"Dmitry, I can't understand! We are flying for several hours, but I don't see any cities under the wing of the plane! None of the lights! Is it possible?” This question was asked many years ago on a clear in the moonlit night, decorated with the light of huge stars from the black haze of cosmic distances, by one of the European hunters with whom I flew to Yakutia to hunt. Such are the expanses of our vast Homeland. That part of it where the Republic of Sakha, or Yakutia, located, is very interesting in terms of historical development and geographical features.
There are many unusual things in its history. Take that fact that Sakha language for instance, belongs to the Turkic group, that also includes Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and Turkmen. But all these peoples live for centuries in the territories located much to the south of the cold Yakut expanses. How and when did the Turkic speaking people got to such harsh Siberian conditions? An unambiguous answer to this question has not yet been received. Sakha is both the self-name of the Yakuts, and the name of their language, that stands apart in the family of Turkic languages. Maybe the permafrost and severe cold affected it so much? Everything is fine with the cold in Yakutia. Meteorologists "staked out" a cold pole near the settlement of Oymyakon in the republic. The officially registered record of sub-zero temperature in this place is 69.9 degrees Celsius. There is the evidence that in some years the thermometer dropped below-to -77 and even to -82 degrees! How people and animals survive in such places will remain a mystery for many, many years.
The main geographical feature of Yakutia for a hunter is the great distance of the republic from the European part of Russia. The only connecting artery for the local people with the "mainland" ( they call so any part of Russia accessible to road transport ) was the treacherous Lena River for centuries. Yakutia lost its inaccessibility only with the development of aviation.
Hello, the land of Sakha!
A hunter from Kazakhstan, Zhaysan Syzdykov, his friend Ilyas and I arrived to Yakutsk at the end of August after a six-hour night flight, during which we did not sleep. A friendly driver Vasily waited for us at the airport. He was medium height, a Siberian with Russian roots and blue eyes, with a slow and very quiet accent, calm as a boa constrictor (in a good way). We received our luggage, sat in the minibus and started a long and, as it turned out, difficult way.
Half an hour later, we were at the crossing of the mighty Lena. It proved with its stormy waters, more than once that Man isn't the master on this earth. Victims, destruction of homes and buildings are repeated regularly during spring floods. That time we saw the Lena in its calm, peaceful state. We had to wait about 40 minutes until the ferry was loaded, and then we were on our way again.
My Kazakh friends were breathtaking from the latitude of the river and the huge mass of water rushing to the Arctic Ocean.
Roads, roads…
In an hour we were already on the other side. The minibus deftly climbed onto a sand-and-gravel embankment and continued its way in an easterly direction along the federal highway, waddling from side to side under the weight of the cargo. At the beginning the road wasn’t quite smooth, but quite a hard surface with asphalt content. But then it finished and the road began from a mixture of sand dust, clay and partly gravel. We were lucky that there was no rain, as Vasily said. The wet road turns into an insidious trough with slush, ready to roll the car into a ditch at any moment. All cars-from small sedans to huge heavy trucks go to the "last way” quite regularly during the rains there. Telling the truth, the entire post-Soviet space is famous for dead roads, but it is difficult to even describe what we had seen and experienced in Yakutia. Vasily was afraid to put a little more pressure on the gas pedal, and we didn’t expect an early arrival to the place. The right-hand drive car (most of the cars there were right-hand drive) was slowly rounding the huge, gaping black depressions in the roadbed, similar to bomb craters, that blocked the path of the accelerating vehicle with enviable persistence.
I wont’ longer bore the reader with a description of our travel adventures with a long wait for ferries and their slow progress through Lena and Aldan, but in the end of the evening in the same day, we arrived to a small Yakut village with the" lyrical " name of Khandyga. We felt how tired we were and that we didn’t sleep well the previous night that's why we discussed the plan for the next day and fell on not comfortable but beds. It seemed that we fell asleep earlier than we touched the pillow.
