Text for Arran annual report - laurenceedwards



A Siberian diary

A personal account of an expedition to North Eastern Siberia,

in order to visit a remote community of reindeer herders, October 2018

1: Champagne and Anthropology

Our journey begins under a giant letter ‘D’ at Terminal 5, Heathrow. My travelling companion, the renowned Siberian anthropologist Professor Piers Vitebsky, waits for me on a bench, laptop perched on knees, signing off. After greeting we progress, not without difficulty, through check-in and settle to what for Piers is a Heathrow tradition. An English breakfast washed down with champagne.

It is here we begin to contemplate the prospect of a two week journey into the ‘forbidden zone’. A sensitive area along the vast hostile Arctic coast of Northern Russia. To get to this point we have undergone exhaustive applications for border area permits helped by official invitations from the North Eastern Federal University of Yakutsk. The coast is strategically sensitive due to a vast exposed border. Our eventual destination is to be a small wooden reindeer herders’ hut a day’s journeying from the tiny village of Naiba, rarely if ever before visited by non-Russians, which in turn is a two day drive across tundra, mountain and frozen river from the Arctic port of Tiksi (population 4,000).

Russia has high hopes of developing this vast coastline into a new Arctic trade route between Murmansk in the west and the Orient, cutting out the need to travel thousands of miles south through the Suez canal, thus avoiding the pirates of Somalia and the South China seas. Retreating ice due to climate change has made such an enterprise possible. Fifty years ago ships could only travel these seas assisted by nuclear powered ice breakers; now, worryingly, the ice forms later and thaws earlier year on year.

Piers has just retired from his post at the Scott Polar Research Institute as head of Siberian Studies, a position he held for thirty years, one that afforded him the opportunity of travelling to remote areas of Siberia, which prior to his tenure were closed to foreigners. His new post coincided with the relaxing of restrictions, allowing him to painstakingly build relationships with officials over a number of years. His special relationship with the Eveny people of Northeast Siberia has enabled him to build complex relationships throughout these vast regions. Piers is a pioneer in the field, with many adventures to recount, some recorded in his book ‘The reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia’. Many of his students have since undertaken their own expeditions in remote Siberian provinces, building a unique field of anthropological knowledge. It was beginning to dawn on me that this trip was an incredible privilege and a unique opportunity, to travel with extraordinary people to places hardly ever before seen by westerners (or even Russians).

Our flight was called and gathering our baggage we headed for the gate, a giant dawning sun like an Olafur Eliasson beaming up at us through windows looking over a hazed cityscape, tower blocks reflecting the latest upgrades in CAD architectural software.

It is on the plane I discover what good company Piers is to be, as we chat over eastern Europe and under Scandinavia into western Russia. Family and personal histories are soon disclosed. His jokes are inescapable, and a good many will colour our future conversations, ranging from the innocent: A circus bear escapes a Polish circus and surprises a man on a bicycle, who runs off scared abandoning his bike, only to see the bear get on it and ride off! To the more ribald: Gorbachev in bed with Margaret Thatcher says “How good it is to feel the British empire under one”, and she in response says “How good it is to feel the ‘End’ of Socialism!” (mmm!)

At Moscow airport we find ourselves enjoying coffee and plov at Piers’ favourite Uzbek airport restaurant, and an hour later boarding for Yakutsk we toast the journey with two large vodkas.

The sun soon fades and we settle down to further Siberian conversations. Night brings broken sleep. I find myself drowsily awoken by a sharp platinum moon highlighting the wing, like the tip of a whale’s tail over a cushion of cloud. Dense endless black provides a backdrop for Orion’s belt and in this Siberian universe it appears as a prancing reindeer on the sky wall, like a drawing scratched onto a Lascaux cave 30,000 years ago. It offers portentous company for as long my eyes remain open.

2: The Twisted Town.

Morning rises fast as we fly against the planet’s axis. Our descent into Yakutsk, the land of the Sakha people, is marked by a rose dawn raking across forests of birch and larch, turning to gold in the new autumn. Indeed Piers is keen to tell me that nothing but forest has passed beneath us in the dark since Moscow, over the Urals and on, six hours of it. I can see tails of smoke denoting forest men and hunters’ breakfasts. Yakutsk looks vulnerable in vast tracts of river islands. This is the great Lena river, full of mythical fish, sturgeon and chir (broad whitefish), the delights of which we will soon be sampling. In a couple of days we’ll be flying along this river to Tiksi on the northernmost coast –– it is hard for me to think of rivers flowing north to the sea.

Professor Anatoly Afanasevich Alekseyev, ethnographer of Yakutsk University, otherwise known as ‘Tolya’ is to collect us at the airport. A legend in Yakutia (a region the size of India populated by only a million people), I’d read about him in Piers’ book. Piers met him on his very first trip to the interior in the village of Sebyan, where he was the chief administrator. Quick-witted and intelligent, this outspoken reindeer herder had risen through his village ranks. As a campaigner for the Eveny people he soon saw the potential of an anthropologist from Cambridge University. A great friendship, fuelled by many adventures, had filled the ensuing thirty years. Greeting his ‘Professor’ this spritely 71 yr. old ex-champion wrestler led us to the car in the sharp sunlight, through streets resembling those of North Korea. His first comments were on the declining numbers in the herds and his recent expert shooting of six mountain sheep!

The outstretched bronze palm of Lenin guides us to the Hotel Tygyn Darkhan in the centre of town. The receptionist barely visible, concealed from the nose down by a counter under a flickering light, takes our passports and allocates our rooms. Just in case, we will be careful what we say in them.

The town is in respite between long winters. Small buses chunter like tug boats along avenues edged with golden-leaved birch and willow, which occasionally are filled with fat chirruping sparrows. Irreverent skateboarders brush and scrape by under Lenin’s unnerving gaze. Indeed bronze busts of the elected and the elevated appear frequently at street corners, and I smile knowingly at the age-old sculptor’s problem of resolving spectacles perched on chubby faces. Electric cabling spans the sky, tangling at junctions and larger buildings. In my overstimulated state, I see them as the remnants of some attempt by Louise Bourgeois type arachnoids at netting the city.

Wide faces, high cheekbones and eyes that want to stretch to temples proffer permanent smiles; one therefore can’t help but think of this as a happy town, as wrapped couples and small groups walk arm in arm talking. The indigenous population of Yakutia speak a language Turkic in origin, strange so far north. Yakutsk was set up by Russians as a trading post in the 17th century for the procurement of furs harvested by indigenous populations living in the forests, and indeed it remained a small frontier town until recently. Now the earth’s resources are being exploited. It is amazing to think that a quarter of the world’s diamonds now come from local Siberian mines, channelled through Yakutsk.

