by Earl Nelson
Many of our people put out snares but they are having to go further afield every day. That leaves us with fewer people to cut trees.”
“This, in turn, causes us to miss quotas which reduces the amount of food we are given. By the middle of the winter, there will be no game and we will have many deaths by starvation. One year many years ago there was cannibalism in this camp.”
“If you can get me arrowheads, I will be able to provide deer or elk.”
“That is a deal.”
Within two days he gave one hundred arrowheads hand cut out of sheet metal. I placed them in the knocks of the arrows and whipped the knock closed with strands of hemp.
I practiced with my green bow, the good one was still drying. I had rough cut the stave so when there was some warping when it dried, I could carve it out.
I was adequate with the green bow. It had good poundage and the arrows flew straight. I would never win the Robin Hood contest in Sherwood Forrest with this setup, but I could hit a deer.
Chapter 20
The day of the hunt as I thought of it, no snares had been set out. Five men were setting out snares. That day, two went with me, and the other three chopped trees to replace me. I didn’t realize that I was contributing so much to the day's quota.
I shouldn’t have been surprised as I was large, young, and still in good health. I could outwork any two of them.
The two guys and I headed deeper into the woods. With their setting small game snares, they had learned the woods. They knew where deer were most likely to be found.
They led me right to a small herd. We had come in downwind quietly, so they didn’t know we were there. We were only one hundred yards away from them, so I had a good shot. I stuck two arrows in the ground to get them quickly and nocked a third.
Taking a deep breath and holding it, then gently exhaling I let fly. Before the first arrow arrived, I had a second ready to go. You could hear the solid thunk of the first arrow as I lost the second. Again, I went for the third arrow and another shot, but the herd was moving by then and I didn’t have a chance.
I had brought down two deer. They were small, called musk deer. They still had enough meat to make it worthwhile.
As I retrieved my arrows the two guys started field dressing the deer. They were fast. We headed back to camp with almost a hundred pounds of meat.
When we neared our cutting area, we hid the meat and walked on in. Joseph saw us coming and came to meet us.
“You weren’t gone long. Problems?”
“Success, two musk deer, almost a hundred pounds of meat.”
“Fantastic.”
This was all spoken in Russian. I only picked up every other word or so but caught the gist.
“Can you go back out; the day is still young?”
That had to be translated for me, but I nodded yes. Our second trip of the day yielded three more deer from two different herds.
It was all we could do to haul the meat back. When we got back to the day's worksite there were some happy people to see the results of our hunt.
I hope they didn’t expect this every day. Deer weren’t stupid. They never had been hunted before, but they would get skittish fast. Then it would be become like deer hunting in the states, requiring patience.
I could be wrong. Siberia is a large place and has a lot of deer.
Joseph was excited, there was enough meat here to feed the whole barracks for three days. He went off in rhapsodies. He envisioned enough extra meat to trade with the guards for medicines and other necessities.
He thought the days of famine were over. There was the little problem that we were one of ten barracks. The others might have a say about all this extra meat.
Joseph wasn’t clueless. He immediately made plans for hidden smoking facilities and a meat locker. These were to be deep in our sector of the woods and only attended by a trusted few.
I was given the duty of chief hunter, but also chief bowyer. I was to provide as many bows as possible and train selected men on using them.
This was the closest I had seen the camp to be festive. That night, men were able to eat their fill for the first time in a long time. Probably the first time since they came to the gulag.
The next three days we went in different directions away from the camp to hunt different herds of deer. The worse day only had two kills, the best five.
We could have done better by starting earlier in the morning, but we had to be present for the morning headcount. There was a large open field where we assembled.
We had to line up fifty men across and twenty rows deep. We had to be five feet apart from the front, side, and back. Each of us was assigned a position according to our convict number. I was 33573. They may have had a rhyme or reason for the numbers at one time. Now they all seemed random.
It would be obvious if someone missing as there would be a gap somewhere in the formation. There were always gaps. Almost every night someone died for some reason.
It could have been violence, an accident, disease, or even suicide. No matter the reason there were always deaths. If there were ten gaps there better be ten bodies stacked in the field.
If someone were missing the dogs would be taken to their bunk area to get the scent and then to the perimeter of the camp and turned loose.
I had seen it happen twice as men couldn’t take it anymore and just wandered away from camp. The dogs tracked them both down. One man stopped when they came up to him.
The dogs left him alone and the guards bound him and took him back to camp.
The other man ran from the dogs, they chased him down and tore him to bloody shreds. I knew this because I was one of those sent out to collect the body.
I don’t think I was chosen deliberately, just the luck of the draw.
About ten days into the hunt, we came across a herd of moose. There were over a hundred of them. When I put an arrow into the first one it went to its knees and was coughing blood. I thought the herd would runoff. They ignored the dying one.
I managed to shoot four more of them before the herd got nervous and moved. We sent a runner back to the camp to get help.
