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Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)

IN THE MONTHS after our trip, Russell bashed on undeterred. Returning to Kamchatka had given him new hope, and the balance of power was shifting. Soon came the biggest news: Kovalenkov had cashed out. News of the deal had spread wide across Kamchatka—the old boss had sold his helicopter monopoly to Kamchatka Airlines, a new conglomerate controlled by Stanislav Belan's Bel-Kam-Tour.

Russell would never forgive the massacre of his bears. But Kamchatka, he felt, might at last be ready for a genuine, small-scale protection program. In late June, he called me on his satellite phone from the cabin at Kambalnoye Lake. He had planned to leave Kamchatka in May, he said, but things had taken "an amazing turn." He'd hired a Russian, a former hunting guide for Belan whose wife was Russell's biggest supporter in the regional natural resources department, and had managed to adopt five new cubs—the pair from the zoo, plus another three orphans. This time he would stay until the snows came, to make sure the cubs denned up. He had scant funding, little help, and no guarantee that another experiment would not end in tragedy. But he'd won his plane back, and even though he could no longer fly it in the sanctuary, he was dreaming again. The rehabilitation center for orphaned cubs was, he hoped, becoming a reality.

In long e-mails, composed alone late at night and sent via sat phone, Russell was alternately giddy and distraught. He wrote about watching his five cubs grow, detailing how, on hot days, the one named Sky would escape under the electric fence to swim in the lake; how Buck was a slowpoke, always lagging behind; how Gina and Sheena, the zoo cubs, wandered off for four days; and how he'd managed to save Wilder and Sky from a large predator bear stalking the cabin.

Sometimes it was too much. "I often ask myself why I do this to myself," he wrote. "What I mean is the stress that goes with trying to look after these cubs and trying to conserve bears in Russia in general." I read the e-mails and thought of Russell, bad heart and all, chasing a large male grizzly up a mountain to save his cubs.

By late September he was worn out. The predator finally got one cub, Wilder, and though funding still trickled in, the hurdles remained huge. "Enough of my troubles," he wrote. "I will find a way to survive, alone damn it. Alone. There is nothing quite as saddening as feeling used, old and alone, all at once." But despite the fatigue, something had come back to life in him. Russell recognized that this new chapter had the potential to end in carnage—like Treadwell's and Nikolaenko's work had—or to redeem all his failings.

"I guess I'm very stubborn," he told me on the phone in September, "and maybe stupid, too." Though he was 6,000 miles away, I could hear it in his voice: He would not give up on Kamchatka.

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