Farming crops is not possible at these latitudes. If you are lucky you can harvest cucumbers and tomatos in the brief jet-propelled summer of white nights, which in turn wakes vast clouds of mosquitos released from the boggy earth, which never drains owing to the solid layer of permafrost underneath. It is this permafrost that buckles the streets: the soft layer of earth is no match for the brooding ice that crunches and marls a few feet below. Pavements mutate, twist and crack under the tension, eruptions looking like roots from vast trees appear in alleyways, lamp posts veer off, fences distort and houses disintegrate. It is like a never-ending low-level earthquake. The local builders have now realised that building on stilted piles pummelled through the ice with great cranes alleviates the problem.

I venture into an older district of dilapidated but beautiful traditional log houses. Windows lined with folkish fretwork compement tin downpipes snipped into serpents’ gaping mouths. These are the last of the old houses forlornly awaiting their fate, together with their inhabitants, whose occupancy is evidenced by wheel-less cars raised on oil drums, skewed browning lace curtains and unlikely lines of white linens, contrasting the mouldering wood. The pocked and puddled tracks dividing these twisted once-glorious edifices, reflect the shiny tower blocks encroaching upon them and the cranes squeaking alongside with their clanging piles driving into unyielding ground.

Indeed some had already succumbed. I entered the charred remains of an ancient house – the blackened surface of the giant trunks that formed it reminded me of Astrakhan coats. The violent silence of collapsed lives in the dim interior reveal a once intimate family life. Large mangy teddy bears nestle with old shoes, kerosene cans and iron bedsteads. Remnants of wallpaper are evident behind charred shelves with tarred, distorted cooking pots perching on them. Disconcerted by this expressionist film set in a state of immanent collapse, I retreat photographing buckling hinges set in coalite timber and exposed nails forged by some Sakha two hundred years ago.

The next day we are joined by the final member of our team, Vladimir Nikolaevich Fyodorov – we’ll call him ‘Vladimir’. A writer and playwright in his sixties who also edits the ‘National Literary Review’ from Moscow. His origins lie in Yakutsk and he’s researching the voyages and unknown fates of 18th century explorer ships, who with Bering were trying to define the edges of Russia, a country that at this point didn’t know where it ended and the Americas began.

3: School bus over the Mountains

We leave for Tiksi. Our small Antonov-24 reminds me of the interior of my old school bus. I gain a seat overlooking the propellor. As we take off the taiga comes immediately into view. Endless shining rat-tailed tributaries feed main river arteries and countless alaas (little lakes with rings of good grazing round them). Soon in the distance the first sight of the Verkhoyansk mountain range, 600 kilometres long, comes into view, and before it the land begins to undulate like a crumpled bedspread. After an hour the pale foothills try to thwart the brilliant white mountains approaching like a tidal wave at four hundred and fifty km an hour. Soon the mountains resemble crumpled tin foil or some vast tented bedouin settlement.

Tolya turns on like a hawk, nose pressed against his window, identifying trails and ridges he has walked and trekked, often together with Piers. The local helicopter pilots call him the human GPS and indeed Piers says he has guided helicopters as they push their way through blizzards. The mountains now appear like colonies of white limpets fading in purple hues with smatterings of fawn staining the tangled channels of the valleys. The droning propellor and the bright reflected light bring on a faint nausea, and the sheer scale and endless topography don’t help. There is no evidence of human population and one soon loses the ability to compartmentalize the never-ending mosaic stretching in all directions – it cannot be absorbed, even the tongues of the rivers lie panting and exhausted. Oceans of polystyrene polyhedra, blue – white, blue – white, blue squinting frowning white – pass; somewhere down there are reindeer herders. Giant dunes scored by pencilled river squiggles, Giacometti-like graphite approximations runneling through ravines, scribbling and scoring. Eventually these compass-scored marks fade and the endless tented city is suspended in a floating fading blue, the last impressions of an old master’s oily palette.

I’ve never needed so much stamina to chomp through a landscape, concentration levels have ebbed, The last valleys I see running down the mountain sides resemble moose and reindeer antler, the tributaries now so fine they look like lengths of black cotton on white crinoline. The shadows of mountain now indistinguishable from the ultramarine lakes, illusions cast by the now southern sun. After two solid hours of mountain range the landscape descends to plain. Elisions of large land shapes fade under sliding cloud. Lakes now freeze over brown water reminding me of narwal skin. Finally it’s cold ice grey sea – the Arctic Ocean! Then land again a steel wired cube, a rotating conning tower, rust red blue containers, a jolt, sudden velocity and the din of landing, detritus slides past, old trucks, propellor and caterpillar tracks, a concrete cube, then still.

Soon a stern soldier boards to look at our papers, making his way slowly toward us, papers waving in front of him. We are told to disembark, the cold is marked, we’re on a plateau in the high Arctic, it feels like the remotest of outposts, rusted sheds, barrels, buses, cyrillic text, drooping helicopter blades, a severe horizontal world, umber blades of grass peeping out of snow, crops of steel containers and poles littering a severe scape.

The airport building is a corroding concrete shed. Here Siberians, on the whole Eveny, gather in sociable clusters, wearing camouflaged jackets standing in thawing boots, waiting for the bureaucratic machine to turn. Passport numbers are recorded in blue ballpoint by soldiers sitting behind formica topped tables in booths. Over the hall a woman is staring disinterestedly, chin on hand, from a tuck shop. Security is nervous, photography forbidden, young military types frown at our strange passports and passes, not quite understanding and not wanting the responsibility. Grudgingly we are allowed to pass. We collect our bags from a draughty corridor then load a van. A huge husky perches on Piers’ lap in the front seat. Russian pop, and the squeak of fingers clearing views in condensed windows, take us into Tiksi.

The town is a dystopian vision, concrete housing blocks on rubbled roads. Our flat is on the second floor of a seemingly bomb-pocked stairway, electric wires dangle in the dark military green corridor. Tolya cheerfully recounts that in winter snow fills these corridors, three metres will fall, you mustn’t go out without holding onto a rope, you will blow away, so many of the stories from now on will deal with the deaths of the under-prepared. Outside solitary figures pace between monotone buildings, some of these blocks end up being off licences, restaurants, shops – or even border guards’ offices, which is where we are headed in the morning.

We stand around a buzzer dangling on a wire, the only means of identifying the office in this stark corridor. After much debate Tolya gambles and pushes the button, and soon an aperture slides open followed by clunking latch and creaking hinge. Sure enough this is the guards’ office. During the ensuing interview Tolya explains our mission, after a while a frown turns to muted interest then dismissal. We are now free to walk around this frontier settlement surrounded by scrap metal, upturned cars and industrial waste. It is a town smeared against unforgiving hills, topped with radar and vast satellite dishes. We retire to our accommodation block, our host Denis Vasilevich Bydygyev (a Sakha surname) is the first deputy head of the civil administration of Bulunsky district (a district inside Yakutia), a hunting friend of Tolya’s and our krysha (fixer-carer). He gives us sofas, beds and floors in this small flat.

