Authors: Farley Mowat
When the last marchers had passed the praesidium there was a concerted rush for the city hall bar; but Claire and I
and Kola wanted only to get back to the hotel. As we parted from Moisie Efrimov, he called out an invitation for us to join him and his wife for a little snack later on.
Moisie’s flat was, by Russian standards, a big one. There was a combined living room and dining room, lined with books, into which two huge tables had somehow been manoeuvred end-to-end; there was also a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. The “snack” turned out to be a full-fledged family party, and the other guests, all Yakut and about twenty in number, had already assembled. The men wore smartly cut suits in which they looked surprisingly debonair, and their sloe-eyed ladies were gaily dressed and elaborately coiffured.
By the time we arrived most of the men were crowded into one of the bedrooms playing cards upon the twin beds, while the women hustled back and forth between kitchen and dining room bearing plates piled high with Yakut culinary specialities. Moisie was soon called away from the game to prepare one of the more exotic dishes,
stroganina
, and he invited Claire and me to watch how it was done.
He produced an entire frozen fish about three feet long, stood it on its nose and with a razor sharp knife began slicing slivers off it exactly as one might peel shavings from a log of wood.
Claire was somewhat aghast when Moisie thrust a sliver into her mouth, but she got it down somehow and, after a thoughtful pause (during which I quite expected her to bring it up again) admitted that it was excellent. The fish, called
chir
, was a rather fatty, white-fleshed species from the arctic coast especially flown to Yakutsk for the holiday feast. The thin slivers seemed to dissolve in the mouth, leaving a rich, nutty flavour.
The guests were eventually herded into the dining room, crowding it far beyond its ordinary capacity; but that only made things cosier. The table had to be seen to be believed. Gleaming bottles almost obscured the vast array of food. There was French brandy, Armenian
cognac, half-a-dozen kinds of vodka, grain alcohol, Polish, Hungarian and Georgian wines, and a large bottle of champagne between every pair of guests.
The food was as varied and as lavish. Several teen-age daughters of the guests acted as waitresses. The main dishes included cold, boiled cuts of young foal, hot mare’s-blood sausages, hot marinated beef, roast chicken, horsemeat salami, stroganina, wild rabbit soup and pickled fish. The table was also loaded with side dishes of black and red caviar, Kamchatka crab meat, pickled mushrooms, smoked sausage and some ominous looking things that may have been strips of pickled rawhide.
The eating and drinking lasted three hours and there were toasts on the average of one every five minutes. Poor Kola soon began to fail under the strain of trying to eat and drink with the rest of us while at the same time having to translate in three languages. The toasts got more and more sentimental and we sang sad Russian songs, wild Yakut chants, and lugubrious Newfoundland ditties, until, carried away by the applause which greeted my rendition of “Lukey’s Boat Is Painted Green,” I essayed an imitation of the bag-pipes and discovered I had hit upon an act which was to bring me fame throughout northeast Siberia. My imitation piping (particularly the “Pibroch of Donald Dhu”) roused such a response that I predict an absolutely smashing success for any real piper who may care to try his art in the highlands of Yakutia.
Before the meal was over Kola surprised us by fainting dead away. A doctor was called upon to revive him with spirits of ammonia while the rest of us pried our swollen bellies away from the table and adjourned to one of the bedrooms for a little dancing. Moisie owned a big, flashy record player but alas, it would only play 45 r.p.m. and all his records were of the 33 r.p.m. variety. This made but little difference. The room was so crowded we could only move vertically. We jumped up and down to the
weirdly speeded-up music, doing what seemed to be a Yakut version of the bunny hop. When that finally palled, three of the men sang to us. They boomed out the ancient nomad songs of their people with power enough to shake the building and they succeeded, where the doctor had failed, in bringing Kola bolt upright in bed, wild-eyed and quivering.
I must admit that I did not have any deep and meaningful conversations during this party. Whatever I may have learned about the people of Yakutia was accomplished purely by osmosis. I am not at all sure this isn’t the best way.
