if I should eat the note.
We crested a hill and before us, on a narrow isthmus of land set north/south between verdant taiga hills and east/west between the brooding waters of two bays, was the beguiling jumble of buildings, power pylons, smokestacks, and antennas that was Magadan. To our right, high on a hill overlooking the isolated town, was a giant concrete head, reminiscent of Easter Island. This I took to be the Mask of Sorrow, a famous monument that commemorated the countless souls who came here by ship, and who lived and died as exiles building roads
and mining gold for the Stalinist regime.
On the edge of town was a shabby corona of dilapidated wooden shanties with little fenced vegetable plots and hungry-looking dogs. Closer to the centre were buildings, some new and sound and colourful, others made of old concrete and steel in need of roofing tar and a lick of paint. We passed a monument of MiG fighters, old rockets, and a helicopter welded up in flying formation onto monkey bars made of old drill pipe. It appeared to be a place for young kids to climb and for older kids to practise their tagging skills.
The road name changed to Prospekt Lenina, and now the facades were clean, with pink stucco and paint and the classic lines and curves of nineteenth-century czarist architecture. Set back from wide sidewalks and new street lamps, they presented a much more sophisticated face to the street. Rising behind and above them all were five golden turrets on what appeared to be a brand new monolithic white cathedral.
We turned off the main drag and laddered our way along narrower streets and laneways bordered by much tawdrier buildings, some of which appeared to have been halted in mid-build. We crept past a stalled truck and pulled up in front of a wooden door hanging off its hinges on a crumbling concrete stoop. We’d arrived: 54 Karl Marx Street, such as it was, a five-storey walk-up.
At that point my friend at the wheel turned and held up four fingers on his left hand. “Turn key four times, four times,” he said, waggling his digits so that I might understand. Holding the key in my hands, I looked at it and then again at his fingers. “Four times?” “Da. Turn key four times.”
The apartment block ran the length of Karl Marx Street, a few hundred metres. Above the first-floor exterior—coated in unbelievable amounts of graffiti, some of it vaguely artistic—the upper stories, with their alternating stripes of cream and yellow paint, gave the impression that somebody actually cared for the place. Standing there with a brass key in my hand, all I could hear in my head was the theme music for the American spoof spy series Get Smart, which got louder as I entered the building, heard a door slam, and started to make my way up the urine-stained stairwell.