Tiksi abuts the harsh Arctic Ocean, via a swathe of twisted broken ships, rusting buoys and cranes. Once the home of twenty thousand, including military personnel, it is now home to some four thousand people (meaning 4/5ths of it is empty). One cannot determine which cracked concrete block with its peeling Soviet murals is occupied and which is vacant, until night when irregular smatterings of light will spread across these facades through small windows. The neglected roads are traversed by trucks, jeeps and road working plant, which seems forever in vain to be patching endless pot holes. People walk huddled criss-crossing Lowry-like from block to block. Today is blue sky and no wind, so God only knows what this place is like in snow and ice at –40. We find canteens which serve goulash to Russian, Chinese and Japanese workers, alliances are being built and plans for the dock’s refurbishment are apparently underway. Locals laugh at a Japanese wind arm being built on a hill: “It won’t last one Arctic winter”.

We move from meeting to official meeting until our presence is well and truly registered, then make our way to the local museum. A proprietor appears and proudly tours us around exhibits ranging from natural history: poor creatures stuffed by enthusiastic locals long gone, eyes popping out of foreheads. Bundles of feather and painted beak are propped on logs or wired to ceilings. Creatures that were once sea birds are cast adrift on seas of polystyrene packaging, abutting shrivelled reindeer with prolapses of hessian. We progress through rooms of cut out natives sitting around paper fires, to photographic portraits of trail-blazing aviators, trade route geographers and electricians. These are the people that helped to build this town. Salutary labelling casually reveals (usually during the second sentence) that each one ended up in a local Gulag at some point in his career, for no apparent reason, to either die or resurface years later to continue working. Such was the capriciousness and randomness of life under the extended gaze of ‘Comrade Stalin’.

To our further joy another museum, set in one of the ubiquitous unmarked concrete blocks, reveals an idiosyncratic Wunderkammer of natural history. A mammoth skeleton, wired to a steel frame with electrical cable and tape, has been constructed by the enthusiastic proprietor. The characteristic dangling confection of feather continues here, together with assemblages of skull and bone on window sills. A snowy owl tied between reindeer antlers next to toy tanks and an upturned cake tin housing a mouse skeleton, are high points for me. Walls are bedecked with Siberian maps of every conceivable type and purpose –we learn the locations of mineral deposits, about the natural history, the variations in seasonal temperatures, of river courses, winds, and aviation routes. This afternoon is completed with the display of the ‘oldest known burrow in the world’ a tiny impression on a piece of stone, left squillions of years ago... The proprietor is also а local author, and Piers leaves with an armful of books chronicling local deaths in the Tundra, the history of Tiksi and great folk and industries of the area.

All the while the prospect of our departure looms. We are supposed to leave today on a fourteen-hour ‘tank’ trip across the tundra to the tiny Eveny village of Naiba. Our driver is to be Vladimir Vladimirovich Alekseyev (we’ll call him Volodya). He is the director of the reindeer farm centered at Naiba. Controlling some four thousand reindeer divided into three herds, (shrinking from some twenty thousand, ten years ago), the herds are managed by ‘brigades’ of six herders each managed by a ‘brigadier’. Living out on the land following the migration of the deer. For hundreds of years herders lived with the deer in familial units, until the Soviet revolution. After this a culture of efficiency forced them into villages built to house families, whilst the men were divided into brigade units to follow the herds. Naiba is one such village constructed in 1937.

Volodya is a fifty year old father of six. His extended family live in Naiba and he is a leader of the community. The farm is a million hectares in size (half the size of Wales) and the village is the only population in the area, so four hundred people live in this vast space. Volodya is also a retired national level wrestler (giving him something in common, together with the deer, with Tolya). His fighting weight was 68 kilos, and his career was cut short by a car accident, the evidence of which is left in scarring on his face and the pins holding his femur together. A reticent character and as we were to find out, extravagant behind the controls of a tank.

At four in the afternoon the light begins to fade, Tolya and Volodya are still preparing to leave for this long trip. Piers points out that it might be a little dangerous travelling through the night in freezing, treacherous conditions and to what point? as we’d only want to sleep the next day. Tolya eventually concedes – it apparently hadn’t occurred to them that this would be an concern!

4: Riding the mashina

The morning comes and the prospect of the next phase of our expedition is finally here. The all-terrain vehicle or vezde-khod (‘everywhere-goer’), from now on to be known as the ‘mashina’ which is Russian for car, but in my mind is a name that suits this grim creature well, waits for us by some storage containers on the outskirts of the town. It is not spoken of with affection, in fact dread would sum up the group’s feelings toward it. It is sadly our only means of getting to the village. The autumn is warm, the ground boggy, the sea ice is not yet thick enough to cross, so sledges are not an option. Helicopters, the staple form of transport, subsidized in the Soviet era (‘they’d be called to deliver a packet of tea’ Piers fondly recounts) are now prohibitively expensive, seriously damaging the livelihoods of the herders. Our return is not guaranteed now either, as snow has started to fall and weather here can ‘turn on a sixpence’. I am in the hands of others and already a little disconcerted by two sets of legs protruding out from under the vehicle and the sparks flying from angle grinders, cutting and splicing the metal caterpillar tracks. I soon discover we are to sit on the roof of this thing for the duration.

We eventually set off. Grinding gears and engine mean that we are heard many miles before we appear, and any wildlife will depart long before our arrival. Volodya handles two joy sticks which he pulls and pushes, each in turn effects a brake, so one track will stop and the other continue, achieving steering, of a type. Soon the brake fluid is burning and smoke issues.

Four hours later and we have broken down three times, amidst landscape I didn’t know could exist. We make violent progress through sliding fluid shapes hosting violet, lavender and tawny umbers. Hillsides resembling the brindled breasts of winter ptarmigan are scarred by the tracks of previous expeditions. A snowy owl glides past apparently unaware, blending into a valley.

We crash through ice rivers and climb out holding on like rodeo riders. One second we face down at uncomfortable degrees looking into boggy voids, a second later we are looking up at endless sky. The breakdowns have gotten progressively more serious, Volodya is frequently muttering and swearing in dialect, kicking and hitting this metal rock. He’s now moved from the battery and is regularly banging and pumping fuel pipes. We four have an impromptu lunch. Talk of walking to a hut five kilometers further up the valley develops. Apparently a man sits in it guarding a gold mine day and night. We wash down the salami, bread and cheese with a thermos of sweet tea. The views are still diverting but our immediate prospects begin to distract.

We lurch on in two hundred meter spurts, Volodya scrambling out to prime the carburettor every time. At one point we stop near the ocean. Stacked bleached trunks, roots and branches evoking mammoth ivory are strewn along slate foreshores, resting after their epic journeys down the vast river Lena from deep Siberian forests. We are permitted to walk along the beach whilst Volodya makes urgent calls via satellite, apparently two people died here last winter. After an hour we are whistled back and I return through a sun-filled tundra, picking out the myriad of lichens covering the slate, which stacks like the charred contents of rotted filing cabinets. The reindeer feed on this lichen in winter, and it takes thirty years to grow back. The ochres, lime greens, orange and vermilion glow amidst smatterings of snow.