Y
AKUTSK
is not Yakutia. Though it is their capital city, and they are proud of it, the allegiance the Yakut give to the taiga is greater than any man can give to a world of concrete and asphalt.
One September evening I arrived in Yakutsk after a flight from Moscow to be greeted by Moisie Efrimov, Simeon Danielov and Nikolai Yakutsky. They were in boisterous spirits as we drove to the hotel.
“The rabbits have come back!” Nikolai told me excitedly. “It is the peak year and they are in the taiga in their thousands. Are you very tired? If not we will go to the taiga in the morning and spend the day there.”
“Yes, and the night too, and the next day … if the vodka lasts,” Ivan added, laughing.
At dawn a hunting party of half a dozen men came for me. Gone were the dapper literary gentlemen I had known. Fur hats, skin boots, and bandoliers packed with cartridges had transformed them into a robust troop of forest dwellers who might have been resurrected from one of their own epic legends. We drove out beyond the city, across the broad flood plain of the Lena into the encroaching forest.
In spring and summer the Siberian forest is known as the Blue Taiga, because of the smokey blue-green hue imparted to it by the dominant larch trees. After the first frosts, it becomes the Golden Taiga as the larch needles
take on the colour of honey amber. In September the endless roll of the larch forest begins to glow with a lambent light, given texture by black swaths of pines and defined by the slim white lines of birches.
We drove to a park-like stretch of pines. Nikolai armed me with a double-barrelled 12-gauge gun, and we formed a skirmish line under his direction and set out to hunt for supper.
A heavy, wet snow began falling, and we had not gone fifty yards before we were absorbed into a timeless void. Nikolai came over to join me and as we moved together into the depths of his inner world, I recalled some lines from one of his poems.
The taiga is a universe without an end
Those that live within it are the stars
.
Bright stars are the eyes of the beasts
And of the men who walk with the beasts
.
The space between the stars is infinite
For the taiga is a universe without an end
.
This is a true poem. The map of Siberia can give no real concept of the immensity of that land. The taiga alone can give the sensation of illimitable space and distance. It is a somewhat daunting feeling, and it makes men walk softly and speak in subdued tones.
Several times I saw the ghostly forms of snowshoe rabbits bounce through the veil of falling flakes, but I had no desire to shoot at them.
It was late afternoon before we returned to the thin slash of the road. The drivers of our cars had been busy in our absence. A huge fire roared amongst the pines, and suspended over it were pails of tea made from the same sort of tea bricks which for thousands of years were carried by caravans from Asia into Europe. Piled on a sodden newspaper were the ingredients for a hunter’s feast; a red pile of horsemeat together with potatoes, tomatoes, onions, slabs of unleavened bread … and bottles of vodka.
We squatted Indian style around the flames, steam billowing from our soaked clothing, while we cooked hunks of meat alternated between chunks of onions and potatoes, skewered on freshly cut willow rods. The vodka bottles went around from hand to hand and we parboiled our gullets with mugs of boiling hot tea. The snow continued to fall and no one cared.
Fourteen-year-old Peter Danielov, Simeon’s son, squatted opposite me, his wild black hair plastered all over his dark face; immobile, except for the gleam and flicker of his eyes in the firelight. He seemed the epitome of a true forest animal, and it required a considerable effort to see in him a teenage student of our world, already the winner of a major scholarship in mathematics and destined for a career in astrophysics.
After a while Nikolai began telling a hunting story.
When I was a boy of twelve I was hunting with my grandfather. It was winter and we had walked a long way from the village when we came to a thicket where many trees had been uprooted by a great wind. My grandfather stopped and sniffed the air like a dog.
“Ah,” he said, “there is a big fellow sleeping close to here.”
We went into the tangle and found a big mound. A tunnel half-filled with snow led into it.
“Well, boy, here is the bear’s home. He is sleeping deep inside his house. I suppose we must leave him to his sleep for what can one old man and one small boy do against a bear?”
He was challenging me. I took my knife out of my sheath, tested it on my thumb and said:
“What we can do is kill that bear!”
He smiled and put his gun down – it was an old muzzle loader. He took his hatchet and cut a long pole and sharpened one end of it. Then he scrambled up on the mound and shoved the pole downward with all his strength.
