Sibir (31 page)

His curious last name was the bequest of an American trader named Roberts who sailed a little schooner from Alaska to the Kolyma sometime in the early 1900s. There is a good measure of Yankee trader blood flowing in the veins of the Yukagir, Eskimo, and Chukchee, and it is memoralized not only in family names but also in a number of English words which have passed into the local vocabulary:
bonanza, rum
, and
sveety
(sweetie) are three examples. Robik was just coming home from a five-day trip around his trap-line, during which he had taken thirty-four ermine and six white foxes.

I was a little suspicious about that “glass of tea,” but since we had come to Kolymskaya unannounced and had only been in town a short time, I thought it unlikely anything too elaborate could have been prepared for us.

I still had much to learn about Siberians! All the tables in the log dining hall had been placed together in a line. And once again the table tops were lost to view under a fabulous array of food and drink. Thirty or forty grinning Kolymskayites stood by their chairs waiting for us. Kola’s pale face grew paler still.

“I hope by the time we get back to Moscow our surgeons will have mastered the art of liver transplants!” he muttered.

Sometime before midnight we were escorted back to the helicopter. I am not an enthusiast of night flying in the arctic, but I was in no mood to worry overmuch. Claire was beyond worrying. She had made the mistake of getting into a toast-making match with the big-boned, buxom lady cook at the café and, though she had fought gallantly, she had gone down to defeat. As we tucked her tenderly into the helicopter she tried to raise her right arm and was heard to say:

“Want give toast t’all nice pilots going carry me home t’bed.”

As a consequence of our visit to the herd, Vasily Amasov, the jew’s-harp-playing team leader of the reindeer herders, concluded I was the stuff reindeer farmers are made of. One afternoon Claire and I were invited to attend a gathering at the headquarters of the state farm. It turned out to be a full-scale banquet during which I was presented with a magnificent red and gold ornamented scroll testifying to my appointment as Honorary Canadian Breeder and member in good standing of the Second Reindeer Team. I have since mused over that presentation quite a lot and have concluded it is better to be an honorary breeder than no breeder at all.

Gay as an Irish gnome, as full of laughter as any happy child, Vasily proclaimed with frank emotion to all and sundry that I was his dear friend. When we left Tchersky he gave me his prized jew’s harp, having earlier almost buried Claire and me under gifts of fur hats, embroidered deerskin gloves, and other tokens of his affection. The day before we parted he told me he would be delighted to take a year off from his own work in order to start a reindeer farm for Canadian Eskimos. He was dead serious about this, having first obtained consent from the state farm director and from Victor Nazarov. Unwilling to hurt his feelings, I said I would let him know … and never did.

Late in 1969 I unexpectedly met him again at Batagai, near Verkhoyansk. There was no longer any laughter in his dark eyes. His beautiful young wife had died in childbirth that autumn and he had found it impossible to remain in the familiar world of Tchersky without her. He embraced me in the crowded airport waiting room and wept as he told me of his loss.

“Please arrange for me to visit Canada,” he pleaded.
“To forget my wife I must go somewhere I am really needed. Don’t your Small Peoples of the north need a good reindeer man?”

This time I had to refuse his offer directly, knowing that even if his own government would permit him to leave, he would find cold comfort at the hands of the Canadian government. I did not tell him how much I wished he could be starting a new life for the Eskimos on the abandoned tundra of my own land. There are some things which are too difficult to say.

The kind of life my Yukagir friend would have liked to build for Canadian taiga Indians and tundra Eskimos was exemplified by the state farm he had helped build in Kolyma. Here is the shape of it.

Nizhny Kolymsk State Farm embraces the whole of the Kolyma district, some 87,000 square kilometres of taiga, tundra, lakes, and rivers. In the 1940s when the farm was first organized (as a collective), it had a population of about a hundred Evenk, Chukchee, and Yukagir families, and a herd of 7,000 reindeer. Today it is the largest reindeer farm in Yakutia, with 36,000 deer. It also has departments for fishing, fur raising, and trapping; and it supports 2,840 people, including 212 Evenk families, 197 Chukchee families, 106 Yukagir families (which is about ninety per cent of all the Yukagir left in the world) and fifty families of native-born Russian stock.

