by Andrew Gille
As we stood in the living room, looking out onto the driveway, another Gaz Tiger pulls up.
“Anatoly is here,” Colin says as he puts the jacket he received on the transport plane back on. He heads outside, and I feel that it would be rude to stand in here, so I put on my jacket and go out as well.
A large Russian man with a well-trimmed beard and short cropped hair gets out of the Gaz Tiger. He and Colin are shaking hands and clapping each other on the back speaking in Russian as I walk up.
“This is my Uncle Mason. Mason, Anatoly, he’ll be our guide for our hunt,” Colin says to me.
The Russian extends his hand, he stands about 6’4”, and his hands are as big as the one I thought I saw at the window last night. I expect the same punishing, knuckle crushing grip as Dimitry in Vladivostok, but instead, he offers a firm shake that does not cause me any pain. His handshake does however, make my hand feel small, stubby and child-like compared to his.
“Good to meet you,” Anatoly says in the kind of Russian accent I’ve only heard from KGB agents in a cold-war era Hollywood movies.
Colin talks in Russian to Anatoly. Anatoly is cognizant that I do not speak Russian, unlike everyone else who has basically ignored me up to this point. When their conversation stops, he looks at me smiles and says, “The details of your hunt.”
“We’ll be snowmobiling to the cabins we’ll be staying in for the hunt Mason. I think you’ll find them much more to your liking than this place, they are small, primitive and cold! There are crates inside that have all of the hunting supplies you should need for our hunt, and the Savage 99 is inside as well. There should be a checklist in the crate, just make sure you have everything before we head out on the snowmobiles. It’s going to be a three-hour ride.”
Three hours on snowmobiles would any other day sound like a great adventure, and I’m sure that’s what Colin intended when he planned this trip. I was hoping we’d get a day of rest or there would at least be someone else driving me today. Colin just doesn’t want to slow down, as usual, he can’t, a tight schedule with things constantly going on is imperative to him. This is how he lives his life, and it is how you live when you travel with him.
I go inside, there are three crates that Colin leads me to, Anatoly cracks them open with a pry bar, and I see all of the hunting supplies brought up here for our trip. There is a jacket, snow pants, boots, a backpack that is already partially packed, some kind of camping snack pack written in Russian, even a multi-tool. I pack the supplies in the bag provided and take the clothes up to my room where I change into the thermal underwear and then add the other clothing. I put on the snow pants but not the jacket or secondary layer because I don’t want to start sweating before we leave.
Within a half hour, everyone is ready to go, the supplies are well-packed and easy to organize. I sling the Savage 99 over my shoulder and sit down in the living room in the same chair in which I fell asleep the night before. I think I might be able to catch a little extra relaxed sleep when Anatoly calls out to me.
“Ready to go?” he says.
I stand and put on the sweatshirt, parka, gloves and winter hat that have been provided. Unsurprisingly, they fit perfectly as I assume they’ve been purchased based on the body scan Colin did. Anatoly and Colin walk outside, they both carry their rifles slung across their back, Anatoly also has a massive sidearm on his hip. I think it might be a .44 Magnum, it turns out to be a Casul 454 Magnum a massive gun meant as a last resort if our rifles fail and a bear is charging us.
Anatoly opens the overhead door of an outbuilding, and three identical snowmobiles are sitting in the building. I’ve never seen this brand of snowmobile before, and I’ve been snowmobiling for almost 50 years now. It said Tajga 500 in red lettering on the blue cowling. Each of the sleds has a pack on the back which I assume contains more supplies.
We put on helmets that sat on the seats and fire these sleds up. After they warm up, we follow Anatoly out into the snow. We’re going through the forest, and now I am excited again. I’m no longer tired and whatever happened the previous night is out of my mind. The trees are flying by as we’re going through the deep snow with these sleds. I hadn’t been on a deep snow sled before, of course, we have groomed trails here in Michigan so it was interesting to be plowing through this snow that my sled at home would get stuck in. The track on this thing is like a boat paddle, and it is pushing us right through, the speedometer on my machine said about 70 kmh most of the time, so we were moving at around 45 miles an hour. We start heading up into the mountains, and the scenery is amazing. Beautiful, beautiful views and I’m trying to keep in Anatoly’s trail with my snowmobile while looking around at the vistas and the valley we’re going through as we head up the mountain.
It seems that we’re on a trail and I’d say the snow was maybe knee to waist deep. It was spring, and we crossed several places where water ran down the mountain. I could tell that the snow had been a lot deeper probably a few weeks earlier. I could see some waterfalls below us, and there were a few areas that I needed to be careful because the getting off the trail would have resulted in a pretty steep drop. This was probably the most fun I had on the whole trip. Maybe I should ask Colin to take me back for some snowmobiling.
