This material is very close and interesting to me because I'm a professional hunter and outfitter in the past. I feel as if I'm walking next to the participants of the events described, when I read it.
January 16, 2010
Valery Yankovsky
It was the opinion of the famous hunter and writer about the book, the materials of which he helped to edit the author.
The author tells about the trials and adventures that he had to go through with his clients - hunters from Russia and other countries, the book is written in the form of travel notes. He also describes the beauty of nature in the vast expanses of our Homeland and the mountain ranges of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The book gives an idea of the outfitter profession, which the vast majority of the population of Russia has not even heard of, and reveals the inner world of people who have chosen this hard and risky work.
The book will be interesting not only for hunters, but also for travelers and nature lovers.
Below is one of the first articles of the book, which can be purchased through the Internet.
PROFESSION - OUTFITTER
I told myself in my hearts and did it a thousand times, cursing everything in the world during the next crossing in the Sayan Mountains when my arms and legs were torn to blood by acacia, or after I spent a week on mountain passes sitting in the saddle of a horse or when I was spending nights in a tent in the snow in wet clothes, suffocating from hypoxia in the Pamirs. It was your last trip. Just stay at home and forget about it. And then there are hunters who are like ballast.
Then I reproached myself for such a short-term weakness once again and walked through snow, rocky, mountain ranges!
It is long overdue to tell about our profession. It is not highlighted anywhere, and we do not have a professional holiday, but we work and get great pleasure from our work, what is probably a rarity at the moment. This term outfitter is not mentioned in modern explanatory dictionaries in the sense how it has already been fixed for those people who organize and conduct activities related to being outside (OUT-...) premises, buildings. This definition is applied to the organizers of the hunt, although initially the word OUTFITTER came from the English language and referred to the supplier of equipment, uniforms. But this term has acquired a much more serious and very definite meaning among hunters than simply providing people with equipment.
There is a profession of a hunter, zoologist, lawyer, ornithologist, hunter-trapper, taxidermist, translator, psychologist. So, our professional activity includes all of them together and a lot of other little things that the outfitter must know in order to do our work efficiently. I think that the reader has already realized that we are talking about those people who are professionally engaged in organizing people's leisure activities in the open air (or simply in nature). We are also called outfitters, especially when the main activity is hunting tourism.
A simple Russian man in the street (especially in the early 90s) has a peculiar idea of our activities. Many people think that we sit in offices, then go somewhere, for a change, to Kamchatka or Tajikistan, and then we just count the "crisp" bills. It makes no sense to prove something to such people. But recently, the people appeared, even among my friends and acquaintances, who began to understand the complexity of that work began.
Revealing were the words of one of my friends, who was a witness of how I was insuring the permit for the importation of rifles from Germany to Russia in the customs office at the airport Domodedovo.
"You can go crazy from such work!". And I replied him. "You've only seen one hundredth of the iceberg that we have to do in this work!” Therefore, I would like to finally give at least some information about who we are - outfitters.
Let's start with the side that is in full view of everyone. Let's start with a formal suit with a hunting style, and a booth at the Hunting Show in Moscow or Dortmund. The difficult work of developing a pricing policy for each hunting region, for each trophy animal, for the development of transport routes lies behind the external conviviality and pomp of such events. You should take into account that basically the companies offer from 10 hunting programs and more, then you can imagine the organizational work that an outfitter company is forced to carry out before the start of the sales season.
It is necessary to closely monitor the pricing policy of your partners and competitors, in order to work successfully in the market so that it does not happen that the clients will not go to you because of high prices. Or not to lower the price for a hunting tour to such a limit, beyond which it already becomes unprofitable. Everyone has their own tricks in the field of pricing. Someone works at lower prices and higher sales volumes; other outfitters work at a higher level of service and corresponding prices.
The participation in foreign Shows, require large amounts of money to pay for the booth, you should pay to print brochures, pay transportation costs, etc. Many hunting companies, to whom we send clients, do not know how much such events cost us and that we inevitably have to cover these costs. Otherwise, the meaning of work is lost.
