3

But we  are what    we  are,    and we  might   remember

Not to  hate    any person, for all are vicious

ROBINSON    JEFFERS,

“Original   Sin”^1

YURI TRUSH AND VLADIMIR MARKOV WERE BORN WITHIN

A YEAR OF each other, both in European Russia, but they were drawn
into this exotic sylvan netherworld by very different paths. That they
would represent opposing points on the spectrum of possibility was as
much a reflection of personality as it was an adaptation to opportunity.
Trush, like Markov, was a relative latecomer to the Far East. He was born
in 1950, and raised in a village outside the city of Nizhny Novgorod,
about halfway between Moscow and the Ural Mountains. His maternal
grandfather was a decorated major general who died in battle at the outset
of the Second World War. His father, Anatoly, a senior lieutenant,
survived the siege of Leningrad, which lasted two and a half years. Father
and son hunted in the pine forests surrounding his village, and Yuri saw
some things there that left deep impressions.
In the early 1960s, when Trush was about fourteen, he remembers
going to the local tavern with his father. There were other hunters there,
friends of his father, and they were discussing boar hunting. One man—
half drunk—spoke loudly of the pregnant sow he’d shot out of season. It
is a generally accepted rule among hunters that you don’t shoot pregnant
animals, and a silence fell over the room. Then the voices rose again and
overwhelmed the bragging man, who was taken outside and beaten
severely.
In his early twenties, Trush had another formative experience, this time