We came up into a valley and rode through it for quite a ways. Eventually, we come upon a group of five cabins. This is where the snowmobile ride ends. Anatoly shuts off his machine and gets off the sled. I do the same.
“Beautiful ride!” Colin says as he takes off his helmet.
I nod in agreement, and Anatoly directs us to our cabins. Anatoly is staying in one cabin and Colin, and I will be in another since they only have one set of bunk beds that only accommodate two people. I notice that it is now getting darker and I am assuming that the sun is setting. Although, in the confusion of the previous night I realize that I’ve forgotten to set my watch. My watch says it is 1:30am so I set it to 5:30pm because I know that Vladivostok is 16 hours ahead of Central Time which my watch is set to. I might be off an hour because I don’t know how far west we’ve flown from Vladivostok, but at least my watch is now closer to correct and might serve as a moderately accurate indicator of the time.
Colin talks to Anatoly and Anatoly actually comes to talk to me, “We rest tonight, head out tomorrow morning, da?”
It’s exactly what I want to do. After being dragged around the globe drinking with my nephew, maybe becoming delirious from the alcohol, jet lag and lack of sleep, I am finally going to get a good night’s rest and we’re in rustic cabins that remind me of the cabin up in Otsego instead of Colin's mansion-like idea of a hunting lodge. It will just be Colin and I tonight so I’ll get to speak to my nephew without having his attention diverted by girls or business deals or partying.
We take some logs from a woodpile in the back of the cabin. There is a splitting maul near the fireplace inside, and we use that to split some wood for the evening. Colin and I take turns busting the bigger logs into smaller pieces. The wood is dry and splits easily as the maul sinks into it.
“I think about Grandpa Charles when I split wood,” Colin says.
Grandpa Charles, my grandfather, is who he is talking about.
“Really?” I say.
“Yeah, I remember him splitting wood on the farm. I was shorter than the handle of the splitting maul, so all I could do is watch back then,” Colin says.
“Sure, they had a wood furnace at the farm, you remember him doing that?” I ask. Sometimes I forget that Colin knew Grandpa Charles, he died when he was 95 years old and I’d already moved to Chicago when he died, so there were years I wasn’t around that Colin visited the farm. He must have had a closer relationship with him than I was aware of. When I’ve thought back on this, there were a lot of ways in which they were alike, and there are probably many paths Grandpa Charles could have taken that would have led him to become a JP Morgan or a John D Rockefeller of his day. He was actually studying to be a stockbroker when his father died, and he had to return to
Otsego to run the farm, so who knows what would have happened if he had gotten into that. Our family could have had a billionaire a lot sooner.
“Yeah, I installed wood-burning fireplaces at my ski lodge in Park City, Utah just so I could split wood, I’ve got 200 acres over there, and I cut wood every spring, you should come out there with me. Mitt Romney was out there with me last year, pretty sure you can cut wood better than he can,” he said.
I’d never been to his Utah house because I don’t ski and I guess I felt there was nothing I’d get out of going with him up there. It was similar to this area, however, and I regretted that I’d never accepted his invitation to come up there with him. I later Googled pictures of it, as it had appeared in Architectural Digest at some point and it was definitely a beautiful house. One photo had a fire burning in a fireplace, and sure enough, real logs burned in it, maybe Mitt Romney had split them, who knows?
“Getting a good split is really satisfying you know? It’s also a great workout, I’d split wood every day if there were a reason to do it,” he said to me.
“I think your great grandfather felt the same way,” I said, “I also think he lived to be 95 because he continued splitting wood until he couldn’t because of dementia, it is great exercise.”
Colin nodded and set another log on his chopping block, he brought the maul down through it. It made a satisfying crisp “chunk” noise as it went through the grain of the wood.
I started thinking about my grandfather at that time, and how his life ended, his body was healthy until the very final year of his life when pneumonia took him. His mind had gone three years prior to that, however. I always thought that was the worst way to go and it was a tragedy I hoped to never have to witness again. Seeing a person’s mind deteriorate is like watching their soul fade away. Colin actually spent a lot of time with my father, visiting him at the end of his life in a nursing home and I know he’d put a lot of his money into fighting memory loss and brain diseases. My grandfather usually knew who I was, but when Colin would come to visit, he called him Kristoff, which was his brother’s name. Kristoff had died in 1964, eleven years before Colin was born. I couldn’t imagine how it was to not be able to trust your mind. To not know if what you were perceiving was a reality. I then had a moment where I realized that I full well did know what that was like due to the events of the night prior and I worried that maybe I was beginning to notice symptoms of the disease that took my grandfather. Perhaps the terrifying things I’d seen in the woods and outside of the windows were symptoms of my brain’s deterioration during a time of fatigue. How long would it be before I had these same symptoms during times of heath and rest? The thought plagued me as we started the fire and settled into the cabin.
