after two years away, both of them were having trouble readjusting to
village life. On the one hand, they were free at last; on the other, they
were effectively marooned with no prospects in this broken, isolated
outpost.
There was also tension at home, and it was exacerbated by the lack of
work and money. Andrei’s father, a former logger and market hunter, had
managed to get a job as the night watchman at the elementary school, but
it paid a pittance, and now Andrei, the third of five children and the
oldest boy, was one more mouth to feed. It didn’t help that he was at
loose ends and chafing at the confines of the cramped family house. The
slow-motion implosion of this community, which had been going on for
years, was playing itself out in microcosm inside the Pochepnyas’ home.
Andrei’s father was profoundly demoralized; his mother was moody and
combative and had strained relations with many of her neighbors. The
negative synergy was almost palpable, and Andrei spent as much time out
of the house as he could.
With so much time to kill, Denis and Andrei went back to what they
knew best: hunting and trapping. The two of them had parallel traplines
running down either side of the Takhalo River, near its confluence with
the Bikin. It was a twenty-five-mile round-trip from the village and the
boys would travel there together. When they couldn’t catch a ride with a
logging truck, they would go in on horseback. The Pochepnyas had an
apiary on the Takhalo with a well-built cabin where the boys would often
stay for days at a time. Prior to Markov’s death, this had been a casual
outing, but now everything had changed; everyone was on edge, and it
wasn’t just for safety reasons.
Outside of logging and the relatively small poppy and marijuana
cultivating industries, ginseng hunting, beekeeping, fur trapping, and pine
nut gathering were the most lucrative “crops” in the forest. The latter
two, along with meat (and tiger) hunting, are pursued in winter, and every
day that a villager was prevented from going into the forest meant money
taken from her pocket and food taken from her table. A hand-to-mouth
existence is, for most people who have the time and inclination to read
books like this, nothing more than a quaint and vivid turn of phrase. But
ron
(Ron)
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