Petya and Shura were Evens, an ethnic group indigenous to the Siberian north-east, most of whom have long reared reindeer and hunted for their living. Spread wide across Yakutia and neighbouring areas, they probably number fewer than 20,000, including a semi-settled group on the Okhotsk Sea coast who fish and hunt sea mammals, using dogs rather than reindeer as draught animals. But Petya and his family were reindeer people, with a herd of nearly a thousand, which his four sons were out with when I arrived.
Their life was unaffected by electricity and unlike in Oymyakon I had to supply my own knife at mealtimes. The biggest blade on my Swiss Army knife looked decidedly puny beside their large hunting knives. Like everywhere else I had stayed in Siberia, I was accepted into the camp with genuine warmth, especially by Petya and Shura’s seven-year-old daughter Nadia after she had spent the first day checking me out. Soon Shura replaced my daily diet of horse with a daily diet of reindeer, relieved by the delightful appearance at breakfast of a sort of rice pudding and on one occasion by a delectable stew of wild mountain goat.
I had already begun to wonder whether it was the cold that made people so hospitable, providing a common bond against the elements, a sense of community based on fellow feeling. In part this was true. In Irkutsk, Dima had told me that during this severe winter he had noticed a distinct thawing in the usual reserve people maintained on the city’s buses and in the shops. The cold had made them more talkative, wanting to share their stories of wintry adversity. And all along the Road of Bones the driver would slow down or stop whenever he saw another vehicle potentially in trouble beside the track. However, what clinched the cold weather theory of community for me were the dogs. When I first arrived in Siberia I had been wary of them, a distrust based on my experiences in Mongolia where they were beasts to be feared. But after some tentative first encounters with canines in Yakutia, I found even the most ferocious looking husky to be friendly. A bark there may be, but on approach every hound simply sought a pat on the head or a scratch behind the ear, a bit of human warmth in the icy wastes. The same was true among the reindeer herders, despite their warnings that their dogs, which they kept tied up outside, were dangerous. When one joined us to help herd the reindeer, it was friendlier than I could ever have expected, especially since it looked more like a wolf.
In Oymyakon, the sense of community had been palpable, enhanced when I discovered that everyone seemed to be related to each other, a fact borne out by the very small number of family names in the town. I was rather pleased with how my theory was progressing until Andrei pointed out that none of the limited number of surnames were of local origin. When the nomads were settled there in the 1930s the use of their indigenous languages was ‘discouraged’, as Andrei put it, by the authorities. Everyone was required to take Russian names and only a limited number were made available. My faith in kinship ties was restored among the reindeer herders, however, when Olga, who had been brought up in a village more than 200 kilometres away, announced that she’d discovered that she and Shura were cousins.
I was surprised by the fact that Petya’s family had avoided the permanent settlement that had followed the collectivization of many reindeer herds in the 1930s, and surprised again when I learned that their animals were still owned by the state. Although seemingly so free of outside interference here in their idyllic valley, Petya, Shura and their sons were all state employees. At first glance, little appeared to have changed since Soviet times, with the exception that the salaries they earned were now usually late and when they did arrive their buying power was significantly smaller than ten years previously. The size of their herd was still checked twice a year by government inspectors and any animals that had accidentally died in the interim had to be accounted for on the appropriate forms. Hearing the situation from Shura, via Olga, I saw the stark contrast with a herding life that in its day-to-day practice had changed little for centuries.
When the day came to join Petya and his sons in rounding up the herd and moving it, the boys brought a dozen reindeer into the camp, which they tied to the totem poles before harnessing them to sleds. The animals waited patiently, sniffing the crisp air and the ground around them. The lucky ones found yellow urine patches in the snow, a good source of salts.
