Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  The sun was colourless and watery above the hillside and it started to snow very light, tiny flakes as I climbed back into the cab to warm my hand. It was 10.30 in the morning and I was totally smashed. I just hoped that Dima was more accustomed than me to drinking so early in the day.

  By the time we reached the shore of Lake Baikal, a beach of rounded granite pebbles dusted with snow, I had more or less sobered up. I needn’t have bothered because before Dima would venture out on to Baikal’s icy surface we had to pay our respects to the spirit of the lake. A fresh half-litre of pepper vodka appeared along with the remains of the bread and a hunk of ham. Just when I thought we were ready, Dima drew his knife and dashed off away from the shore to attack a birch tree. He walked back clutching some desiccated pieces of bark that he placed carefully on the ground and then set alight with a match. After toasting the god of Baikal, we fed the small fire with slivers of ham.

  Lake Baikal’s vital statistics are on a scale appropriate for the vast wilderness of Siberia. It nestles in a continental rift, a yawning slit in the Earth’s crust more than 8 kilometres deep. Much of this is buried in sediment, but the lake itself is still the world’s deepest, its crystal clear waters bottoming out at more than 1,620 metres. It’s the largest freshwater lake on Earth and at perhaps more than 25 million years old, the oldest as well. Its 23,000 cubic kilometres of water, which cover an area the size of Belgium, constitute one fifth of the world’s reserves of surface fresh water. It is said that it would take all the rivers of the world nearly a year to fill it. Of course, it’s also one of the world’s most diverse lakes with 1,085 species of plant and 1,550 species of animal. Eighty per cent of the animals are found nowhere else on Earth. They include the Baikal seal, one of the world’s only two freshwater species.

  In winter, up to a metre of its surface waters freeze, enabling vehicles to drive over the ice. During the Russo–Japanese war, when the trans-Siberian railway used ships to traverse Lake Baikal, the crossing became impossible in the particularly severe winter of 1904 because the ferries were ice-bound. Desperate to get reinforcements to the Far Eastern front, the authorities organized huge teams of men and horses to drag more than 2,000 munitions carriages and 65 locomotives across ice that was more than 150 centimetres thick.

  Before dragging this lot they had tried laying track across the icy surface, using especially long sleepers to spread the load. But the first engine to test the rails came to a weak spot and plunged into the icy depths to leave a gaping hole more than 22 kilometres long. I felt suitably sobered by the memory of reading about this incident as Dima revved the engine and drove down the pebble bank and on to the ice.

  The experience was surreal. The view from the cab was not that of a frozen lake, it looked more like a photograph of the liquid version. For the first 100 metres the waters were flat, while beyond this a slight ruffling of the surface resembled the small ripples that might be produced by a light wind on water. As we crossed the glassy plain, the ripples materialized as a stretch of jagged ice that Dima turned to avoid.

  The lake’s petrified shell stretched out before us like an enormous ice rink. Where patches of snow covered the surface the tyres were able to grip, but a glassy section offered little traction and sent us into a spin, which was met with chuckles of delight from Dima. Away from the pebble beach the bank closed in as steep cliffs, their lower sections swathed in dramatic ice formations that looked like a Siberian Goliath had been dripping wax from a dinner-party candle over the rocks.

  We stayed close to the shore as we drove north-east, heading towards a hunting lodge in the Pribaikalsky National Park which hems the south-western rim of the lake. Our route was a tortuous one that Dima had taken before. Every so often our way was barred by a lengthy stretch of jagged ice, like gigantic glass shards thrust up to half a metre into the air and several metres in width. If the water had been liquid, these sections would have been waves. As it was they looked like ice sculptures, or Nature’s attempt at frozen barbed wire.

  Every so often Dima would stop and get out to investigate something. He carried a long spiked pole, like the ones the walrus twins had used to excavate the swimming pool. It was the ideal instrument to test the thickness of the ice, which in its weakest spots was less than 20 centimetres and definitely unsuitable to drive across.