My thoughts had turned elsewhere as Colin once again began to discuss the NFC North division and the Lions and Vikings as our breath ceased to be visible and the fireplace warmed the room.
I turned him down for shots of vodka. I wanted my mind sharp, and I wanted to sleep well tonight. He drank a few glasses from a bottle that had a black label which was written entirely in Russian.
“Did Grandpa Charles ever hunt bear?” Colin asked me.
“No, I think only deer and he hunted birds. There’s actually a picture of him with a bald eagle he hunted. That was legal back then of course. It was a little shocking when I found it, he’s standing there with it, and on the back, he had written, ‘Eagle I shot - 1927.’”
“What do you think he’d think of this, do you think he’d enjoy hunting bears?”
“Oh, yes, he would have enjoyed this,” I said.
The comment seemed to satisfy Colin, a smile went across his face as he sipped his vodka and stared at the fire. We discussed a few other things before heading to bed. Colin graciously took the top bunk, and we settled in for a good night’s sleep.
I was content, I was secure, warm and sleep came over me. I could hear that Colin had fallen asleep, his breathing was deep and purposeful, and I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. Right before I was about to doze off; however, I heard a strange and disconcerting noise outside. Some kind of howl, it was almost like a wolf but deeper and more ominous. It sounded far off, if it had been any closer, I am not sure that I would have been able to sleep, once again. However, I just put it out of my mind, and I did drift off to sleep albeit in a less relaxed and contented manner than I had been only moments earlier.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Crash
I’VE SPENT A lot of my time trying to reconcile the events that happened in Russia. Trying to understand what occurred, trying to find reasons why I saw what I saw and I feel that this story is related somehow to what unfolded there.
I looked at the news stories in Russia from one month prior to one month after the date I arrived in May. I found a story of a missing Russian transport plane. That plane went missing at the beginning of April a few weeks before I came.
There was scant news about the flight, and I hadn’t found this on a Russian site. It was on an English language Georgian site, completely missing from any Russian sites. They said it was a Russian Air Force Tupolev TU-134 with 8 crew members. It still had not been found when I initially did my search, and its mission and payload was unknown.
A freak snowstorm had occurred in the mountains north of a small town called Sangar in The Sakha Republic. This was the last known location of the aircraft. During the time between the disappearance of the flight and when it was found, strange things began happening in the area surrounding Sangar.
Wild animals were being spotted, strange beasts that did not belong. It seemed like there was some sort of exodus out of the mountains to the north of the town. Some people reported seeing saber-toothed cats and other animals that should have been extinct for years. These reports were dismissed as children seeking attention from the local authorities.
What could not be explained away, however, was that farmers in an area west of the mountains reported that their livestock began to mysteriously disappear. The reports of strange animals being spotted also turned up here, but it was given less attention or suppressed, and I only read one story from that area that mentioned it.
An official explanation of the flight being found never turned up. However I did see a photo gallery on the website Imgur that had a caption in Russian. I translated it to read, “Russian TU-134 Crash Sebyan-Kyuyol - Crash occurred 5/4/2009, found 30/6/2009 - Crew thought to have survived the crash but found dismembered and disemboweled perhaps by wild animals in the days following the crash.”
The pictures are pretty gruesome, I’m not going to show them to you, but they show men who appear to have been eaten. One particular image shows a man who looks like he’s been skinned, it says, “Aleksandrov, Grigory, 34, victim found 3 miles from the crash site.”
The photos of the plane crash site have pictures of the wreckage. The images either have tarps over certain parts of the debris or other parts of the photographs have been redacted by blacking out parts of the picture. What the censor blacked out is unclear to me, many times tarps or redacted parts of images are done to protect the victims' families from seeing the gore of the deaths of their loved ones. That clearly wasn’t the aim of whoever censored these photos because in one picture, a blacked out square sits right next to a decapitated victim and you can see right down the victim’s throat. The caption even lists him as “Marchenko, Vitaly, 32.”
Only two days after I downloaded these pictures, they disappeared from the Internet, and any mention of this flight also disappeared. The stories on the Georgian English news site, likewise disappeared.
Like everything else, there is just nothing that is clear about this. I have a theory however, I think whatever was on that plane was something that wasn’t supposed to get out, some kind of experiment. Something the Russian government didn’t want anyone to find out about. The people who claim they saw saber-toothed tigers? I believe them. After what I saw I can only surmise what this crash let loose.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Hunt Day 1
THE NEXT MORNING Anatoly wakes us up by bringing us eggs and some kind of Russian pancakes called bliny that he’s cooked in his own cabin for us. We down the breakfast with some type of milk I do not think came from a cow and begin gearing up for the ride out to the area in which we’ll be hunting.