Olga took me on one side and politely explained that Shura thought I needed a change of outfit. My sheepskin coat was too unwieldy for riding reindeer and the boots that I’d bought in Yakutsk were fine for city wear but no good for the country. I was mildly disappointed to have to shed my coat, which I’d become rather attached to despite its weight, but the boots I was happy to part with because the felt heels had warped and I found them increasingly difficult to walk in. In their place, Shura provided me with a reindeer hide coat that was so thin and light compared to my sheepskin that I initially doubted its ability to keep me warm. The replacement reindeer boots were made of the softest chamois-leather with the fur on the inside. On the soles of my feet they felt like moccasins.
As Olga and I sped away in the convoy of sleds, the temperature sank rapidly with the wind generated by our movement. In protest, my nose and chin broke off diplomatic relations almost immediately, but the rest of my body was quite happy beneath its layers of reindeer skin. Fur keeps animals warm because it traps air within the hairs to provide insulation. Air is a poor conductor of heat so it retains warmth. It’s the principle employed by the string vest, invented for an expedition to the Antarctic in 1920: the holes between the strings trap the air. Reindeer fur is particularly warm because each individual hair is hollow. I have sympathy with animal-rights activists and vegetarians at home in the West when they argue against the maltreatment of God’s other creatures. But I suspect that not many of them have been to Siberia where there is no substitute for meat as human fuel, and animal skins are still the best means of staying warm. Although some of the clothing I’d seen during my journey had been stylish, these people weren’t making fashion statements. They were simply conserving body heat by using the best materials available. Mind you, I still felt a tinge of guilt being pulled along by a couple of reindeer while wearing their cousins on my back.
We found the herd only a few kilometres away but kept going towards a ridge to where we would be driving the animals. ‘How does Petya know where to take them?’ I shouted to Olga who sat in front of me on the sled. ‘The reindeer know where is the best grazing,’ she called back. ‘They just follow them.’
When we got to the ridge we set up camp – a large canvas tent. Petya’s sons set about chopping firewood and stripping spruce trees of their branches, which were laid on the ground inside the tent to provide a layer of insulation beneath a floor of hides. A battered metal stove was positioned inside the door, its chimney poking out through a hole in the flap, and rapidly filled with logs. Petya cut shavings with his knife to make kindling and we were soon drinking hot tea and chewing meat before settling down for the night, fanned out with our heads all pointing towards the dying embers of the stove.
It was one of the most uncomfortable nights that I can remember. My sleeping bag, a construction of animal skins, was excellent, keeping my entire body snug. When I covered my head with my hat and coat, that was fine too, except for one serious drawback – I couldn’t breathe. Twice in what seemed like quick succession I was woken by nightmares. In the first I was doing a sponsored fast (something I’ve never done) in a cellar that someone had freshly painted. The fumes woke me up gasping for breath. Later I was awoken again when I dreamt I’d been buried alive.
The solution to this problem presented me with a new dilemma. I left an air hole in my folded coat but although the air it admitted was breathable, it was also perilously cold. I spent most of the rest of the night shifting from one position to another, first freezing my ear, then my cheek, followed by my nose, the other cheek, the other ear and so on. Somehow I did manage to get off to sleep again, but I only knew this when I was woken a third time by another bad dream. I was playing in my parents’ garden on a bright summer’
s day with my childhood friend David Williams. We were using magnifying glasses to burn holes in dead leaves. Bored with this, I suggested to David that he turn his glass on my forehead to see what it would be like. I woke up when the tiny centre of light started to burn my flesh and was surprised to find myself not only considerably older but also wrapped in animal skins in a tent in Siberia in winter. David Williams was nowhere to be seen.
Kiasha, one of Petya’s sons who had the telltale signs of severe frostbite on his cheeks, had briefed me on the basics of riding a reindeer the day before. I quickly realized that the most difficult bit would be simply getting on the beast since there were no stirrups hanging from the shapeless lump of felt that served as a saddle. The trick was to launch the left foot straight on to the felt and then push yourself up with a long stick, later to be used to drive the animal and maintain balance. If I’d been a practicing ballet dancer this would probably have been an undemanding task, but seeing as how I had spent much of the last month sitting on my arse in a vehicle trying to keep warm, the procedure presented problems. When Kiasha leapt into the saddle it looked so easy. The first time I tried it, I inevitably fell flat on my back. When the snow broke my fall it was the first time I truly appreciated the stuff.