The next morning, the car took us to the pier, where two "Khivus" were already waiting for us. These hovercrafts are the most optimal solution for traveling in conditions of unstable water levels in the Yakut rivers. Riverbeds often change, and if you were able to climb somewhere on a water jet, then on the way back you may have to look for another way, because the river, with its steep and unpredictable temper, decided to pave a new channel or simply dried up in this place due to the lack of rain. It is not a problem for hovercrafts at all. I has to confess that hasn’t sail on such hovercrafs before. As soon as, we had plunged into the "Hivus" under the roar of its propeller and set off, there was a cognitive dissonance. Everything was clear while we were sailing on open water, but as soon as a shoal loomed ahead, a thought flashed: "That's it, we've arrived!". I was already prepared that we would have to pull this colossus off the river pebbles, what I did more than once when switching to a water jet. NO! It continued to move, gliding calmly along the sandy and rocky spits.
So, we sailed for about two hours, moving up the Aldan to the turn to the Tyra River. This name probably came from the Yakut "tyrin", what means "ice place", or "big ice” It was generally easy to go along the full-flowing Aldan, but after turning to the Tyra, the route became more complicated. Many channels began to appear. It was not an easy matter to know which of these channels should be followed. The river was constantly winding, twisting like a snake. Sometimes it pressed to the steep bank, from which the permafrost protruded. We could see how it sparkled and shimmered with crystals of centuries-old ice, then the river spread over a large area like pancake dough poured from a ladle into a frying pan.
Everyone was a little tired and after a three-hour trip and decided to stop, stretch their legs and have a snack. After the rest, the road seemed much more fun/ At last after a couple of hours we were at the base called "Five Lakes". There was something familiar about the name.
Here was the Russian spirit!
My old partner Andrey Petrov met us there. He was a lean man, slightly above an average height, with surprisingly clear blue eyes. Andrey was the director of the hunting farm, on the territory of which we had to hunt. Life in such remote areas requires from people a lot of knowledge and skills He must be able to do everything from cooking to repairing equipment and processing wood. I'm not saying that he must know very well the habitat of the animal, whether it's a moose, a bear or a reindeer or sheep.
I knew well that Andrey was an extremely soft and responsive person but could tolerate huge physical exertion and was very strong physical. Such are our Siberians, whom foreigners still dream of conquering. They can't even imagine what our people are capable of. Europeans who come to us for hunting are constantly surprised by the physical endurance and strength of spirit of our people!
One of the main problems in such remote places is the provision of transport with fuel. Fuel reserves are made in advance with a large margin for unforeseen situations, which are more the norm than the exception there. Andrey had prepared strategic fuel reserves for that hunt. It was good but we never expect the expected. None of us predicted that the small Tyra River would overflow and wash away the entire small intermediate base with all the buildings and take with it the entire strategic supply of gasoline! Well, this was the way it went in such harsh places.
Hunting.
Nevertheless, Andrey found a way how to solve that problem with fuel, and we continued on our way to the hunting lands. The plan was to sail up the river to a small hunting cabin, to make it an intermediate camp and "fight” from there.
Zhaysan and one of the guides moved to the mountains to try their luck Immediately after arrival. There was a salt lick on the opposite bank and the guides said that sheep came there from time to time.
The team who remained in the camp took up the arrangement. We cooked a modest dinner on the fire, paid tribute to Bayanai and began to wait for the hunter's return.
Zhaysan's trip to the mountains turned out to be fruitless, that was expected. It’d be too easy if he got the trophy in the first day. A good and honorable mountain trophy must be suffered. No one became upset about the first failure. We all spent a good friendly evening and then went to sleep. Some of us accommodated in the cabin like Zhaysan and Ilyas, some in "Khivus". had to spend the night by the campfire. Fortunately, the cold hadn't come yet, and I had all necessary equipment such as an inflatable mat, a good sleeping bag and a blanket from the rain. The only thing that alarmed me was the stories of the locals that the bears were very aggressive there. They wouldn’t ask for permission to visit the camp, but they could come and try to take what they wanted. That's why I had to load and put the carbine next to me. I couldn't say for sure what kind of animal approached the camp at night, but I heard a noise about 30 meters from the place where I was lying. It was creepy, and my night passed not in a dream but in a half-dream. But God took the danger away from us, and everyone woke up in good health in the morning (although not all of us felt quite well because drank too much a night before).