A decision is made to reside the night at the goldmine as we are now resorting to bump-starting the mashina on top of mountains! This can’t go on. It’s taken twelve hours to do a four-hour trip. We lurch on arriving in the dark at five pm. A cluster of huts buried in slate appears on the horizon, and it is the slate-stained dogs that greet us first, the customary barking is followed by growling, as they circle the limping mashina. Two lamp-wielding figures emerge from the huts, one of them puts down a chainsaw as he approaches. The first is rotund with impossibly puffed cheeks the other thin and angular of face, pocked cheekbones and an absent look in his eye. My wariness is not justified, the warmth and legendary hospitality of the Russians soon reveals itself. Ushered into a hut, we find two make shift beds a table and a giant fifty-gallon drum which serves as a wood burning stove. Kettles permanently boiling proffer tea. Sustenance is provided through a watery soup containing traces of meat and noodle.

Our hosts set to work opening up a log cabin bedded in slate, used in the summer when some thirty men return to pan for gold. It too contains an oil drum stove, leading to a network of six-inch steel pipes that form a radiated area along half a wall. This is fuelled by driftwood gleaned from the beaches nearby, which in the summer host vast colonies of Arctic seal. Moss is stuffed between the logs of the cabin for insulation, acoustically the space is dense and weighted. Mattresses are dragged out of a store hut and we mount bunks to lay out our sleeping bags. The fire is sparking inside the drum and the steaming sounds of pipes turning to heat form a reassuring background sound. Our hosts tell us to rest whilst they prepare a meal. We wake and gather in the gold miners’ hut, the younger of the two darts around attentively stoking fires, bringing in buckets of water, serving and offering sustenance, then sits behind us on his bed without saying a word or catching us with his eye. We eat boiled meat and noodle from a large vat, hot tea follows. Tolya throws himself into gesticulation and story-telling and we settle as if we’ve been there for a week. Tolya has put bread, jam and butter into the boiler for the local spirits, in gratitude for the hospitality. The leader informs us the generator cuts out at nine thirty, and we are advised to be in bed by then.

The stove has heated the dormitory, wet clothes steam on pipes and rails overhead, the last one into bed stuffs the last logs in and the boiler ticks with heat. The immensity and density of the outside seems to bear onto this building, the dark is absolute and the silence allows the tinnitus sparked by the churning mashina to rampage through the head.

This mine dates back to the beginning of the last century, It has always been an independent operation, even in Soviet times, as the efforts to provide Soviet style facilities, schools, administration and health facilities would have been very difficult here. Gold miners in general were considered outsiders, it was encouraged to think of them as ‘out for themselves’ in a socialist system. As a result this place had a wild west frontier feel. It produced a hundred and twenty kilos of gold last year. The river is diverted and water is pumped through slate shale bulldozed into position, men gather the dirty water and sieve it for tiny nuggets. They were allowed to keep the money, the state paid them directly as it needed the gold, so these miners had independent means and could afford to build their own houses. This was a compensation for a hard life, and very unusual in the Soviet era.

Six am and Tolya’s only English shatters the silence, ‘Goot mownink , goot mownink, eggcellent!!!’ followed by renditions of patriotic Russian songs from the 1930s (very amusing). We rouse to a breakfast of batter drop cakes, jam and salami. I hastily photograph the array of sheds and log piles mounted on giant steel tubular runners, all are evidently transported and moved when the snow comes.

Volodya urgently herds us back onto the mashina, which he has been working on since dawn and soon we’re chuntering off, beetle-like, waving our farewells to friends and quieted dogs. The landscape soon flattens, Piers says the tundra is the Arctic desert, endless empty scapes with no wildlife to speak of (because of our mashina?), so the next few hours will pass slowly. Rumbling on we meet our first ice river of the morning; crashing down and through it we leave a shattered ice sheet and churning black water in our wake. A new range of slate mountains, peppered with icing sugar, greet us after a gentle rise. We stop for vodka and pour a glass under the mashina for safe passage, climb up and resume our positions. Soon the chuntering rhythm is interrupted by a bang, then the dreaded halt. The head of Volodya appears again from his cabin. A rock has interfered with a wheel, more repairs.

This stop is serious and will last a couple of hours. A torque bar has snapped, hammering and grunting fills the next two hours, we drink more vodka and lunch on meat and batter cakes. Volodya doesn’t want the vodka to reach the reindeer herders’ hut. The herders’ constitution is not suited to it, they’d be put out of action for days, so we finish the bottles. The top of the mashina seems a more amusing place after all.

Our journey re-commences, warily we listen for every strange noise that emits. We charge on unremittingly through glowing mountains lit as though from the inside, like geological lanterns. Our vehicle, effectively a boxed explosion, continues to create a nature vacuum, and the snow is full of tracks of fox and small creatures recently fled.

Reindeer tracks begin to appear in the snow and Tolya points out striations on the mountain sides, evidence of their activities. Snow starts and we hunker down. We’ve been driving over ten hours, the temperature is dropping to minus five. Rivers continue to surrender to our thunder, brown trammelled tracks are carved out and left behind. Darkness descends and the lights pick up streaks of snow. Volodya frequently gets out to nervously inspect his craft, we hold our breath until the ignition rips up again and we commence. To be stuck out here now would not be good. Then it happens, he takes a sharp turn to the right to avoid a deep cavern and an awful mechanical squeal issues. He jumps out and kicks the mashina, the snow is strafing the flank of the vehicle, the caterpillar track has sheered completely off. Volodya is not happy stamping around and cursing us ‘useless professors’. We stand back, sheepishly surveying the scene.

Tool boxes, sledge hammers, crow bars and socket sets are all dragged out, we are given jobs handling the vast track, like a metal crocodile skin, some thirty foot long and two foot wide. It is laid out as straight as we can manage, then the truck is driven forward and lined up, Volodya reverses it over the linkage until it sits on top of the tracking. We lift one edge up, freezing snow chills the metal, we offer it up to the cogs on the end wheel. It takes and he drives forward, the tracking travels along the top of the wheels, wow! We continue to manipulate taking care not to lose fingers and feed the track along in the dark, wrestling it into position to fit to the cogged wheel at the other end. Smacks from hammers and crow bars followed by screw drivers thrust into apertures mean that an hour later the tracking is back on. Tired and exhausted we return to the top of the mashina and tentatively restart our journey.

Twelve tiny lights on the horizon come into view, a way off, they denote our destination. We stop again, it’s late, it’s snowing, it’s cold and it’s dark. ‘The river in front of the village is too high to cross”, we’ve got to detour ten miles south and ten miles back. We’ve been travelling for fourteen hours today. Five miles later we’ve crossed a number of rivers back and forth, each one we hope is the ‘one’. Eventually Volodya scrambles exhausted out of the cab and paces off into the darkness. After a while a torch headlight beams back toward us. It stops at the truck, talks to Tolya, and Piers’ translation ‘we’re lost’ reach my red ears.