The work at the exhibition looks simply but it has a certain exhausting shade. Just imagine that we should communicate sometimes only in a foreign language (sometimes in two foreign languages) with people who have a desire to go hunting and do it for three to six days in a row. For a example, a hunter wants to go to hunt for an ibex in Kyrgyzstan. But he had not been in the mountains, had not ridden a horse and had not climbed higher than a shooting tower in Germany before that. At the same time, he claims that he is in excellent physical shape and can climb, if not Everest, then Mont Blanc for sure. You should need to explain him at what altitude and in what conditions the hunt takes place, what clothes should be taken with him. Unfortunately, it happens that a person cannot move at an altitude of about 3000-4000m even after such stories! The physical fitness of some hunters is too far behind the benefits of civilization. Not many hunters can walk well in the taiga in Siberia or on the tundra in Yakutia. I don't talk about mountain hunting for ibex and sheep. There were several situations when hunters form Germany and Austria, which are famous for their hunting traditions, came to capercaillie hunting in clothes that gave it away with their noise even on the approach to capercaillie's place.
I want to say that our work is individual and takes place from 9 am to 6 pm every day. By the evening, the voice drops significantly, the dust causes a pain in the eyes. The head is spinning from the large mass of people constantly moving in front of the booth, which is a problem with concentration. You come to the hotel in the evening after such a day and, just fall off your feet. But that work together with Western partners helps our customers to know us better. People have more confidence in us and their Western company when they can see and talk to a representative of the Russian side, who will organize the hunt and accompany them throughout the route. Some hunters come to us only if I personally accompany them. The fact is that it is necessary to issue a whole package of documents in order to register the arrival of a hunter in Russia for hunting. Our legislative framework contradicts common sense and logic in many matters.
Registration of documents for the import of hunting weapons and customs formalities at airports, registration of veterinary and other permits for the export of trophies and many other details of trips just sometimes plunges our hunters into a light prostration. And when they see how we regulate all of these problems, many of them imbued with great respect for us immediately and forever and sometimes hold on to us, like children for their mother. If you are also present directly at the hunting camp and help them to pass a difficult hunting route, then your authority becomes simply indisputable!
Our main market over the past 20 years has been mainly made up of foreign hunters, that's why many of my colleagues have tried to master foreign languages, at least one. Some can communicate in two or even three languages. I am fluent in English and German. I can explain myself in Italian. Knowledge of foreign languages helps to avoid many ridiculous situations in operational work on the route.
So, the Show season is over. What’s next? The painstaking work on the preparation of the hunting tours comes next. It includes voluminous correspondence on the coordination of hunting areas, transfers, flight formulas. When this is agreed, we begin to draw up documents for the arrival of hunters. It's a separate story, and we will not touch on it in detail this time. In February-March, the groups are formed for the spring hunting of grouse, grouse and bears.
We will still have to dwell separately on those "problems" that our authority does for us periodically.
Our all-knowing apparatchiks has decided on restructuring the organizational structure of hunting management in Russia in in late 2004 and early 2005 and "threw the baby out with the bathwater"! It seemed to them that the ecological expertise, which approves quotas for the seizure of wildlife objects was not carried out by the wrong people. They forgot to establish a state body in the regulatory documents, that controls the conduct of the ZMU (winter route accounting). And they did not find anything better but NOT OPEN the spring bear hunting in the Far East of the country.
And most importantly that the culprit for all that mess didn't be found. The result of that action was:
1. People in Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Magadan and other regions of Russia had been left without work and means of livelihood for the next six months. Hunting farms in these regions are focused on seasonal work on the organization of hunts and they have nowhere else to earn money at this time!
2. The authority of Russia as a state that is not able to bear responsibility for its actions before its citizens and before foreign firms has been undermined once again.
3. That situation damaged the reputation of our outfitting firms. It turned out as if it was our fault before our partners in the West and their customers. Is there even a little bit of our fault in this? Absolutely not. But we were responsible for everything, spent a decent amount of money on an advertising campaign and invested money in organizing spring hunts.