“Now I’ve tickled his ribs! Hand me my gun!”
I gave him the gun and he cocked it and pushed the barrel down the hole. It went off with a rumble like an earthquake – then there was a roar that made my skin go tight all over my body. My grandfather scrambled off the mound and we ran back to the edge of the wood while he reloaded his gun.
We waited but there were no more sounds from the house of the bear. After a while my grandfather uncoiled the halter rope he carried around his shoulders and tied a noose in one end of it.
“Now,” he said, “we have another choice. We can go back to the village and get the strong young men to come here tomorrow and pull out that bear, or you can crawl down the tunnel yourself and tie the rope around him so we can pull him out together.”
It was hard to make up my mind. I was very frightened. I asked him to make the decision.
“That I cannot do,” he said. “I am an old man and my life means nothing. You are young and your life means much, but it will mean very little if in the long run you cannot decide when to take risks with it.”
He was telling me I could become a man on this day if I chose. I put the knife between my teeth and took the rope and crawled down the tunnel, pushing the snow out of the way with my shoulders.
It was too dark to see anything. I moved as slowly as I dared, but I knew if I stopped I would not start again. It stank in that tunnel and I could hardly breathe. There was no sound except the drumming of my blood in my ears.
My hand touched something warm and I died a little. It was the paw of the bear. I lay there in the darkness for a long time and when I came to my senses I was stroking the bear’s paw as if it was the head of a good dog. The paw never moved so I tied the loop around it and crawled out into the daylight. We pulled and we dug and we pulled and we dug for an hour before we got him out. Then we cleaned him and skinned him, and hung the meat in a tree out of the way of the foxes. Finally we put his skull on the end of
a long pole and set it up above his house to honour his spirit and to calm his anger.
Then we went home. I was no longer a boy. I had become a man of the taiga, like all those who had gone before me.
As we drove toward the city that night through the endless cone of swirling snowflakes pinned in our headlights, Nikolai was silent. But when we reached the hotel and I was saying goodnight, he got out of the car and gave me a tremendous hug.
“Through many hundreds of years the taiga fed us, kept us warm, shaped our lives. It is the home of my people. I am so glad we could take you into the home of the Yakut.”
In most areas of the world the impact of twentieth-century machine culture has shattered earlier and simpler cultures, forcing their people to abandon the old patterns of existence. Fishermen, hunters and small agriculturalists have either suffered a traumatic transformation into industrial workers, or they have been left to huddle on pathetic remnants of their own lands, despised and scorned for their inability to realize that the ways of industrial man are the God-given ways pointing to the heaven of ultimate progress.
Yakutia seems to be something of an exception. Leonid Popov, son of a horse breeder from the Namcy region, and a fine Yakut writer, gave me this description of what took place amongst his people when the industrial revolution came to Yakutia.
“At that time the remaining Yakut lived dispersed in small groups, often at great distances from one another. Our houses were mostly domed felt tents called
yurti
. In winter we travelled through the forest paths on foot or astride our ponies, and in summer we rowed our boats upon the moving waters. We were often out of physical
touch with one another, but we were still one people although our ranks were sadly thinned.
“We had small herds of cattle, of horses and, in some areas, of reindeer. We cut hay in the natural meadows around the taiga lakes. There was trapping for fur and hunting for wild meat. Nevertheless, these things did not sustain us as they had sustained our forefathers. We could no longer work as hard as one must work in the demanding taiga. In my father’s time almost everyone had tuberculosis, or some even worse disease, and the Yakut people were perishing.
“Then Soviet Power came to Yakutia. The tax collectors, the merchants, the soldiers, the officials of old Russia were replaced by a different sort of Russian – mostly young men and women who said they had come to help us build a better world for ourselves. At first these newcomers were not trusted. We had learned very well not to trust white men. But they endured our suspicions, and in time we trusted them. I think this came about because they gave us no orders. They did not tell us: ‘You must give up all the old ways and leave the taiga, where men live like animals. You must learn to build cities and factories and learn to live like us.’