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One Last, Feeble Attempt
- University of Minnesota Press
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1 one last, feeble attempt I run my fingers down over my face. My cheeks are hollow, and my eyes feel as if they are sinking into my head. After a week without any food at all, I no longer feel the hunger gnawing at my stomach. But my physical strength has been used up long ago. My arms, my chest, and my legs, my entire body is weakened from exhaustion. Every movement takes such an effort that it feels as if I am stuck in a vise. I know it will not be long before I am too weak to hunt. And then we are finished. Ivan is lying rolled up in his sleeping bag on the wooden bunk across from me. He is breathing faintly. Then he is quiet. Is he dead? I listen. No, he is still breathing. Ivan is more severely weakened than I am. He has suffered frostbite in his right foot and can no longer walk. I stare at the empty tin can on the little wooden table where we have put the last of our stock of ammunition. Four cartridges are all that is left. I am overwhelmed by a feeling of utter hopelessness. “How the hell are we going to make it?” I open the cabin door and step outside. The murderous frost immediately makes my lungs contract and my face stiffen like a mask. I pull my wolverine fur cap down around my head and cast a glance out at the taiga, the naked, deserted forest. “What the hell are we going to do?” We have no food and have not seen the shadow of a moose for more than a month. Somewhere in the winter-clad taiga, not far from the cabin, a hungry rogue bear is wandering restlessly about, ready to fall upon us. Map of northeastern Siberia. Drawing by Louise Hilmar. 2 . one last, feeble attempt Yura and the other hunters who were supposed to meet us several weeks ago never showed up. The leader of the Yukaghirs has disappeared with the three hundred sable furs we collected, and the police in Zyryanka have issued an arrest warrant for me. “What the hell are we going to do? . . . What the hell are we going to do?” I repeat to myself, as if my voice is the only thing keeping me from losing control and falling flat on my back from exhaustion and despair. Ivan and I are caught in the taiga—the huge forest area stretching in a broad band across Siberia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Bering Sea in the east, and from the Mongolian steppe in the south to the Arctic Ocean in the north, an area of roughly 4.5 million square miles. There are places here where no human has ever set foot. In reality, this wilderness is the limit to the distribution of human life. With temperatures that can drop to minus 97 degrees Fahrenheit in January, this is the coldest place in the world that is inhabited—albeit sparsely—by people. The cold cuts like a knife through fur clothes and hoods, and just breathing in the air is painful . The ground is always frozen solid, covered by a three-thousandfoot -thick cap of permafrost in which fossilized mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, and other ice-age giants lie hidden away. The people who live in this vast, harsh wilderness rely largely on hunting for a living. But hunting is a game of chance; luck counts just as much as experience. One day, you might win: your prey comes running toward you as if voluntarily sacrificing its own life so you can go on living. But at other times, the quarry seems to have vanished from the face of the earth and cannot be tracked down. When this happens, hunger sets in—a hunger that drains you both physically and spiritually and leads only one place: death. “Can we make our way back to Nelemnoye?” I think to myself. Compared to the enormous dimensions of the taiga, the village we came from is just around the corner, but in these parts that means roughly 125 miles through unfamiliar and uninhabited terrain. The thought of making it there on foot crosses my mind only briefly before I realize the hopelessness of the plan. Ivan would never make the journey on his injured foot. And even if we made it to the village, I would be at the mercy of [18...