by Andrew Gille
We’re off once again on the snowmobiles, and I finally feel whole. I have gotten a good night’s sleep in the bunk, and now I’ve had a good meal, and I am having fun riding these snowmobiles through this gorgeous Russian pass. The sun is coming up and streaming through the clouds into the valley in which we’re riding. My grandfather’s Savage 99 is at my side like it used to be when he bought a Winchester 70, and he let me use the 99. I’m with my favorite nephew, and although the road to this moment has been a little rocky and made me question him, I’m finally very pleased to be on this trip with him.
We ride along a river and through a forest, finally, after about another hour of riding on the sleds, Anatoly comes to a stop. Colin and I stop and get off of our machines. We both remove the helmets we’re wearing and put them on the seats of the snowmobiles. I don a balaclava and a winter hat. The temperature is crisp, maybe in the 20’s and we begin to hike. The snow is almost to our knees, and Anatoly leads and we follow in his footsteps. With his long legs, the snow is more like ankle deep for him, and he walks in a kind of shuffling motion that clears out a path for us.
I feel great, and now we’re actually hunting, Anatoly keeps scanning the hill in front of us as it comes into view through the forest. The woods are made up of coniferous trees, and I can see that they extend up the hill in front of us but that there are bald patches here and there. Every once in a while we’ll stop at a high point in the forest and Anatoly will gaze out onto the hill with a pair of field glasses. They are clearly military surplus from the Soviet era, green and ugly with the aesthetics of a mass produced product designed by bureaucrats.
The hike gets harder as we reach the hill, it is a steep trudge up, and now I wish Colin had told me about this trip so I could have prepared physically for the demanding environment.
We reach the summit of the first hill, and I see that it dips down, below us is another river, and Anatoly once again takes a look through his field glasses. He encourages us to glass with our scopes. Colin scans the hill and riverbed.
“I see a reindeer!” Colin said excitedly.
I pointed my scope in the direction he was facing, and I saw it as well. A majestic animal, it walked with its antlers in velvet along the river. Colin had seen one, and I saw almost half a dozen more behind it, I drew his attention to this and Anatoly too took in the sight.
We admired the animals for a short time and then began to descend the hill down into the valley in which we’d seen the reindeer. The river appeared to be a small creek cutting through the valley but became a wide and wild river as we approached it.
A rudimentary bridge made of three logs cut lengthwise and balanced on rocks stood over the river. Anatoly walked up the rock steps and sure-footedly made his way across. Colin was next and made the crossing with a bit of arm waving. It was now my turn.
I placed my boot on the rocks that acted as steps and felt how slippery and unsure the traction was. I nearly fell as I planted my foot to ascend up to the next rock. The log seemed narrow, and when I stepped on it, I could feel it bend under my weight. I slowly and reluctantly put one of my boots in front of the other as I made my way across the narrow log. Freezing, quickly rushing water shot down the river beneath me in white swirls as I felt the wood bending and flexing with each step. As I stood in the exact middle of the center log, I heard it crack. I could feel the vibration of the sound move through my foot and into my spine. I swallowed and then continued to put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had happened, I was still alive and the bridge was still intact.
I stepped down on the opposite side, and except for a few of the first rides I’d gone on with Colin after he got his pilot’s license, I had never taken such relief in setting my foot on solid ground.
Colin and Anatoly stood looking at a paper map on the other side. They hadn’t even paid attention as I’d crossed the raging river and thus they’d missed my show of hesitancy and fear. Where they had moved quickly, and with purpose making a quick trip over the bridge, I’d done it deliberately and slowly. I was afraid I’d be mocked when I got to the other side, but now I thought that if I had fallen in, there was a chance that neither of them would have noticed.
We walked across a wide field which the reindeer had crossed, the snow was not deep here at all. Our snowmobiles from home would have been able to get through that field, I wondered how the mountain snowmobiles would have fared with their big paddle tracks.
We stopped at an outcropping of boulders just where the mountain began to rise up from the valley. I was feeling weak, and out of breath, I could tell we were pretty high up in the mountains, things like walking were becoming more difficult to do.
Anatoly took out his field glasses and encouraged us to look through our scopes onto the mountain for any signs of bears. He said that we were in an area where the bear come down from their dens to fish and drink from the same river that we’d crossed.
I could see up into the mountains clearly with Swarovski scope attached to the Savage 99. I tried to canvas the entirety of the mountain in sectors and began from the top left and worked my way to the right.