I think, ‘why am I sitting up here’? like an Emperor penguin in the southern Antarctic, my hands going numb, my feet increasingly hard to manipulate. I decide the husky and sacks of onions are a good option, I tap Tolya on the shoulder to signify my intent and jump off. Limping to the back I untie the tarpaulin and climb up and over the rear door. Two green eyes look up from the top of a pile of baggage, I move to the right, feel netting containing hard spherical balls, turn around and fall back. Steady breathing from above my head marks a husky’s grudging acceptance, I feel confident to the point of stretching out a hand to stroke it, maybe some warmth will return, a growl puts me to rights. I lie back gloved hands on chest, then with a jolt and a thrust forward this metal creature lunges forth. Tossed this way then that, head banging on side panelling and luggage, I fall asleep.

Tarpaulin is yanked apart, torches shine in scanning the scene. Strange agitated voices, door unbolted, small people behind torches reach for bags and provisions and then a cry, ‘Laurence are you there?’ It’s Piers. Fugged from sleep and disorientation I don’t answer, the back is emptying fast, I’m pulled off the onions. Piers’s face appears, ‘Thank god you’re here, I thought you were left out there’. We are in Naiba, it’s two in the morning, two quad bikes have been out and found us. Soon I’m ushered into a spacious wooden house, fur spats, leggings and boots line walls in corridors leading to a bright entrance hall, a very small lady with a pointed woollen hat and long ear flaps pulls me this way and that, ordering boots off and coats to be hung. Talking fast in a strange language, not looking at me, barely above the height of my waist, pot bellied in a house fill og coat and boots, she leads me by the hand to a kitchen.

The others are already sitting around a table laden with food, Tolya already tucking in. Inuit crossed with Mongolian faces sit too, the small woman fusses. The ever stoic Vladimir the writer drinks tea, impassive, Piers explains the feast that lies before us: raw fish, and ‘gorny baran’, mountain sheep (good for the eyesight as they see wonderfully) shot by our hosts. A real delicacy piled on a plate. I pick a rib, it’s delicious, rich, I chew on bones and fat. I take another, raw fish follows then I ask for water, the lady looks disconcerted, ‘Nobody drinks water especially with gorny, the fat will congeal in your stomach’. Still she obliges. Eventually Volodya comes in, takes a seat, tucks in without a word, not even a look up, chats to his uncles and sister, laughs and jokes as though he’s just got back from work. These then are the Eveny. No one seems particularly interested in our adventure and soon we were ushered to the village hospital, where we are to sleep. Replete we jump back into the mashina to make the short trip. Two minutes later we arrive and another clank, we look over and in that short distance the left caterpillar track has fallen off! Really! Half an hour later we are asleep.

We wake to a gloss tan brown room, a peaceful long building with a number of rooms left and right down a corridor, the hospital for this small village, a dispensary at the end, a set of scales and a bucket of water with saucepan. This we bale into a enamel receptacle above a sink (there is no running water), push the plunger sticking out of the bottom to find the water dribbling out. Wash, change, move to the kitchen behind a hatch where Tolya and Vladimir are tucking into jam and bread. I creep out to sample the village. A river is directly across the road, beautiful crisp pale blue, This is the one too high to cross last night, were we really that close? Mountains stretch back, cream-yellow light pours on them, it’s a thick intense light, clear. These must have been the mountains we came through. A wooden cubicle is the toilet, I step up, open the door and look down to see a removed plank and a pile of excreta betraying the ailments of the patients in the hospital. I turn, squat and pray the floor holds my weight, as I am a lot bigger than most of the inhabitants here. These cubicles line the river. Every house has one, frozen waste is removed once a year, effectively the main street and river frontage is the toilet, not something an estate agent from our world would describe as a ‘selling point’. Still I see their charm.

I crunch around the village in the snow and return to find we have a cook, and a wonderful one at that. Nastasia is scraping the scales of large frozen fish, retrieved from underground permafrosted cellars. She offers them raw, grilled in cutlets or baked. Beautiful white salmon from a big river nearby.

5: With the reindeer herders at last

Volodya turns up with news that his other mashina (‘a much better one’) has been prepared for our trip to the herders’ hut. Through the mountains and plains to a valley far away about the same distance travelled from the gold miners’ camp. My heart sinks – I thought they’d be in the outskirts of the village. He assures us in this mashina things will go a lot smoother and we’ll be there by nightfall. But we must leave now...

We exit via derelict fox-fur coops made aesthetic by recent snow fall, and an intriguing derelict grave yard. Soon we are rising out of the village and on reaching the first summit, our breath is taken by the crystal-cut views of the distant village, clinging to the edge of the vast grey Arctic Ocean, beyond it mountain ranges stretching as far as the eye can see. Clouds climbing in spectacular convolvulations. One hundred and eighty degrees of pale blues, cream brilliant yellows, mauves, greys and brittle ivory. The higher we climb this tiny Breughel village pales to a smudge which feels like it could be rubbed out by the eraser in my pencil case. We chug over peaks and draw a trail of two lonely lines that fade in the impossible distances we travel. A lonely gull circles us like a Coleridge albatross.

We journey through vast white plains ringed by dune-like mountain ranges, surprising hues encouraged by bright sun, concealed often by cloud, send light streaming across other ranges set further back, these doming summits recede, setting up contrasts not possible, deep purples, intense yellows, dense blues in sculptured chunks disappearing to hazed pinpricks. Such an empty place. We clunk our way through endless plains, the horizons of which one hopes mark a change but no, it’s just the curvature of the earth preventing a further view of flat open space, obligatory ice rivers yield as we crunch crystal-fresh ice. Tiny vole tracks betray night time foragings.

Night falls again, as does the temperature, and eventually after an endless day of no signs of human activity or presence an imperceptible prick of light appears at the valley bottom. Within half an hour it is shockingly vivid. Still we have a way to go, another twenty minutes before a rectangular shape is definable, then dogs, scurrying up on top of mounds barking, head-torches follow strafing the black sky, piercing the back of retinas as they locate our visages. We pull up, more figures emerge from a hut, searching our faces and turning away, lights move around the truck and find Volodya, they drag him out and hug. The torches return to us, I feel viewed like an alien species.

Helped off the bone-breaker we are ushered though the snow, lowering heads through a dense hide-lined door (even the step is covered in tanned fur). We enter a dense dark chocolate brown interior, heated by a central wood burning stove, which is planted on top of a bed of slate set in a log frame on a thick oily boarded floor. A chimney extends up through the roof. The stove is covered in half a dozen blackened boiling kettles, and a vat of broiling meat with a surface of fat, bubbling away.

One yellowing dim bulb illuminates brown wild darting faces, flitting in and out. We remove our wet clothing, stamp our feet and huddle round the fire. This is an ancient place. The trunk walls burnished by fifty years of spines, shoulders and backs, support wooden benches a meter wide traversing the whole room, which are divided by uprights approximately six feet apart. These are the bunks, lined with deer hides.