Docile and uncomplaining, the reindeer just stood there awaiting my next attempt. With a great shove from Kiasha, I made it onto its back. ‘Sit forward,’ Olga said as I settled into the saddle. I edged a little further towards the towering antlers. ‘Further,’ she urged. My nose came within a matter of millimetres of the furry horns. ‘Yes,’ she called. I was sitting on the animal’s neck. ‘You lean forward to balance,’ Olga added, a piece of advice that seemed like madness because if I leant any further forward I’d be impaled on the antlers. ‘OK?’ Kiasha asked me with his thumb up in anticipation. ‘OK,’ I replied, lying fluently.
He showed me how to drive: a pull on the rein to turn right, a tap on the muzzle with the stick for left. Kiasha warned me not to poke the stick in the reindeer’s eye. Moving was a simple matter of kicking with my heels, like on a horse. If that sounds like I have ridden horses before, it’s misleading. I have, but only twice in my entire life and one of those occasions had been in Mongolia where ‘ridden’ is not the appropriate word. If I remember correctly, the longest I stayed in the saddle was about four seconds.
So it was with no small degree of trepidation that I set off. It felt like riding a cow, an unhurried and stately pace that was only interrupted when Rudolph decided his head needed a shake, which he did while bending his neck down towards the ground. I don’t know how I stayed in the saddle but I think it was something to do with the fear of putting my eyes out on his antlers.
The remainder of the day passed in a blur and not just because I had removed my glasses before mounting the reindeer on the advice of Kiasha. In fact, my eyesight seemed to me significantly improved in the cold air if that is medically possible.
The reindeer moved in their hundreds yet as one flowing whole save for the occasional splinter group that was soon absorbed back into the herd. I impressed myself by maintaining my perch and actually managed to provide some minor assistance in driving the herd, although Kiasha did most of the work, backed up by the dog and Petya who brought up the rear on his sled. The dog was easily the fastest to move across the snowscape, and continually dashed back and forth in response to Kiasha’s whistles, to cut off stragglers and keep the herd moving.
We drove them across a frozen lake where the sound of their hooves on the ice was that of a gale through trees, and up a snowy bank where the air reverberated with the clacking of horn against horn. When we finally reached the tent I flaked out, exhausted and aching all over but especially in the legs, renewing my acquaintance with muscles I’d forgotten I owned. That night, I had no trouble at all in sleeping.
I like to think of myself as adaptable and I was pleased with my performance on the reindeer drive. I had managed to stay outside for most of the day without freezing to death and for me that was a significant achievement. The concentration needed to stay on board my reindeer was part of the explanation, as were the rare moments when I could sit and gaze across the valley in wonderment at Nature’s splendour. But I also felt that I’d adapted to the cold in some rudimentary fashion.
Rudimentary it was, however, because at the same time the weather was getting to me after a month in Siberia. Everything was so relentless: the cold, the constant eating, and the daily ritual of pulling on so many clothes. Prior to the reindeer drive I had started to wake up in the mornings longing for the day when I could walk out of the hut wearing just shirtsleeves. The conditions were grinding me down. Everything was such an effort. I felt as if I’d been to the edge and looked over, but I wasn’t going to cross. The prospect of spending an entire winter in Siberia was unimaginable. If I had to do it, I probably could, but in my heart of hearts I knew that I could only do so by mimicking the behaviour of Chris, the Australian at Nezhdaninskoye. I’d be in bed by 8 o’clock every evening and would refuse all visitors until I felt ready. This might not be until springtime.
