though, as with more recent marijuana plantations, greater efforts are
now made to conceal them.
Before Markov acquired his portable barracks, his friend Danila
Zaitsev had used it as a remote plant for processing fir needle oil, a
multipurpose folk remedy rumored to be effective on everything from
coughs to rheumatism. After perestroika, the niche market for fir oil
collapsed, and the project was abandoned. With Zaitsev’s help, Markov
moved the caravan into the sunny clearing where it now stood, ringed by
tiger tracks. In addition to being his new hunting base, he and Zaitsev ran
a honey operation from there, consisting of about forty hives. On the side,
they brewed medovukha, a honey-based drink comparable to mead.
Apparently, Markov had a gift. “He liked bees,” recalled his son, Alexei,
who shares his father’s stature, eyes, and cheekbones, “and they liked
him. He would go to the hives without his shirt. He wasn’t afraid.” So at
ease was Markov that the bees would cluster about his half-naked body,
stinging him only occasionally.
It was from these hunting grounds that Markov started poaching game
in earnest. His guns, of course, were unregistered, his bullets homemade.
He was desperately poor. When he managed to bag a deer or a boar, he
would often barter the meat for essentials like sugar, tobacco, gunpowder,
and tea. (This, incidentally, is exactly how Dersu Uzala was making his
living when Arseniev first encountered him in 1906.) It was the taiga, and
the creatures it contains, that kept him and his family alive. But by 1997,
this hand-to-mouth existence was taking its toll. A heavy smoker,
Markov was approaching fifty in a country where the average life
expectancy for men was only fifty-eight. For his demographic, it was
even lower than that. When Yuri Trush encountered him the previous
year, he recalled being struck by the unhealthiness he saw in Markov’s
eyes: they were badly bloodshot and had a yellow cast to them. Trush
couldn’t tell if this was the result of a recent drinking binge, or something
more serious, but Markov had other problems as well: ever since taking a
bad fall on his hunting skis several years earlier, he had acquired a
permanent limp. No longer able to cover the ground or carry the weight
he once could, something had to change, but without money—a lot of it
ron
(Ron)
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