We were the first who sounded the alarm about the violation of the basic rights of hunting users but not the hunting users themselves. And we did not receive any special support from the hunting companies at that moment. It can be seen that Russian people have stereotypes of the kind that "All this is useless!” "It won't work anyway!". It looks like a disease of respectability, which manifests itself in inadvertently not answering the officials in power. I dare to assure that it will work out if we try to get the authority to think first and then do it.
Such a situation is just one example of the difficulties of our work. A separate issue is the importation of weapons by foreign citizens for hunting on the territory of Russia. The state services tried for a long time to shift responsibility for the private property of an individual to us, as legal entities. Such paradox exists because of the shortcomings of the regulatory framework in the Law on Weapons, orders and instructions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, a permit for the import of weapons was issued for a specific hunter, to whom the weapon belonged.
But when we did achieve to change that absurd situation after 20 years, we were introduced a new restriction. I can talk about this for a long time, but don't want to pay too much attention to such issues on these pages.
In addition to this legislative casuistry, some policeman who does not know his own regulatory documents intends begins to check our visas, documents for the import of weapons, or even more interestingly, veterinary documents for trophies. The statistics of our work are such that there has not been a single case of the use of imported hunting weapons for illegal purposes for 15 years of active activity in the field of hunting tourism. But we know about many armed attacks, which have been committed during this time with the use of Russian standard military weapons?! About 24,000 citizens of Russia die every year from conflicts on domestic soil from axes, hammers, frying pans and other household utensils. From 25,000 to 30,000 citizens die in car accidents every year. And how many people are injured. But no one imposes restrictions on the use of axes or personal vehicles.
Many citizens of our country have no idea what a socially significant burden an outfitter sometimes performs to protect the authority of our country. Often, we find ourselves on the edge of an invisible front in the battle for the prestige of the country. It happens when hunters come to us with a certain negative attitude, artfully warmed up by media in the West. They are prejudice from the very beginning. They say that our President is a dictator, who threatens the entire "civilized" world. And people in Russia are unable to govern their own country.
And we work as the bridge between our countries, and try to dispelled the informational and moral ignorance of some people just right in the course of a hunting tour. Once we had to make a stop near the Beslan school, while in North Ossetia, where I showed and told Hungarian hunters what happened here and how. Who sponsored those monsters who encroached on the most sacred thing in life - CHILDREN. They knew practically nothing about it at home.
I know several foreign hunters who have been living in Russia for many years for some reason but refuse to understand Russia and people. The amazing thing is that, they all strive to get to us again and again to hunt. And I hope that our work as outfitters helps to change their attitude and contributes to this to a large extent. Sometimes hunters change their attitude to our country and people, if they sincerely want to understand the essence of what is happening. So we often act as professional diplomats, and carry the spirit of peacefulness and enlightenment peculiar to our people.
When the clients arrive, we meet them at the airport and go to the hunting grounds. The law obliged us for a long time to accompany weapons imported by foreign hunters. So if someone thought that we could be sent the hunters to the Altai Mountains, Kurgan or Kamchatka and then sleep peacefully, then he is deeply mistaken.
The day of arrival is also the day of departure to the hunting area. Usually, it happens in the second part of the day. Departure is closer to night. A flight takes from two to nine hours over the expanses of our vast Homeland or beyond its borders to Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan.
For example, we arrive in Barnaul. We should get a gun and then drive by car or by bus and it can also take from 7 to 12 hours of travel to the hunting camp. We have a little rest there and then ride by horses or float by boats to the hunting area during the next day.
The flight formula when hunting moose in Yakutia looks something like this. Moscow-Yakutsk - 6 hours flight. The connect flight in Yakutsk. We change the plane to AN-24 and another three hours of flight. After arrival to the place we change the plane to the helicopter and another 1.5 hours of flight by rotorcraft. After 10.5 hours of flight we find ourselves above the Arctic Circle in the Yakut tundra in an 8-hour time zone difference. Sometimes the body does not understand what it needs to do, rest or stay awake. But all this is just statistics. This is a separate conversation what happens next. The expedition is planned with the utmost precision, and even the slightest deviation or delay can disrupt the successful conduct of the hunt.