  Daily temperature fluctuations and warm subsurface currents give rise to these intricate assemblies of cracks and minor crevasses that resemble collision zones between rival ice plates. Walking and sliding across the smooth parts of the lake surface produced squeaky noises from my rubber-soled shoes, which offset the ominous creaks and occasional deep booming sounds that signified great ice movements. Beneath my feet, a dark-green abyss of water reminded me of the absurdity of my actions. I was out for a stroll on the world’s deepest lake. I had complete confidence in Dima’s ability to get us through this eerie ice field, despite the fact that he must have been half-cut like me. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

  Nikolai was everything I could have hoped for from a Siberian forest ranger. His face wasn’t skin-covered but shaped from a tough hide, with eyebrows that met on the bridge of his nose and eyes that betrayed the faint almond shape of Siberian stock. His hands were the hardest hands I’d ever seen and one of his thumbs bore a deep, roughly healed gash, the result of a slip with his knife that had left him with no feeling in his eastern extremity. He was a man of few words, as silent as the wilderness he inhabited.

  His self-built wooden hunting lodge stood surrounded by a series of outhouses right on the shore of the petrified lake. He also had a house in a village ten hours’ walk away where his children were at school. But this was where he preferred to live with his wife, most of their food the result of hunting trips into the forest interior, their water hacked from the lake as blocks of ice.

  Dima and I had arrived in time for dinner. Other than at the entrance, there were no doors inside the lodge, where all rooms led off the warm kitchen with its stove built into the central support wall. Vodka was served before we tucked into a feast of pickled salads and a thick venison stew. This was followed by a couple of typical Siberian dishes, both of them raw and frozen solid. On one plate was a large frozen deer’s liver, on another a couple of frozen raw fish, not unlike medium-sized trout to look at. I like liver when it’s fried, but the raw frozen version is never likely to become a favourite. I found the fish, which Nikolai shaved into thin strips with his hunting knife, more palatable. The shavings were dipped in salt before eating and tasted very good when washed down with vodka.

  We each drank a generous shot of the oily alcohol between every course and when Dima placed a second bottle on the table in front of us he did so with the announcement that, ‘to have a good conversation you have to drink vodka – it is food for the soul.’

  Dima had a point, because with each drink Nikolai had become a little more talkative. I had already learned from my driver that Nikolai was employed by the National Park authorities to safeguard the area from poachers. Pribaikalsky was rich in wildlife, including brown bear, deer, fox, wild boar, sable and lynx. As a ranger, Nikolai had a licence to hunt. ‘Do you hunt to sell the hides or for food?’ I asked him. ‘I hunt to live,’ he replied, with Dima translating. We had been eating the fruits of his labours, but he also provided skins on contract to a hunting organization. Sables were among the more profitable species, he told me, since their skins made the best fur hats. But they were not easy to hunt. I asked him if he set traps. ‘Niet,’ he replied, and I thought that was all I was going to get until he added, ‘I track a sable with my dogs. It takes one or two days.’

  Once the dogs had a sable’s scent the hunt was on, the aim being to chase the small animal until it took refuge in a tree. Then Nikolai would build a fire beneath the tree and wait. ‘When the sable jumps from the burning tree to the next, that’s when I shoot it.’ ‘It has to be in the head,’ Dima added, translating as Nikolai spoke, ‘or the fur is spoiled.’

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p; Silently, Nikolai had left the table and reappeared holding two small gleaming brown pelts. I examined them and found the bullet entry holes in the heads. To shoot such a diminutive creature while flying through the air with this accuracy was a sign of an extraordinary marksman. I said as much and Nikolai gave me a barely perceptible shrug before looking away. ‘I hunt wild animals,’ he said finally, ‘but I couldn’t kill a chicken.’

  ‘I have hunted since I was a child,’ he added by way of further explanation. ‘I used to run away from kindergarten to go hunting.’ He told me he remembered catching his first perch when he was four years old in northern Siberia. ‘It pulled so hard I fell off the jetty trying to haul it in,’ he added with the slightest of twitches at the ends of his mouth that I took to be a rare smile. It was the most expressive gesture he’d made all evening.

  ‘And what about bears?’ I asked him. ‘Do you hunt bears?’ He nodded. ‘There are too many bears in these parts,’ he said. But bears were unpredictable, he added, and therefore difficult to hunt. The meat was plentiful but a bearskin was too heavy to make into a coat. He used it to make pads for hunting seals on the ice. ‘A dead bear is also heavy,’ he continued. ‘Once my boat nearly sank when I brought back a bear in it.’