Its headquarters is in a big three-storey building in Tchersky, where a staff of thirty-seven, embracing economists, agronomists, veterinary scientists, botanists, and construction engineers – mostly young and mostly of native origin – work under the direction of an elected committee headed by an Evenk, Gavriel Efrimov. Most of the staff, including the director, hold university degrees and each year at least thirty young people from the farm are sent as far afield as Leningrad for university training in the many specialties which affect the farm’s operation.

Most of the employees live in the three settlements of
Kolymskaya, Kanzaboy, and Pokholsk, which were originally tiny, decayed collections of one-room shacks, but which by the end of 1973 at the latest will all be completely modern towns. Work on the new Kolymskaya was well underway in the winter of 1969. This town will have ten sixteen-apartment masonry buildings connected with one another and to a central shopping area by aluminum and plexi-glass corridors. It will also have several aluminum-sandwich-wall type experimental apartment blocks; a hockey and soccer stadium; a completely integrated fur-breeding station; a new two-storey community centre with a large theatre; and all requisite ancillary buildings for a permanent population of a thousand people. Central heating, sewers, running water, electricity, and an airport have already been installed.

Reindeer raising is the state farm’s primary concern, and employs 127 families in two Reindeer Departments, each of which has a base herd of 18,000 deer. Roughly a thousand tons of meat is produced each year, returning (with sales of hides and other side products) a gross income of about one million rubles; for a profit of nearly 300,000 rubles, which is invested in new equipment, training programs, improved breeding stock, and in the reconstruction of the three towns.

Wages of apprentice herders begin at 210 rubles a month, increasing by ten rubles each year to a base rate of 250, plus all the usual, and some unusual, side benefits, including virtually free housing and a supply of meat, fish, and reindeer hides sufficient to meet the needs of an average-size family. Teams which overfulfill their annual quotas are paid extra in cash, or the members may take their bonus in reindeer, which they run with the farm herds and may sell at any time at market prices.

This is no empty gesture. In 1969 Innokenty Khodyan’s team was running 163 privately owned deer with the farm herd. When I returned to visit Innokenty that year, I was presented with three reindeer of my very own – earned for me by the overfulfilment of my mates
on the Second Team of which I was an honorary member. Since I could see no way of bringing the deer home with me, I authorized the slaughter of one to provide a special feast for my teammates and myself. The other two reindeer may, hopefully, breed enough offspring to make me rich some day – in Kolyma, if nowhere else.

In 1968 the fur farm had a number of female white foxes, but the experts concluded it was too expensive to hold them over winter as breeding stock. Instead they now live-trap several hundred wild pups in early summer on the tundra and hold them only until the pelts are prime in autumn. Not only was the year-round feeding of white fox breeding stock expensive but, as Victor pointed out, it was stupid to feed good reindeer meat to foxes when it could be used for human beings.

Wild-fur trapping employs about ninety families and is the particular province of the Evenk, who are natural-born hunters. Each trapper gets a guaranteed income of two hundred rubles a month all year round but in addition makes a percentage on all the fur he catches. Serafina Robik cleared several thousand rubles over and above his salary in 1966, and most of the other trappers did proportionately well. Since fur prices are supported, and since scientific cropping methods are employed to prevent a depletion of the natural stock, trappers are amongst the best-paid people in the north, and hunting is second only to reindeer breeding as a farm moneymaker.

Fishing is also increasingly important at Kolyma, and one November day Victor took me down the river almost to the arctic coast to see the operation of a fishing station for myself.

We set off in relatively mild weather – it was a mere 10° below – but with the threat of a blizzard implicit in the dark and brooding sky. Victor, Kola, Yura, and I went in one Bobyk while Victor’s Yakutian-born wife, Gallina, followed in another, accompanying a young Evenk girl who was going home from school in Tchersky
to visit her parents’ village. We were convoyed, until we outran it, by a big tracked vehicle called a snow-tank. Its job was to pick us up if we got in trouble, a not unlikely possibility since we had to travel on the river ice which was treacherous due to overflows from springs along the banks that had not yet frozen.