One day during our drive along the Road of Bones to Oymyakon, I had asked Andrei what Siberia was like during the summer. ‘It is very hot and much of the taiga is marshy,’ he told me, ‘then the mosquitoes come out. They are very good at biting. This part of Yakutia also receives swarms of giant insects in some years.’ ‘What sort of insects?’ I asked him. He paused. ‘They are like grasshoppers …’ he said finally, ‘…only flying.’ ‘Locusts?’ ‘Yes, locusts.’
I told Andrei that in my opinion Siberia ranked as the most hostile environment on Earth. ‘The whole place is frozen solid for eight months of the year thanks to the lowest temperatures in the world, then it gets too hot and turns into a swamp with swarms of mosquitoes and plagues of locusts!’ Andrei just smiled, obviously unconvinced at my assessment. Later he told me that of all the extreme places I was visiting he thought that Siberia must be the one that was easiest to live in. We agreed to disagree on this point.
Yet, despite its drawbacks, Siberia was still a magical wilderness and I couldn’t help feeling how unfair it was that it was so inextricably linked in the European mind with exile and hardship, a land of woe symbolized by unutterable suffering. Misery and torment there had been, of course, on an unrivalled scale, and my soul had felt it on the Road of Bones. But the landscapes along that sorry trail had also been awe-inspiring, and somehow the reindeer herders’ valley had taken me beyond awe. The stars at Oymyakon had been brilliant, but here they were better. I had marvelled at the otherworldly silence heard elsewhere in the taiga, but here it was more so. I tried to think of words to express it, but failed. I just drank it in instead. Siberia had surpassed herself. I felt that I had truly penetrated her heart and found a wonderful place.
But it was still cold, and I was glad to be going home.
D R I E S T
A r i c a
C h i l e
O N E
Don Cecilio lost his hand when he was hit by lightning as a child. The shock of the strike put him into a coma for three days. In a sense, he was lucky. He might never have regained consciousness. Had this happened in Europe, Don Cecilio would have been forever relegated to a position of pity. He’d just be another cripple who couldn’t hold his knife and fork properly. But it’s not like that in South America.
For three days and three nights, his mother sat by his bedside and watched anxiously as her son wrestled with the visions that were floating through his mind. When eventually he came to, he was a different boy from the one who was caught out in the Puna by a rare thunderstorm. He awoke with the power of foresight, and so began his career as a soothsayer and shaman for the village of San Pedro de Atacama.
I had arrived in San Pedro in a small aeroplane that flew low over the high-altitude desert. This was the elevated section of the Atacama, the world’s driest desert, here known as the Puna de Atacama after the local name for altitude sickness. Approaching the Andes in the earl
y morning, the mountains had seemed at first like clouds on the horizon, but soon materialized as a series of brown peaks with snowy summits, that looked as if someone had painted them white so that passers-by wouldn’t trip over them in the dark. Down below, the arid landscape was the closest in reality I’d seen to pictures of Mars. The desert was coloured with a palette of terracottas, browns and burnt siennas. It was red and dead, with not a tree, or bush, or blade of grass in sight. The airstrip we landed on was just that, a ribbon of tarmac on a gravel plain with a limp windsock and nothing else, at all.
San Pedro exists in this desolate terrain because it is on a river, the Lican, which rises in the foothills of the Andes and peters out in one of the many salt lakes that puncture the landscape of northern Chile. But green though the village was, it couldn’t totally escape its barren surrounds, its baked mud streets and adobe houses respiring dust in the desert sun. My consultation with Don Cecilio took place one evening as a dry wind was getting up to blow in from the Puna, adding a slightly spooky edge to my sense of expectation. I had decided to confer with Don Cecilio about my passage down from the highlands, across the Atacama to Arica, the driest city on Earth. I was keen to learn what I should expect from my journey, but my enthusiasm was tempered by consternation at the possibility that the soothsayer might prophesy bad luck. As I made my way to Don Cecilio’s house beyond the village street lights, clutching my offerings in kind – a bottle of pisco, the local firewater, and a packet of cigarettes – I was wrestling with the pros and cons of the man’s part-time profession.
Going to Extremes Page 7
