thing to a deity its inhabitants had. When all else failed—and it had—she
alone had stood by them. If the taiga should turn against them, too, where
else could they go?
During those few days following Markov’s funeral, nothing much had
changed for Denis Burukhin or his best friend, Andrei Pochepnya, save
for the emptiness left by the death of their “Uncle” Markiz, a man they
had known and liked. Both Denis and Andrei were twenty years old and
fresh out of the army; they had lived in Sobolonye for most of their lives.
Where Denis was short, dark, and compact, Andrei was tall and fair-
haired; he was a quiet young man, even shy, but like Denis, he was a
competent tayozhnik. The two of them had been hunting and trapping
together since they were boys; they trusted each other implicitly, and
trust among fur trappers is like trust among gold miners—a rare and
precious thing. In many respects, their fates appeared to be linked; they
even left for the army on the same day. Denis, the better marksman of the
two, drew the short straw and was sent to the front in Chechnya, and that
was the last his family heard of him. After a few months, his mother,
Lida—short, dark-haired, and densely packaged like her son—gave him
up for dead. “There were no letters,” she said. “Nothing. We stopped
waiting. And then he came back.” But he wasn’t quite the same. “He
became aloof—like a different person. It must have affected him to see
all those people die.”
Andrei, meanwhile, spent his entire tour at a base in Khabarovsk, the
tough, historic city of half a million on the left bank of the Amur River,
only 150 miles north of Sobolonye. But even so far away from the front
line, the Russian army can still be a brutal environment. The hazing of
new recruits is entrenched, systematic, and often barbaric, and morale
was abysmal: soldiers could be seen standing at the edge of their fenced
compounds begging for money from passersby. For teenaged boys from a
remote village, either experience would have been a rude awakening and,