Victor happily reverted to his original profession and drove our Bobyk himself, manhandling the tough little machine with great skill. We soon left the main Kolyma channel and headed northwest into a complex of estuary channels winding through the bald-headed tundra. The only visible vegetation was the occasional clump of willows on the bank, from which flocks of ptarmigan rocketed away at our approach. The Bobyks flew along wide open, which was the only way to keep them moving. Every now and again we would hit a soft patch, and slush and water would erupt around us as we skidded, slewed, and roared through it.

The wild drive continued for two hours and brought us to a low, snow-dusted ridge on which stood a gaunt looking cluster of shacks. This desolate-looking place was the fishing camp.

We were greeted by the manager, a Russian who had spent decades in the arctic. He was taciturn and withdrawn until we got him going on the subject of his fishery. At this season the camp was operated by only four men (it employs forty or more at peak times), fishing two dozen nets set underneath the ice for a herring-like fish. One of the squat, log shacks contained two diesel-electric generators. Another was a living cabin much like any such cabin in the Canadian north, except for electric lights and a powerful radio transceiver. The third shack, however, was an eye-opener. It stood above the shaft of a quick-freeze “mine” and was connected to the river shore by a narrow-gauge railway.

This natural underground freezing plant had been blasted out of perpetually frozen black muck which seemed to have the hardness and texture of basalt. It was
still another example of the Russian genius for making permafrost serve man. The main shaft, which we descended down icy ladders, was sixty feet deep, and drift tunnels wound out from it on all sides. The walls were covered with immense frost butterflies – flat, multicoloured crystals as big as playing cards. A touch brought thousands of them fluttering down with a delicate tinkling sound.

The mine had sufficient capacity to freeze and store three hundred tons of fish. It was originally built as an experiment and was now considered obsolete. A new one of greater size and better design was under construction at the Evenk village site three miles away. Equipped with an efficient air-lock and modern conveyor equipment, it will have the capacity to freeze and store up to one thousand tons of fish.

In winter the frozen fish are trucked along the river ice and distributed all through the Kolyma region and into adjacent parts of Chukotka. In summer whatever has not been used locally is loaded on refrigerator ships bound for Murmansk and finds it way into the Moscow and Leningrad markets.

During 1966 this was one of five such stations in the district. By 1969 the Fishing Department had added a modern processing and canning factory and was producing a grand total of 1,700-1,800 tons of seven different species of fish each year. The fishermen told me they made about two hundred rubles a month, excluding bonuses, and were supplied with all gear, including clothing.

When we emerged, well chilled, from the mine shaft, Gallina was busy preparing a great pot of
ukha
, a species of fishermen’s soup which is a national addiction throughout most of the Soviet Union. Almost any kind of fish can be used to make ukha and everyone has his or her own special recipe. Gallina’s version called for four kinds of fish and was delicious. We crowded around make-shift tables and gorged ourselves. And, of course,
Victor had not come empty handed. Out of his Bobyk came another clinking gunny sack.

My compliments to Gallina on her cookery and to the fishermen on the quality of their products were sincere, but perhaps a little overdone. In any event, the manager, all smiles now, decided to reciprocate. Two of his men were despatched to the “mine” and returned therefrom carrying an enormous frozen fish between them. It was a
chir
– the king of all arctic fishes – and it was mine – all sixty pounds of it!

This was, the fishermen told me, a little token of mutual regard. When I got back to Canada, they said, Claire would be able to make real Russian ukha for me. Nothing was said about
how
I was going to transport this monster home.

That damned fish haunted me for nearly two weeks. It was considered a marvel by all who saw it, and it received royal treatment. Hotels were happy to hold it in their refrigerators and even Aeroflot recognized its regal qualities. On the flight from Yakutsk to Irkutsk, it was given a seat all to itself.

In Irkutsk we finally parted company. I hope my fishermen friends will forgive me, but we were approaching warmer climates and my
chir
was in danger of becoming a monumental embarrassment. So I gave it to a writer friend and breathed a sigh of relief.