Tea is poured, one kettle holds thick stewed leaves and the other boiling water, like the old samovars. We dilute the tea to taste, holding the handles with rags to prevent the burn. Soon we are tucking into a pot of boiled reindeer meat. Tonight we are curios, heads appear over the backs of shoulders and laugh at each other as we, strange lefthanders, attempt to cut meat and separate it from bone (the Eveny cut their meat holding it between teeth taking upright slices to separate it from the bone). No plates to eat off – we share from the pot. Our cack-handedness and mastication excites mirth, putting on a hat prompts laughter, indeed I begin to feel self-conscious, what gesture will cause what reaction? Laughter increases as I’m christened Richard (pronounced Reeshar) – apparently my beard resembles that of Richard the Lion-Heart. Fine by me.

Affection soon develops as Tolya takes centre stage again. He is now in his element – these are the environments he is most familiar with, this is ‘home’, and this ‘home’ spans range after range for thousands of miles. He commands conversation, he stirs up hilarity as his voice speeds, raises and lowers, his mouth moves like he’s chewing the stickiest of toffees. This is a night that’s been repeated for millennia.

We are truly remote, our safety and lives are in the hands of complete strangers who have given up their beds for us, as they top and tail it in the neighboring bunks. We set out our sleeping bags, too hot in this piping room. The moss stuffed into every joint and crack insulates the hut completely, and I am relieved to have a bunk by a flapping polythene window which offers a faint draught, clapping every time the door opens in the night. I am able to make out the tops of mountains in the starlight through milky plastic.

The generator falters to a halt, the silence is absolute. Vivid dreams wake me temporarily, to the dying crackles of the fire as the room cools to a tolerable temperature.

Dawn brings the deaf and dumb Yuri, at 65 the oldest herder of the group, up to light the fire, using shaved kindling with its florid pared curls to nurture a flame. Which, as I watch from my bunk five feet away, seems impossibly stuffed with logs. It crackles into life and chirrups almost in Russian as it spits, a faint hiss and the pots which have cooled overnight start to warm, he returns to his bunk and we doze for another half an hour, and the floor boards warm and the low planked ceiling creaks into life as if yawning.

Bodies start to stir and Tolya bursts into ‘Goot mownink, goot mownink!’ and his three patriotic songs. We all secretly enjoy them even though we’d never concede. He thumps the bed demanding praise. Tin cups start filling with tea and the cook places a pan full of venison hacked from its host and boiled, onto the table. Tolya is up like a shot and we guests tuck in from the shared saucepan. Our hosts sit and watch from their bunks. Replete we retire wiping mouths with the backs of sleeves, to be replaced at the table. Chatter cackles into life and their capacity for endless talk reveals itself. We feel slowly assimilated, our taking photographs of things we find strange tolerated.

It is announced that the herd will be brought up the valley mid-morning and soon Anatoly the brigadier and Yuri saddle up their uchakhs (tamed and trained reindeer) with saddles made entirely from deer: hip bones and antler all have their specific places in the construction of this double-cushioned arrangement.

They hop on in one easy motion, clutching a stick. Tensing their knees they move off at a trotting, staccato pace, the stick aiding them in the absence of stirrups. The herder sits high on the shoulder of the animal, in order for it to bear the weight. These reindeer are not big creatures, the size of a small donkey, and odd spurs of the antlers are cut off to prevent them knocking the rider at the turn of a head. Out of sight and down the snowy valley they descend, searching for the wandering herd.

I decide to explore. Out of tufts of grass, fur balls of dog emerge, stretching from their frozen night quarters, their lairs often signposted by chewed hoof or scrap of hide. A trail of oil drums and home crafted sledges, beautiful wooden constructions carved and lashed with reindeer hide, deliberately loose in order to withstand the compressions and tensions of their job, lead me to four forlorn reindeer tethered to posts, their bloodied antlers and cheeks rubbed bare by the rope that binds them. Straining and tugging, their heads twist and contort, their long antlers exaggerating the gestures, they flail in all directions as I approach. Their wills are being broken to become the next generation of uchakh. They are not happy about it, even the herders approach with trepidation. I find a skinned fox on a pile of hide, red like the newborn baby of some mountain Golem, and later I find the skin pinned to a board in the hut. A young herder called Rinat (named after a Tartar footballer) shows me a mammoth tusk found in the tundra, lying between freshly skinned heads. Nothing rots here – the permanent freeze preserves everything. A diary of meals and kills punctuate the ground. The frozen temperatures are seen as a tool here, in the distance at the apex of a wooden tripod about ten feet high a butchered carcass is skewered, haunches and ribcages adorn this external fridge, just beyond the reach of bears, wolves and wolverines. Later Anatoly proudly shows me pictures of a large brown bear he shot in the summer, skinned and eaten. Also pictured is his wife picking berries in beautiful summer pastures. The tundra in summer is a different place and it is here that bears and humans come into contact, searching out the same fruits and berries.

I attempt sketches of the tethered deer , self consciously trying to catch the straining resistance. Its not long before Rinat looks over my shoulder. Unimpressed he takes the book and draws a perfect silhouette of a noble deer. I’m humbled and impressed at his deftness. Disheartened by my efforts I return via the oil drum bread ovens, set in the hill side, to the hut for more tea, bread and jam.

Volodya then hails me outside and points up the valley. There at last – the climax of our journey. They arrive as if out of the hill, a mass of clicking heels, swelling and contracting over the land like a benign tide, blends of colour barely perceptible from the tundra, approaching in a vast line. The trembling sound comes ever closer with the calls of our two herders mounted on uchakhs, casting their spell on this transient mass. They tumble over a hill and breeze into the valley behind the hut. Piers says ‘it’s like flowing lava’. The antlers give the impression of a moving forest, ‘Birnam Wood moving toward Dunsinane’, circling and circling, drawing calligraphic strobing lines against the white hills, a maelstrom of coral forest. Like a shoal of pilchard they rotate anticlockwise as if determined to screw themselves, whirlpool like, into the ground, then they settle to a cautious standstill, flicking and twitching, grunting and watching. I am surprised to be so affected by this ancient mass, a herd sixteen hundred strong, shouldering each other, locking the occasional antler, some three or four foot in length, others like delicate twigs. They are of the land, padding the tundra with hooves which will come into their own, on top of the metres of snow soon to come, spreading out with tiny hairs between toes holding true on slippery surfaces, effecting the gliding motions that the herders love, their job made easier and faster by the snow.

I absorb the presence of this sudden mass of consciousness after such a long period of emptiness. Over three thousand eyes watching my every move, like a negatively charged magnet through iron filings they part as I move through them. We scuttle around them with fluffed dogs, photographing trophy antlers against the sky, familiarizing ourselves with the blends of fawn to brown to black which has disguised these creatures since and before the last ice age, the impression broken occasionally by the odd lucky white one. Rinat tempts his favourite with sugared bread and soon I’m stroking deep dense hollow fibered fur, which reaches my first knuckle.