Movement caught my eye as I scanned over a section of the left side of the mountain. I moved my scope back and forth trying to find what it was that I saw walking. For a brief second I caught it, it was standing on two legs, white fur.
I heard Anatoly say something in Russian and then he said, “What is this? Do you see?”
I said, “Yes!” to him and put down my gun looking his way. It was then that I noticed that he was looking in an entirely different direction than me.
“This should not be here,” he said.
I looked through my scope at the opposite side of the mountain trying to approximate where I thought he was looking with the field glasses. Then I saw it. What looked like a Siberian tiger prowled along a ridge. Unaware of where we were I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I just took in the majestic animal through my scope. It was amazing to see a wild tiger here in Siberia.
I was smiling when I put down my rifle, I noticed that Anatoly was not.
“This does not belong here,” he says, “Bear here, not those.”
I look at Colin, and he shrugs his shoulders, “What did he see?” Colin asks.
“I saw a tiger, and I think I might have seen a polar bear as well,” I said.
Colin's eyebrow raises up, he looks over at Anatoly then looks through his scope at the mountain.
“I still don’t see it,” he says.
“Let’s go,” says Anatoly.
We begin walking back over the plain toward the river.
“We must be in wrong area,” Anatoly says, “We go back check map.”
“What’s going on? I didn’t see it,” Colin says, he seems to want to protest Anatoly’s implication that we should go back.
“We’re in the wrong area,” Anatoly says.
“No we’re not, I checked the map, this is the place,” he says.
“Wrong place,” says Anatoly already walking toward the river.
“Wait, come back, we have guns, what can’t we do? Get over here!”
Anatoly, storms back to Colin, he’s almost a half a foot taller than him.
“I say this in English, so both understand,” he says, ”You shoot bear up there, tiger take it from you, you shoot tiger, same as shoot man, penalty same, go to jail, Russian prison. Better to let him eat you,” Anatoly explains.
“Understood,” I say, grabbing Colin's arm, “Let’s go,” I tell him.
“Alright,” he says, realizing that no one is on his side in this argument and even he can’t break these rules.
We reverse the journey back to the snowmobiles. I once again take the longest time crossing the river. However, my confidence has increased, and I get over in probably half the time I had previously.
“We will go back to cabins, try another area tomorrow,” Anatoly says.
Colin rolls his eyes as he puts on his helmet, that was clearly not his plan, but he�
�s realized that Anatoly is calling the shots on this hunt since he knows the area and I am going to follow him rather than Colin.
Once again, the snowmobile ride is beautiful and amazing, the sun begins to sink into the late afternoon sky as we return to the cabin. It is clear that there just wasn’t time to try to head anywhere else to hunt.
We unload the snowmobiles, and Anatoly tells us that he will be by with dinner after a nap.
“That’s probably what he wanted more than going up the mountain this afternoon,” Colin says sourly.
“What?” I ask him.
“A nap, he’s probably tired and didn’t want to climb a mountain today,” Colin says, tossing some logs in our fireplace.
“There was a tiger, I saw it,” I say.
“I didn’t see a tiger. Did you say you saw a polar bear?” He asks me scrunching up his face incredulously.
“I don’t know what I saw, it was standing on two legs, white fur. I didn’t see it long enough to tell.”
“Well it wasn’t a polar bear, we’re pretty far from the arctic circle here Mason.”
“Maybe it was a bear covered in snow?”
“Maybe you need to get your eyes checked.”
“That’s awfully combative Colin, no need for the adversarial negativity,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, look I am disappointed. Anatoly told me that they usually see 10-15 bears a day. I expected us both to shoot something today. I’d like to wrap this up and relax, maybe take you to Moscow before we have to get back.”
“I’m quite content here Colin,” I say.
Now I see what this is about. Once again Colin is in a hurry. Hunting bears are not what he wants to be doing. Instead, it is something he wants to have done.
“I’m a little concerned about you Mason since we’ve arrived you’ve been seeing things. Strange stuff that just isn’t there. Have you been to a doctor lately? Have you had a checkup lately, like I don’t mean a prostate exam? There’s a neurologist at Mayo I can get you referred to…”
I cut him off, “You think I’ve got dementia?” I ask, shocked at the audacity of his statement.
“We have it in our family Mason. Grandpa Charles thought I was his brother for the last few years of his life. This can manifest itself earlier than that.”