It is worth noting the organization and conduct of mountain hunts. One way to the camp, located at an altitude of 3,000 m to 4,500 m, takes from 7-8 hours to 1.5 days. There are enough adventures while traveling to the camp. One day in 1999, I had to accompany an American hunter to hunt Marco Polo sheep to the Pamirs. We drove for two days. from Dushanbe to the camp by UAZ 452. The reason was a new road along the Afghan border along the Panj River. We were constantly checked by some military of childish age and slightly taller than the famous AKM, which, hanging from their fragile shoulders, dragged along the ground. The whole check at the posts was reduced to the request for cigarettes, or some sharply smelling muck and it happened 42 times throughout the route. They called it "nasvai". It is used instead of smoking tobacco in the east, and the locals put it under the tongue After our escorts gave them, what they asked, we could continue on our way. The locals warned us not to get out of cars in open places and not take pictures, because somebody can shoot from the Afghan side, taking the camera lens for the sight of a sniper rifle. The times were turbulent.
Once we got stuck in the mountains, unable to share the road with oncoming cars, and we had to take the UAZ back, I stopped the driver so as not to fall into the abyss. Suddenly a few seconds later a boulder the size of half a car flew from above half a meter from the back of our car. I'm still grateful to heaven that we didn't let him drive an extra half meter. At last, on the second day we stopped in a mountain valley in pitch darkness in the Pamir mountains, at an altitude of about 4,000 m, because the local guide could not orient himself and take us to the camp.
The temperature overboard was - 20 s. Dizziness and nausea in the first days of staying at altitude was a normal phenomenon, but it was perceived differently after two days of such a journey.
Next should follow the hunt for the most prestigious trophy – the Marco Polo sheep. But sometimes you don't want anything after two days of such a road and being at such a height. You walk 100 meters from the dining room to your house with two stops. You have to constantly run to the toilet, because moisture flows out of you like from a cracked vessel. At the same time, you must constantly make up for this loss and drink a lot of fluids to restore the water balance in hypoxia. You shouldn't move abruptly until the adaptation is over. Any sudden movements lead to a sharp change in the activity of the heart and respiratory organs. You feel like you're being squeezed by a vise from the inside. If you are negligent about your health in these conditions, you are provided with altitude sickness. The consequences are as follows: severe heart failure; pulmonary edema (at this stage there is a chance to survive); brain edema, when nothing will help you anymore.
The reader may ask, how do I know all this? A real outfitter should be well informed about what can happen in different climatic conditions. I have studied this issue a lot and have gone through certain stages of this disease myself!
But, sometimes after going through all this stages, the hunters and I have few opportunities to make a full-fledged hunt due to bad weather conditions, which is not uncommon in the mountains. Sometimes we have to come back empty after going all this way. Fortunately, it happens extremely rarely.
Another challenge that has to be overcome there is riding horses in mountainous terrain. We organize such hunts in the Altai Mountains, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.
We have nothing to do in the mountains without horses, if the hunter is not in a good physical form. Horses in the mountains are special. They are very hardy and walk well in the mountains. They help a lot. There are enough impressions for a long time when you sit in the saddle for 5-7 days in a row from 5 am to 5-6 pm. Once in Kyrgyzstan, we climbed on horseback on a slippery rock to a height of more than 4,800 meters in search of sheep. This is the height of the highest mountain of the Alps - Mont Blanc! In Tajikistan, we had to climb even higher when we're chasing the beast, although this word didn't suit for a slow ascent, to a height of more than 5,000 meters.