We retire for food as the deer settle down resting in hummocks and tufts. We too fall asleep in the hut and I wake to an invitation to ride one. I’m led to Anatoly’s uchakh. I am pleased with my easy mount and with my horse riding technique, clicking my tongue and digging in my heels, holding a stick looking every part the herder. However the stubborn deer doesn’t move, even when yanked by Anatoly, and I retire slightly miffed. We then witness lassoing, the rope is made of twisted reindeer hide with a toggle of carved gorny baran horn. Casting large hoops over far-off antlers is a skill one can only admire. Yanked antler brings the deer to order, they are reeled in and tied up for maintenance and health checks. Its important to keep human contact with these creatures otherwise they will re-wild.

The deer are now left to retreat into the hills and soon they are grey dots on white slopes. I decide to go to them and promise Piers I’ll not let the hut out of my sight. After a march of some ten minutes I find the deer keep moving on, I’m lured into a pursuit, feeling I’m not travelling far and totally absorbed I realize the hut has gone. It begins to snow, and visibility decreases. Not worried as it would be easy to retrace my steps, I continue. Soon I realise chasing reindeer is a hapless task – always keeping a safe distance they evade me, and I give up. Turning to make my way back I take a short cut over a peak rather than round it, to find myself disorientated, convincing myself that logic will see me through, I look at the sun and calculate, to no avail. I now move left then right constructing a tangle of wrong turnings. Mild panic sets in, a mixture of foolishness, embarrassment and fear now take hold. As I descend a valley in the direction of where I think the hut is, I see in the corner of my eye, on a peak in the other direction, a red dot. It must be Piers’s coat. I turn and walk in its seemingly counter-intuitive direction. Some time later we wave and make contact. Ever vigilant, he has been keeping a lookout for me. Sweating I tumble down to the hut below him, to a snoozing cluster, unaware of the lesson learnt.

Snow now falling steadily we enter the dark fusty interior, vats bubbling and boiling, Gregory the cook hacking at the frozen flank collected from the tripod outside, seems to peel potatos endlessly, constantly stirring and salting to provide sustenance for this tiny group. He has filled some intestines with blood plasma and offal to make a white pudding sausage, a delicacy prepared for us. Later we will chew on its rubbery texture, which goes down better with the bread he baked in the hillside yesterday.

The two riders take off at four pm to collect the herd again. Everything here depends on these deer and their welfare, they are loved, it’s a tough love but one feels there is a mutual respect, man and beast have evolved together over millenia. Indeed the sacrifices made by these men are considerable, family and relationships lie out of touch many mountains away. Content, they will wait out the autumn for tougher times ahead, tent poles leaning against the hut allude to a different life to be had in the warmer months. These people are still at heart nomadic, choosing to follow herds, rather than fortunes in the towns thousands of miles away in the south.

The long periods of snoozing like a pride of lions in this thick smoked air and dense silence, belie the hostile terrain beyond the polythene windows. The trails of blood that lead to and fro from this building speak of a violence – the sprinkling of Siberian snow covers a charnelled place. Tripping over femurs and hip bones frozen to the ground, slipping on frozen skin, confusing bright red grinning skulls with plastic bottles, one is constantly reminded of the fine line we traverse.

The herd returns again swirling down the hill side, I re-acquaint myself. The last I see of these deer is at dusk, settled. Their antlers adorn the horizon like edgings of lace, it’s as if they’ve collected the driftwood on the coast and formed a miniature forest. I retreat down a slope over dwarf willow poking through the snow, resembling a myriad of antlers. In the half light it is as if the whole hillside is now deer. I am walking over them, carefully picking my way back to the orange light that only twenty-four hours ago I’d spied from the top of the mashina.

A week of flights and hotels, three days of caterpillar tracking through aquariums of light, shale and tundra have led us to this redoubt, where all that is left of time is the rhythm of one thousand six hundred beating hearts. Left to ruminate, interrupted only by freezing gusts caused by the opening and closing of the door, I ask Piers if the effort and resources employed were typical and even right to get us to this place. ‘It’s all about the effort, it’s the shape’ he said, the vast dragnet of experiences and space act on this ordinary wooden hut, distilling it, creating what for us will always be a powerful, intense and magical place.

6: Return to Naiba

The next morning we set off, retracing our steps like the rewinding of video tape, up down through and out. I’m keen to visit the strange cemetery I noticed on the way out and it is this that occupies my mind as we near the village, hours later. My first view of it is a distant row of wooden crosses leaning in different directions, reminding me of the last view of the antlers. Strangely due to a high river level, we detour through the cemetery. I am shocked by this violent intervention. We chunter through a neglected world, the ubiquitous rusted oil drums litter our way, buckled steel, twisted gates, plastic containers and driftwood surround and indeed penetrate this eerie place.

Permafrost rumblings under ground seem to have pushed the graves into the air, splitting them apart and spilling out their contents. The Orthodox crosses hang on for life on a series of mounds which giant moles might have left. It was as if the inhabitants themselves had lifted the lids of their unwanted tombs and crept off. This time our mashina sloshes across the notorious river which had hindered our progress all that time ago. Back in our hospital dormitory, we are fed and rested.

Later in the evening Tolya’s urgent knock on the door brings news. We are to give a presentation to the community in the village hall in an hour. The young and enthusiastic administrator has gathered some thirty cheerful villagers and soon we are awkwardly giving an account of ourselves. Questions start and Tolya, whose fame seems to have spread even to here, is asked if he really does have a transplanted reindeer’s heart? He stands up, bares his chest and revealing a vertical scar, confirms that indeed he has a reindeer heart and the deer has his!

The next question is aimed at me: ‘How will the herders influence your sculptures?’ As I struggle to think of an answer, ready for Piers to translate, a young girl runs into the room calling out. The audience is distracted, unsettled, hastily it rises to its feet and rushes outside. Soon whistling can be heard in the dark. We follow to see a luminous sky shivering to the whistles of the village. The first Aurora Borealis has arrived much to everyone’s surprise, it’s early. The whistling is to encourage the sky to perform. Tolya leads us to the foreshore and clambering over the wood we step onto the black slate. Vladimir sets up a tripod and a camera and we witness a majestic visitation, curtains of luminescence swing through the dark, fingers of light tremble as if being played by a cosmic organist, soft palpable pale greens, reds and electric blues emerge then dissolve in swirls of oily haze, in fact it is as if some spirit has spilt oil into the night and shone a light through it. Tolya jumps like a child cheering, running up and down the narrow strip of shale, whilst we point in every direction under a giant polychromatic dome. It feels as if a vast consciousness is visiting, ruminating on us in a language we have always known, somewhere deep inside.

I fancy that this is where the souls from the junked graves are escaping to. One can imagine jumping into this, to dissolve like ink in a watery oblivion. Here one glimpses a shamanic world possibly bigger than a human mind can countenance.