  ‘Wolves are a big problem also,’ he went on. When Nikolai killed a deer that was too large for him to drag back home, he would skin it and cut the carcass into quarters. One quarter he would carry back, the others he would wrap in the hide and bury for another time. But if wolves found his kill, there wasn’t another time.

  The evening continued with understated stories of encounters with wolves and bears and when the vodka appeared to run dry I produced a half-litre of Scotch whisky as my contribution. Dima lifted the bottle to inspect it and made a comment to which Nikolai nodded his agreement. ‘Whisky tastes like moonshine,’ Dima announced as he unscrewed the cap, ‘but we will try it.’

  They did, looked at each other again and nodded some more. ‘Yes, moonshine,’ declared Dima and he left to find another bottle of vodka.

  That night I slept beneath a bearskin. It was very heavy.

  The following morning, Nikolai joined us in the van to drive further up the coastline. We were heading for a lair that he had built in the forest the last time he had spent the night out on a hunting trip. When we had parked the vehicle, Dima and I had our work cut out to keep up with Nikolai as we trudged through the thick snow deep into the forest. Our boots were no match for his short skis with pelts on their bottoms.

  The lair was constructed of coniferous logs and branches and was open along one side to face a log fire. The inside of the lair was lined with plastic sheeting to reflect the fire’s heat. It was the longest period I had yet spent outside and I was truly grateful when Nikolai set about lighting the fire and settled down with his knife to shave strips off a frozen fish that he had produced from his pocket. From another pocket he pulled a small jam jar of salt and we sat down to enjoy the fish. Dima delved into the small distillery he kept inside his coat and produced the usual bottle of pepper vodka along with three tin mugs.

  Sitting inside the makeshift shelter I was surprised at how warm it felt once the fire had got going, although I still wouldn’t actually have wanted to spend a night here. Nikolai told me that if I was going to places colder than this, which I was, I should buy a proper coat made of fur and a hat to go with it. ‘Fur is the only thing to keep you warm,’ he told me as he looked with his usual deadpan expression at my greatcoat and two woolly hats.

  During the previous night’s dinner I had warmed to this undemonstrative Siberian hunter-cum-forest ranger and this morning he was decidedly more talkative, suggesting perhaps that he had warmed to me too. He looked away from my coat as he lifted his mug to his lips and drank another shot of vodka; then put his eyes directly on mine. His face was a piece of Baikal driftwood carved to look like a man but his eyes appeared to be sizing me up like a quarry. Here was a man who could remain stock-still but totally alert for hours, while waiting for the right moment to shoot.

  ‘A piece of advice,’ he said finally. ‘Always stay warm in Siberia. If ever you have the opportunity to go inside a car or a house, take it.’

  T H R E E

  The road ran through this part of north-eastern Siberia like an artery, kilometre after kilometre of frozen gravel stretching from the icebound port of Magadan at one end towards the ice-bound city of Yakutsk at the other. The heavy trucks that plied the Kolyma Route supplied the chain of towns and villages that unfolded across the landscape like a string of fairy lights in a forgotten void. We drove across frozen rivers trapped in a winter time warp that lasted so long no one bothered to build any bridges; huge barges ferry the traffic across during the brief summer months. The trail snaked its way through a terrain of breathtaking beauty, the endless taiga forest sitting silently beneath a shield of snow. Each tree looked snug in its winter coat and it was difficult to imagine that the winter would ever pass.

  Every day the panorama was bathed in a crisp clean sunlight, making it Christmas-card pretty. But the vista was deceptive, a honey trap that lured you into a world barely fit for human habitation, to a place of such searing cold that it bites through layers of clothing as if they weren’t there.

  Yet I was feeling more confident about the weather after kitting myself out with fur clothing, as Nikolai had advised, in Yakutsk. In the central market I had bought a raccoon fur hat and a pair of boots made of fur taken from the legs of a reindeer. They were both light and remarkably warm. But the centrepiece was my sheepskin coat that was so heavy it felt as if I was carrying an entire flock around on my back. I’d been sad to leave Dima in Irkutsk but the flight to Yakutsk had put me on this road that would lead me to my destination, the coldest town on Earth. The sense of penetrating deeper into the heart of Siberia was palpable. I was nine hours ahead of London, on the same longitude as Australia and I felt as if I had entered another dimension. Flying into Yakutsk had been like landing on a different planet. The frozen River Lena, among the longest in the world but one I had barely registered previously, was shrouded in heavy mist and the sun that sat on the horizon was ghostly, like the yellow planet Venus or a moon of Pluto, wreathed in a vaporous miasma.