We had a quick breakfast, got ready and moved to the places where we were going to hunt. Andrey suggested to sail up on the "Khivus" along one of the small channels to a high-altitude plateau about an hour's walk from the lodge.
We sailed smoothly, carefully skirting huge boulders and rocks. The channel narrowed more and more and our doubts about the possibility of passing by ship to the hunting place increased. Finally, as they say, we sailed. The "Hivus" ran into insurmountable rocks. But it wasn't the worst part. We were afraid that there was no place to make a U-turn. It was an unpleasant situation. We had no opportunity to go further. And we still needed to be able to turn around. If it was possible we should sail down by the narrow swirling stream on a ship with impressive dimensions and not the best maneuverability at all. It looked dangerous even in the theory. What could we say about the practical side of the matter!
We were able to turn around, just pushing the "Khivus" from rock to rock. I looked into the eyes of our helmsman, who was also the driver and the captain, and asked: “Could we do it?!” He paused, sighed and silently got behind the wheel. I could only hope for... although it was very difficult to understand what to hope for.
We plunged ahead brazenly.
You can guess that we’d been lucky because I sit and write these lines. But it was not quite clear whether we would get out of the trap.
The engine roared, and we went. We rushed off, carried away by the stream through the narrow gap that fate left us. We only hit a rock once. Then we hit to the stones the second, the third and the forth time but could escape and continued to sail. I was holding the camera all that time, leaning out of the hatch of the "Hivus" to the waist. Come what might, if we got out of this trap, there would be exciting shots.
Everyone was quiet and stared intently ahead in the cockpit. The "Khivus" came out on a flat section of the river after a few kicks and jumps from waterfalls between the rocks. So, we could breath a sigh of relief. We got out and were alive! We landed on the shore and, the first thing we did, we drank a good glass of vodka for the successful release from stone captivity and safe return. Our "Khivus" looked like a warship attacked by torpedoes from the starboard side. We could see skinned sides, broken handrails in places.
This chronicle still excite the blood of my relatives and shocks my friends, to whom I show my films.
One more attempt.
The main thing was that they were alive and well. We discussed the current situation and decided to move to another place where sheep could be. It was located a few kilometers from the shoal where we landed. We had to unpack the bags, get dressed according to the weather, load necessary things into running backpacks and get on the road. It was quite difficult with the equipment at that time and in that place, if we keep in mind the absolutely unpredictable weather. It was a cold downpour, then a strong gusty wind blew. Then everything suddenly stopped, and the scorching sun looked out. It seemed as strange, as if we were in the southern latitudes. The heat began to put pressure on us as if you covered by wet-sticky excessively warm blanket. We sweat while walking and couldn’t understand where we were - in the Caucasus or thousands of kilometers to the north, at the very pole of cold?! It wasn't so hot and stuffy when we left the camp. A half an hour had passed and the heat and moisture captured us.
I would like to say a few words about the ground where we were walking. The soil was saturated with water after the torrential rains that happened on the eve of our arrival. There was already permafrost below, just 30 cm away, and the water had nowhere to go. We walked along a small stream, measured the wet ground with our mountain boots, sank ankle-deep in wet clay, and sometimes we sank almost knee-deep in moss. It was the best training for athletes and for those who wanted to lose extra pounds! But we didn't need to lose excess weight. Otherwise, the skeleton will remain from us in a couple of weeks of such campaigns. So that we had to stop more often to rest and catch the breath.
In two hours, we came to a beautiful lake, locked on all sides by old mountain ranges. Several ducks which rested in the calm waters of the lake, took off with a noise almost from under our feet. It was very beautiful!
We rested and had a snack. That hike took a lot of effort, and there was only the unknown ahead.
We sat, discussed the situation and came to the concussion that there was only way back to the river. The ridges where we wanted to get to were still far, and there was a very little chance that we would have time to get there before dark to hunt. And we didn't take any equipment to spend the night and food.
So, we turned around and ... went back to the boat.
( to be continued)