I think back to Orion’s belt turning into a deer on the flight here, at the time I wondered at the nonsense of it. Now I think back to one of Tolya’s Eveny myths recounted in the hut. Three brave brothers out hunting are chasing six mountain sheep up a hill. The sheep veer off just before the summit. The brothers don’t notice and carry on running up into the sky. They carry on and on and eventually become the stars forming the belt of Orion. The sheep later leap one by one into the night to become Andromeda. It is foretold in Eveny folklore that Orion and Andromeda will one day collide causing the end of time.

7: The Baker’s banya

Volodya wakes us early, announcing that the original mashina has been serviced by his uncles and cousins in readiness to deliver us safely back to Tiksi. We remember the two day journey here and are circumspect. We load bags, climb on top, settle rears into familiar positions. Grabbing brackets, bolts and ropes we set off.

We cross the road and crash through the placid platinum river which half an hour earlier I had contemplated. We fast approach another river and Volodya charges, crunch, thick slabs of ice rise above the bonnet, hitting the window, tearing off lumps of metal, lights and wipers. The engine gurgles and we stall, steaming. The familiar sight of Volodya grappling to get out of his window presents itself, he wades to the front, pulls off a mud guard, sweeps chunks of ice off the bonnet and sighs. With effort we reverse out of this deep river, and all the way back to the village. A disgruntled family greet Volodya, scratching their heads and sighing. We disembark, unpack and sit in the yard whilst they decide what to do, an hour later Volodya brings the reliable mashina down the road, parting ponies and dogs.

We re-load, climb aboard and set off, the long way round this time, up the mountain and down the valley, across the plain to see the village from the other side of the river, crushed ice, a black pool and a mudguard the evidence of our presence hours earlier.

On we go, the rocks that seem to live in the gear box churn. Like a moving compression chamber we drive on inexorably retracing steps, through plains and mountains at ten miles an hour. Now is a time for reflection. For the first time in a fortnight I think about my home, drifting into trains of thought violently disturbed at turns and crossings. As the darkness falls the northern lights re-emerge as if to keep the spell alive, under the gaseous green shifting sky the land retains its magic. We pitch up at the gold mine, to be welcomed and fed, and sleep sweating in the sweltering hut as the aurora continues its dance.

We return to Tiksi the following day. A frozen airport means a nervous delay. ‘What do you expect, this is Tiksi’ is Tolya’s response to our consternations. The unspecified amount of time we have to play with provides opportunity to sample many social events. We give speeches on the elderly and agriculture, we dance and sing, we toast nightly with vodka, various friendships, philosophies and political developments, and attend an incense-rich Orthodox service.

One memorable night we are invited to a local character’s banya (an extreme sauna) situated in his bakery. A bakery which serves the whole town. In the communist era he baked sixty thousand loaves of bread a month, now only a sixth of that. We are led to a changing room and told to strip as he leaves. Self-consciously naked, we four stand waiting uncertainly. Eventually our baker returns summoning us along a slippery corridor, past workers on the night shift in overalls and boots, to a wooden door resembling the entrance of a bread oven. It struck me that I had no idea who this man was and where I was being led. Opening the door he ushers us in, we climb up inside a dark wood-lined room, orange rocks glow in a steel basket, I settle on an upper tier head against the ceiling. Saucepans of water are cast onto hot rocks, which I can see now are perched on and around a raging furnace. A hot rush of stinging steam shoots to the top of the room where I am perched, the sensation is of being skinned. Our baker friend stands naked now at the bottom next to the oven, Piers and Tolya are on the lower tier, heads bowed sweat streaming down their noses forming puddles between their feet. Immediately in front, hands on hips, our baker thrusts his thighs forward whilst recounting epic baking tales and bemoaning the fact that kids don’t want to spend this sort of male time together any more, all the time his balls resembling the reindeer intestines Gregory was filling to make the sausage in the hut, pass perilously close to their heads.

Soon we are released broiled and gasping, and are led to the canteen, where two large fresh fish are brought straight from a bread oven, gosh! We are given a half each and sink our teeth into white perfectly cooked flesh. Vodka and toasts to friendship and fishing are had, and then wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist he eyes me, he pulls me up and marches me back to the boiler room. There still naked he lays me face down and from a bucket pulls two sheaves of birch twigs still in leaf. He beats me with stinging force, he pummels me, he then scrapes the twigs along my spine and down the back of my legs to the balls of my feet, the skin now raw is treated to a fresh flush of rock water and a long hot hedge compress in the small of the back, one that lasts beyond comfort to the border of intense pain. Biting my lip I enter into a phase of panic. With a slap in the dark he gestures for me to turn around, now on my back he sets about his violence again. This time my groin is scarified, my chest flagellated and my stomach sanded raw. With a final beating he pulls me up and drags me out of the door, along the slippery corridor and vats of white flour, to a large metal door, pushed open as a burst of cold air hits my lobster-raw body. I am led into the street where his van is parked engine and headlights still on. In the raw beam he picks up crystalline snow and proceeds to rub my chest, he holds my hands up and scrapes my arm pits, ribs and thighs with cutting icy snow, eating into my wounds – the pain is interesting! This continues until the steam from my body no longer fogs the beam of the van. He then tells me to look up into the night sky, beat my chest and roar like a lion. I follow orders.

I’m dragged back pulsating to the canteen, my fish now cooling. Taking its lead I flop onto the bench under a towel and drift into a revery between toastings of vodka. Now Piers and Vladimir are processed, returning with chests full of snow. Finally we are released back into the Tiksi night, back to the flat which now seems fusty and close. We take to our beds nursing wounds. Soon men flinch and wince in deep sleep.

Over at the airstrip, it’s the wrong kind of snow and our scheduled plane will not be coming. The following morning the mood is resigned as lives at home go on without us, and we start to miss urgent appointments. Pacing rooms and reading books we kill time. Tolya tries to communicate with the airport. We are told its not uncommon to be waiting for months.

In fact, we wait for a mere four days. Then Tolya receives a call from his brother, a reindeer herder in Sebyan some seven hundred miles south in the mountains, who says ‘pack you bags, your plane is coming’. He has seen our plane in the sky heading north!! Fantastic. Tolya acts instantly and two hours later we are loading frozen fish and venison into the hold. That evening we board our Antonov-24, propellors spinning. Twisting on the ice we skid off, gather momentum and at last leave the ground, the dim lights of Tiksi disappear into the mist and clouds.

Two days later, Piers and I are drinking champagne again in a Moscow airport. We fill the five-hour connection with fine dining: Crimean wine, large steaks (beef, not reindeer) and Armenian brandy.

Without the anxieties of being stranded we talk about our experience. Piers’ ‘shape’ stays with me, it was a sculptor’s term, and it is the shapes of this experience I dwell upon. I see the shape of the herd flowing down the valley. In their antlers I see the elisions of cloud flowing through Siberian mountains, snowy owls disappearing into hillsides, blind probing rivers in valleys. I see Aurora Borealis and silhouettes of men fusing with beasts. When 3,200 antlers spin in the snow and 1,600 lungs empty into a single crystalline breath cloud, I see individuals submit and the one becoming the whole. Here there is no other choice.

-----------------------

22

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download