There are other problems with horses. The worst thing for a horse is to get a hoof into a groundhog's hole. Then the horse may hurt its leg and you will have to walk back to the camp. But the most dangerous thing is when you fly over its head forward when the horse stumbles. If your foot get stuck in the stirrup, and you are guaranteed very serious problems. One of my colleagues in Kazakhstan got hit by a horse that dragged her about 500 meters over rocks. She was in the hospital for a long time after that. I was a little «luckier» in the same situation. The horse just crushed my legs pretty badly, without damaging the internal organs. But I still remember her hooves whistled near my head, which I covered with my hands. I was saved by my backpack with photo and video equipment and our guide, Beschen, who was there in time and restrained the horse with great difficulty. The second guide, who knew the seriousness of the situation, was ready to shoot the horse with a carbine.
I will briefly tell you what other difficulties I had to overcome during my work.
I hiked 10-15 kilometers a day in half a slope of mountains with two backpacks and a carbine at a temperature of +25-30 C in the absence of sufficient water.
The special place takes the horse crossings in the mountains for 20-40 km per day from 4 to 7 days. I remember the riding horses through a snowy pass at a depth of 1.5 meters of snow cover. I should to mention about the night in a light tent in the snow at a temperature of - 15 C in the complete absence of clothes corresponding to winter conditions.
Even waiting for a bear for 6-8 hours on a very light sitting in Siberia in the spring will not seem like a simple entertainment. Waiting for animal the same 6-8 hours in winter on the shooting tower at a temperature of - 20-25 C will seem like a great test of willpower and the whole body.
You can ask me, why do you have to sit? The hunter cannot know which board is large and trophy size for the definite area so that it can be shot. The local hunters look at you as an oddball sometimes when you tell them about the need to be together with a client, though they receive the bulk of the money from the hunting tour.
The outfitters in Russia are those people who were the first to instill in the local population the culture of real trophy hunting. Statements like: "And why do they come to shoot deer in "my" lands? I'm hunting here and I don't care about nobody", - I often heard especially from tipsy aborigines in Khakassia, Tuva, and the Altai Mountains. Fortunately, the bulk of local hunters began to understand that commercial trophy hunting is not only way to get meat, but decent earnings too. But it took many years to bring this idea to the consciousness of local guides. It cost us many "failed" tours, and most importantly - undermining the reputation, which is more expensive for us than money!
Recently, already in 2017, I had to hear such a phrase addressed to my profession. "The main thing for outfitters is to have as many clients as possible!". Obviously, the author of this statement was referring to the flow of customers, in order for us to make a big profit. He omitted the main meaning of our work - to do the work efficiently. The author of the statement confused the outfitter with a clientele like in the travel company.
Our reputation is formed, which is much more expensive for us than any money, is from the high quality of work. Not many people realize that only one hunter out of 3-4 willing to take part in the expedition, goes with us to the mountains, because it often happens that many of them cancel the trip after a detailed description of what he can expect in the mountains, many are aware that they simply will not get such a hunt both mentally and physically.
Some hunters almost cry with such heavy loads, without calculating their strength, others are silent, bend their heads low, unable to squeeze out a word. It happened that I was told that they were just dying I always look into the client's eyes in such cases. Everything is written there. ( but you should read it). Do you remember how the referee behaves in the boxing ring. He looks into the eyes of a boxer sent to a knockdown. The "muddy" look speaks of the inability to continue the fight. I have seen such a look from clients. Then you don't think about hunting, but about saving the hunter himself. The first help includes urgent rest if it's needed, water and dried fruits, especially dried apricots. It was dried apricots that helped me to bring one client to the camp in the evening in pitch darkness after a whole day's journey (about 20 km) in 30-degree heat in the mountains. It happened in 90s, we haven't had sports nutrition on free sale, which I can now use effectively in such situations.
The local guides also provide us with great help in such difficult situations. But I would like to tell you about them separately. I would like to note the statements of the guides that sometimes we and our clients walk along such routes and in such conditions that some employees of the special forces who come to them to hunt cannot move. Though they had to hunt with such specialists.
One more duty of the outfitter is to control the process of how the taken trophy would be prepared for transportation. Unfortunately, the hunting staff still does not know everywhere how to skin an animal properly and how to preserve it, not to mention the specifics of the requirements of veterinary services in different countries. Here again we have to roll up our sleeves, pick up a knife and help the guides. I had to prevent outright spoiling of the trophy several times. It's another important point, for which our partners and customers respect us.