We got busy field dressing the moose and building travois to haul the meat. Field dressing ended up at nine hundred pounds per moose, after butchering it would be four hundred and fifty pounds of useful meat.
We had to drag back forty-five hundred pounds of meat. It was hard work and required twenty of us. We would miss our work quota for the day but knew we could trade meat for logs with other barracks.
I had carved five more bow staves from greenwood, along with twenty arrows per bow and two strings each. That took every waking minute. At least I didn’t have to chop any more wood.
While doing my carving I was teaching other men how to do it so I wouldn’t be the sole source. I didn’t tell them I was doing this so they wouldn’t be left without bows and bowmen when I escaped.
How I was going to do that I didn’t know yet, but the first steps had been taken, I had a source of food for my journey in the wilds of Siberia.
I also was training prospective archers. Some of the candidates didn’t get it, some did, and one guy was William Tell reborn.
Even though they had little to do the camp has an escape committee. I had the best chance of escaping of anyone ever imprisoned there.
Since my Russian was extremely limited, they drew me up a sample identity card.
My name would be Ivan Popov, a quite common name, from Vladivostok. What they had given me had to be copied onto official paper. They had little advice on how to get it, other than it would be at an NKVD office.
I still had to memorize the Russian alphabet and the sentences in that language that I would need to use to fill in my travel pass and school papers, but with my acting experience memorizing a few lines wasn’t all that hard, even though they were in an unfamiliar language.
I would have to have better clothing. I was told how to bribe clerks to get in the backroom where what I needed
might be available. This would cost a lot of money. They had no idea how I could get it. I did, I grew up on westerns.
Then there was how would I hide in Moscow. If I could come up with the money, I could buy my way into the University. It turned out that there was a whole network of dissidents known by fellow camp inmates who might help me, starting with a fake transcript and recommendation papers.
I was given places and names where I could obtain both, and once again, my experience in memorizing lines paid off.
My escape method came about almost by accident. I had to find a way to leave no scent for the dogs.
It was a barter session one night when I saw a man sitting with a pile of parachute silk. He was cutting small pieces and selling or trading them.
I don’t know where it came from, but I remembered a couple of the stuntmen back in Hollywood talking about a new sport called hang gliding.
It was simple in principle and had been done since the 1890s. It was a one-man glider with no shell, just a wing that the person would hang suspended under.
They had talked about a wing design called Rogallo. Rogallo must have been the inventor. It only needed about twenty square feet of fabric and the parachute had much more than that.
I had the parachute reserved for me until I delivered one hundred pounds of deer meat. It took me two days to collect that. My co-workers weren’t wild about me taking the meat personally as they thought it all belonged to the collective, but they finally yielded when they realized their dependence on me.
Someone must have known that I was receiving parachute silk for it, but no one brought it up.
This is where my aeronautical knowledge was important. I knew the wing shape I needed. I could calculate the lift provided by each square foot of wing, thus telling me how much weight I could fly with.
Sunday was our one day of rest in the camp. We didn’t even have to hunt. Things, in general, were looking up in our barracks as the men were getting a regular source of protein in their diets. Healthier men could chop more wood. Quotas made earned more food in the form of greens.
I didn’t feel like I was abandoning my workmates. It is strange how you can identify with a group. Anyway, two Sundays in a row I went off by myself and built a hang glider using one-inch diameter branches as the mainframe and some sort of long thin branches to keep the wing shape. I think they were a willow, but not a weeping willow.
Siberia is a large flat plane, but not perfectly flat. There are some cliffs and valleys. On one of my hunting trips, we came across a one-hundred-foot-high cliff that opened on a valley that dropped another couple hundred feet. The best part was that the prevailing wind blew from the west to the east. It would be a perfect launch spot.
When I finished the glider, I carried it to the cliff. I then went back and retrieved my bow stave which I had curing under the barracks.
As I crawled from under the barracks, Joseph was there. I thought he would try to stop me. Just the opposite.
“It is time that you go, the weather will be too bad soon. Here is something that might help, it only has three shells so be careful.”
He handed me a pistol. Later I was able to read Nagant Model 1895 on the barrel.
I thank him, then on impulse hugged the man and walked away without looking back.
With a backpack loaded with twenty pounds of meat and five pounds of cabbage I and my bow and arrows, while wearing my cold-weather gear I ran and went over the edge of the cliff.
Chapter 21
Was I scared, yes, I was? However, I was determined to escape from this prison. I had a life to live and a country to teach a lesson to. I didn’t know what I was going to do but the lesson would be don’t mess with Richard Edward Jackson.
I fell forward and dropped until I felt the air expand the wings. The hang glider didn’t fall apart so I was okay for now.
The ground was coming up fast but when I felt lift, I brought my feet up and the glider started to climb. The further I got from the cliff the greater the lift. I seemed to be moving faster as I went.