“I can assure you that for a guy in his late 50’s I am doing fine in mind and body,” I said, in a state of disbelief about where this conversation had gone.
“I am not trying to be antagonistic, I am concerned about you. You thought we’d given you mind altering substances in Vladivostok, we were just drinking, why would you think that if you weren’t seeing some weird shit?”
“Colin, you swept me away from what I thought was a work trip, flew me halfway across the world. Kept me from sleeping and imbibed me with alcohol. I don’t mean to say that I am in any way not grateful for this opportunity, I really am, and you’ve gone the extra mile to make this special for me, and you’ve done an excellent job, this is the trip of a lifetime. However, I’m also tired, jet-lagged, in a totally unfamiliar situation, and now we’re at altitude. I don’t think it is implausible that maybe I’m not thinking clearly. I didn’t say that I saw a polar bear, I don’t know what I saw, but I saw something.”
“Ok, well still, do me a favor and see this neurological specialist when we get back,” Colin said.
“Well even if I do have early onset Alzheimers, which you seem to be accusing me of, what are they going to do about it?”
“Well, early treatment at least allows you to know, and you owe it to Aunt Diane, so she at least has some clue about why you’re acting so strangely.”
“You’re talking like I already have been diagnosed, Colin.”
“I just think you’ve been acting strangely and doing some weird things and you weren’t like this before.”
“How well do you think you know me, Colin? How often do we actually get together? You’re off dating some starlet or supermodel and flying your jet to Los Angeles for a premier or London for dinner with Mohamed Al-Fayed. I see you more on TV than I see you in person. I don’t think your perceptions are the best litmus for the status quo of my behavior.”
“So you always act this strange?”
Now I became angry, I didn’t need one of the weirdest members of my family telling me that I behaved strangely. Remember when he had his dog could only drink Evian water? Like $1000 for water for that dog each month and half of it was splashed all over the area of the dog’s bowl. I didn’t think he should be calling me strange, so I flew off the handle a little on him and said something that had been on my mind since we’d come to Russia, “You want to talk about strange? What is going on in this country? Can you imagine if a foreign national came to The United States and got ushered around by our Army and Air Force? What exactly are you into that you get this treatment?”
This upset him, and he just stared at me without answering.
“Ok, that’s enough,” he said, lightning the fire, “I’m going to go see where Anatoly is on dinner. Let’s just take this conversation down a bit Mason. This is supposed to be a nice vacation for you. I don’t want to antagonize you or upset you ok?”
He said it in a patronizing way, the way you’d try to deescalate from a deranged person. I got the impression that he thought I was demented or at least senile. He shut the cabin door as the fireplace came alive with flame.
CHAPTER NINE
Night in the Cabins
COLIN'S ATTITUDE WAS completely different as he returned with Anatoly who was holding two cast iron pans, one contained wild boar in a type of stroganoff sauce and the other had a kind of greenish stew he called “zeleony soup.” I was starving after not having a proper lunch break and only getting part of a Russian protein bar, which I was beginning to think was a Soviet-era surplus item.
Anatoly and Colin sat at the small table in our cabin and uncovered the cooking pans the smell of food wafted through the small room which was now warm from the fire Colin had started.
I wanted to take all of the wild boar that Anatoly had cooked, it was delicious, but I reserved myself to the same portion as the other two men and then ate two helpings of the green soup. The plates and bowls provided in the cabin were wooden, and we just rinsed them out with water from the pump outside which is where our water came from. I thought that whoever had previously used this wooden cookware had probably done the same thing and I kind of wanted to at least swish some soap around on them beforehand. I was so hungry that it didn’t really matter once food was dished into them, however.
“So, I was talking to Anatoly about what you saw,” Colin said.
I was immediately irritated because he was clearly condescending me behind my back to the Russian.
“He thinks he knows what you saw,” Colin said, his tone was condescending, and he had a very irritating smirk on his face, “Tell him, Anatoly.”
“I think you may see menk,” Anatoly says.
“A mink?” I said.
“Da,” Anatoly answered.
“This was quite a lot larger than a mink, like a small weasel hunted for fur?”
“No, a menk, a menk is. Forest spirit. Protector of forests,” Anatoly answers.
“A ‘menk,’ its spelled with an ‘e’,” Colin explained, “It’s like some kind of wild man who lives in the woods. He told me the indigenous people of Siberia believe in them.”