  The city itself was otherworldly too, a settlement constructed entirely on permafrost, ground that remains frozen to great depths throughout the year. Building on this icy substrate requires special measures because a heated house placed directly on permafrost can partially melt the surface layers, which heave and subside in their struggle to throw off the unnatural intrusion. The results were plain to see in the succession of old wooden dwellings that lined the road into town from the airport. Some were partially sunken, their windows now resting at road level; others had been reduced to drunken edifices with neither a horizontal nor vertical line to their names.

  Modern engineers and architects have met the challenges of building in the permafrost zone by preserving the Earth’s thermal equilibrium. Every contemporary structure in Yakutsk stands above the ground on concrete stilts. It’s as if the buildings know they really shouldn’t be there, so they stand on tiptoe as a mark of respect to Nature. Pipes too are difficult to bury, so the urban landscape is a maze of heavily lagged pipelines winding their way all over town like bloated spaghetti to feed the apartments and office blocks with hot water and to remove their waste.

  My awe at this floating cityscape was strengthened by a respect for the people who lived there. The market where I bought my winter clothing was in the open-air, the stallholders just standing around in -41°C (-42°F). I couldn’t quite believe it. Who were these people? I decided that there must be something physiologically different about them, which both eased my feeling of envy at their resilience but at the same time deepened my sense of insecurity. This meant an additional challenge for me as a mid-latitude man. I could come here and feel the cold, only more so because I was not on an even playing field.

  The fact that Yakutsk was in a different cold lea
gue from Irkutsk was clear. Several people I spoke to just laughed when I asked about Siberia’s cruellest winter in living memory. ‘That is in the south,’ they told me, ‘they don’t get proper winters there.’ Other little things confirmed this viewpoint. In Irkutsk every public building came with double doors against the cold, but in Yakutsk the entrance doors came in threes. Many of the vehicles I saw on the streets, including the one I was now travelling in, had been equipped with home-made double-glazing. Roughly cut pieces of glass had been attached to the outside of all the windows using double-sided sticky tape like the draught-excluding strips I have round the windows of my house in England. I could see how effective they were because beyond each double-glazed panel in my vehicle the metal window frames were permanently covered in frost on the inside.

  Yet at the same time I was definitely becoming accustomed to the cold. The temperature in the morning in Yakutsk was significantly less of a shock to my system than the temperature in the morning in Irkutsk. This realization, along with the furry additions to my wardrobe, gave me hope as we drove further north and east towards Oymyakon.

  I had been joined for this leg of my journey by Andrei, my new interpreter. He was a gentle man who worked as a researcher in a Yakutsk economics institute after doing a series of jobs that included hotel manager and street trader. Like Anatolie, my fixer, who was usually a university lecturer in anthropology, Andrei could take leave from his job to do better-paid work on an ad hoc basis. Both men were Asiatic in appearance, members of local nationalities that are still dominated numerically by ethnic Russians, although it should be said that much of the power in this region is now in the hands of the Yakuts.

  The area in question is Yakutia, or the ‘Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)’ as it is now officially known. It is Russia’s largest region, occupying one fifth of the country’s territory, stretching 2,000 kilometres from north to south and 2,500 kilometres from east to west. It has three time zones. Yakutia’s incorporation into the Russian state dates from 1632 when Russian Cossacks, sent by the Czar in search of furs, built a fort on the bank of the Lena River, from which the city of Yakutsk developed. The Yakuts have a legend that deals with these events. It says that two blue-eyed, blond people arrived one day and were enslaved for a couple of years before they escaped and disappeared on a boat up the Lena. Three years passed before a large number of people looking like the escaped ones arrived on big rafts and asked the Yakut ruler to grant them a piece of land the size of an ox-hide. On receiving approval, the Cossacks cut the hide into thin strips and encircled a huge area on which they built their wooden fortress. Realizing their mistake, the Yakuts tried in vain to destroy the fort, and soon after they submitted to the Russian Czar. Using Yakutsk as their base, the Russians went on to conquer the rest of Siberia all the way to the Pacific Ocean.