Trekking Through Kamchatka’s Wild
Kolya is the kind of boss that everyone at once pray
s they will have and dreads they will end up with. As a leader he is nearly flawless; knowledgeable, experienced, and deadly calm under pressure. As a teacher, he is all of these things, but also impatient, short-tempered, and sarcastic.
Kolya is the indigenous Even hunter and mountain man who led me, Tatiana Indanova, a PE partner who monitors water quality, two Muscovite botanists, his son Zhenya, and a local friend on a week-long expedition through the Kamchatka wilderness to conduct Indanova’s water quality monitoring project, collect samples of Kamchatka’s flora, and find some escaped reindeer.
From day one, I knew what kind of leader Kolya would be: as we packed our belongings into our saddlebags, I found myself standing around, unsure how to pack and not wanting to get in the way. As Kolya packed some of my things, he stopped for a moment to pull off his jacket. “Too hot?” I asked, hoping to strike up a conversation. “Yeah,” he replied with a grin, but looking me dead in the eyes, “because I’m not just standing around.” I still chuckle when I remember how he scolded his son’s friend for pulling in a net too slowly: “Pull harder, dammit, you’re not undressing a girl!”
But Kolya’s decisiveness and skill showed through during the middle of the trip when, as we searched for two missing reindeer at a high alpine pasture, a bear with two cubs crested a hill and started running toward us. Kolya quickly sent us running. He then loaded a round into his ancient shotgun, raised it, and put the bullet about a foot in front of the bear, which was less than fifty yards in from him. Within a moment the bear had turned tail, and Kolya was walking towards us, smoking a cigarette and looking for all the world like he had just walked off the set of the next Clint Eastwood western.
What most impressed me about Kolya was his attitude towards the environment. Kolya had no interest in talking to me about conservation, and never asked me about my work. He saw the wilderness as a challenge, not a place that needs to be coddled, but he exercised more common sense in his approach to conservation than even the most new age California backpacker. One night Zhenya and I spotted a huge Chinook salmon in our net. We pulled the fish out and ran with it back to camp. Everyone was impressed, except for Kolya, who asked if we had removed the net from the river. “No,” we answered, surprised. “Well what the [expletive] do we need more [expletive] fish for?” he demanded. Within moments, Zhenya and I were back out on the river, pulling the net in. Later, one night when we were all tired of rice and porridge, we began dreaming of the reindeer that the mother bear had chased away from us. I commented that Kolya should have killed the bear instead. The room grew uncomfortably quiet, setting me up for the punch line. Kolya stared at me, no humor in his eyes, and said “Evan, she had cubs.” “I know,” I responded, “but imagine how good they would have tasted!” Everyone laughed, but I sensed the severity of my comment – killing a mother bear, even a potentially dangerous one, was almost as unthinkable as killing a human mother. If everyone could use such simple, common sense approaches to conservation, then the world’s environmentalists, including myself, would be searching for work.
Tags: community partners, environment, Indigenous Life, Kamchatka, Russia, Russian Far East