This was confirmed as I watched the forest dwindle below me and pass at an ever-increasing rate. I was climbing higher. I flew on for another fifteen minutes and I realized that it was getting colder. My cold-weather gear was protecting my body, but I had nothing over my face.
I finally leveled my flight off. If I had to guess I was between six and seven thousand feet in the air. I had no way of knowing how many miles I had traveled but no dogs would be able to track me now.
I decided to glide as far as I could. I was going almost due east towards the Pacific Ocean. It was almost eight hundred miles away so I would never make that but still the further I got from that camp the better.
Also, I had to worry about human contact. The closer to the camp the more likely I would be caught and turned in for the reward.
I slanted my flight to the south as much as I could. I planned to get as far as I could and then head south until I ran across the trans-Siberian Railway. I couldn’t miss it as it ran across all the Soviet Union.
Hanging in the air if I could, took a toll. I was getting hungry, had to go to the bathroom, and was freezing! The last reason was the one that made me decide to land. I had rough straps to hold me to the glider but if I fell unconscious there was no guarantee of a safe landing.
During the three hours or so that I had been aloft, I hadn’t seen one light nor sign of human habitation, this truly was a wilderness.
The first daylight was appearing over the horizon as I started to descend. I had gotten up safely now could I get down?
The further I descended the more doubts I had; I was descending faster than the earth was rotating so I was going from light to impenetrable dark. I could never find a safe place to land.
This stark fact jolted me into a more wide-awake awareness. I hadn’t realized that I was falling asleep. I leveled my flight up and continued.
Like the soap opera title, the world turned. Sunlight touched the ground and the lakes! Yes, it glinted off bodies of water of all sizes. I now knew how to make a safe landing.
Not in the water but on the shore parallel to my flight if the shore was wide enough. I dropped my altitude so that I was now about fifty feet above the tallest trees.
I had spotted one large lake in the distance; it was the most likely spot to land. When I sailed out over the edge of the water, I was thrilled to see that there was a long stretch of grass running alongside the water.
Dropping my altitude, I flew directly over the long straight stretch of grass. The lower I went the slower I flew as the wind died, cut off by the trees. I came within a few feet of the land at a running speed. I lowered my legs, touched the ground, and started running. At the same time, I pulled the homemade cords to collapse the wing.
The wing did collapse, and I took a tumble with the lack of support the wings had been giving me. It didn’t matter as I was down without any injury.
I was well over a hundred miles from the gulag, maybe two hundred, it didn’t matter I was out.
Taking my glider, I went into the woods. It had a lot of undergrowth, so I was able to disappear in short order. Not that I had seen anything to disappear from.
I only went in a hundred yards or so and came across a rock outcrop. I was able to nestle down between two boulders, cover myself with the parachute silk, and fell asleep.
When I woke the sun was going down. I had to go to the bathroom like crazy. Taking care of business, I started to set up a better camp. I improved my sleeping arrangement by making a roof over the boulders. By tripling the large nylon sheet over I thought it would be waterproof if it rained. It was late enough in the year it might even snow.
To keep warm, I collected downed firewood and started the fire with the flint and steel Firestarter from the survival kit I had assembled in the camp.
Calling it a survival kit may have been a bit much, it contained a small compass, about the size of a dime, the Firestarter, and several bandages which I h
ad boiled and wrapped in wax paper stolen from the kitchens.
I also had a small hand hatchet I took from the felling crew. Then there was that pistol Joseph had handed me.
This was what I had to get out of Siberia.
I ate well from the dried meat I had brought along and even choked down some of the cabbage. I hadn’t ever liked cabbage but now it was a necessity for my diet.
I rested for two days. I didn’t realize how much the escape had taken out of me. On the third day, I woke and felt great, so I rolled up the parachute silk, why do they call it silk when it is nylon?
There was no sign of human activity so far. The first day I made many miles as I followed the lakeshore. It must have been twenty miles.
I had no idea how far I would have to walk before I ran into the rail line. Each night I would dry my socks out by my small fire. I would wash my feet in the lake. If I had foot problems, I was dead.
The days turned into weeks or at least two of them. I estimated that I had gone almost two hundred miles, give or take fifty.
One day late in the afternoon I saw my first sign of human habitation. It was smoke curling up into the sky. I cautiously approached the area where it was coming from. I’m glad I did. It was a small outpost of Russian soldiers.
Why they were stationed out here was beyond me. I was about to pass them by when I realized they were a mounted group. They rode horses!
I made a wide circle around the camp until I saw the small barn and corral. There must have been fifty horses in four corrals. Two soldiers were watering the horses. They made no effort to bed the horses in the barn. It wouldn’t have held them all anyway.
I backed away several miles and set up a hidden cold camp. The next morning, I was out at daybreak and had the corrals under surveillance.
Five soldiers came out and selected horses from the nearest corral saddled them and went out on a patrol.