Our work is impossible without a good knowledge of hunting weapons and their compliance with the conditions of the intended hunt and the stopping ability of the cartridge relative to the beast that is being hunted. We should give advice on choosing the caliber and type of bullet for a more successful hunt. This experience comes over the years and from the practice of hunting.
The hunter's equipment and clothing, especially shoes is the most important point in preparing for any hunt. How to dress and what the weather is like in the hunting area is one of the very first questions that we have to answer to our clients. You could hardly offer the best clothing option for a particular type of hunting without going through all the hunts and having tried several types of equipment on yourself.
Another circumstance without which we cannot work is the ability to determine the quality of the trophy at a distance. It's mainly the work of a guide, but it happens that the guide is young or just inexperienced and you have to take all the responsibility on yourself. We must honestly admit that the local guides sometimes try to expose an animal with clearly undervalued trophy qualities in relation to the price, it's because the of a certain system of trophy payment. Sometimes the huntsman cannot tell at all about the age of the red deer by its "roar" and the approximate weight of the horns by visual assessment, unlike African PH who can tell about the quality of the trophy and the length of the horns with an error of only 1-2 cm. So, we also have to regulate all these issues. And you need to know very well every kind of animal that you organize hunts for to do it.
Imagine our schedule from the beginning of the hunting season in August. Approximately it may look like this. Caucasus, Kurgan, Yakutia, Altai Mountains, Kamchatka, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, Khakassia. All this with a return to the center of Russia every time and with small breaks. Different time and climate zones, weather conditions. Height and pressure differences. Once I calculates how long time i have spent in air in one season from September to February, according to rough estimates, it was more than 100 (!) hours of pure flight time only in the air. In one of the seasons, I flew to the Pamirs three times in 6 months. What health you need to have in order to withstand all this together with the loads on the hunts. We are not accompanied by medical staff. You have to take care of your health and your insurance yourself.
My masseur, with whom I take the course 1 time in 6 months, clicks his tongue every time and is surprised: "How can you clog the muscles of the shoulder girdle, lower back and legs in such a short time?” Although he knows perfectly well what and how I do. These rehabilitation courses are extremely necessary, and if I do not pass it in time, then I can "stand up" somewhere in the middle of the route due to the fact that the muscles will simply be "wooden".
The desire to make video of the results of hunting for advertising purposes developed gradually into an independent direction of my activity. I shoot a lot of nature where we hunt, flowers and wild animals, what is i a separate "photo hunt". And how can I pass by the beauty created by the greatest creator – Nature! Photo hunting is perhaps even more exciting than usual hunting. You have to get much closer to the beast than when hunting with a carbine. A good picture is shot only from a distance of 10-20 meters. I had the good fortune to be at such a distance from the moose in Yakutia; a bear, a roe deer and a maral in Khakassia; a spotted deer in my Vladimir region, a roe deer in Kurgan, a Dagestan tour in North Ossetia (Alania), a Kuban tour and a bear in Adygea. Even experienced Yakut hunters told me, after they saw me 10 meters away from the giant moose, that it was the first time in all their practice that a hunter had approached a moose at such a distance. And it happened in full view of our entire field camp. It became possible thanks to the hunting skills that I acquired in my professional activity.
I approached very cautious turs in the Caucasus by 20 meters, which caused genuine surprise and respect of the mountaineers with whom I was hunting. I bring a lot of photos and videos from each trip. They serve as a good base for my information products in addition to pleasant memories. The ability to present your product well is another component of our work.
It so happened that I did not go on vacation for more than 15 years due to certain circumstances, with such enormous loads. Many of my friends say: "Why do you need a vacation? You already have a rest every time you travel!” And I offer them to join with me along our routes and "relax" in full with me. But none of them has expressed a desire yet.
But I would not have endured so much time without rest if I did not love Nature, animals and my work! Being an outfitter is not just a job - it's a way of life! And it can't be any other way.
