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Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)


	A brown bear near Kurilskoye Lake, in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary (Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

NINE TIME ZONES AND 4,000 MILES EAST of Moscow, Kamchatka's sole city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky—known to foreigners as P.K.—sits above one of the world's most alluring harbors, Avacha Bay. Winters here can last ten months, but when the icy sea fog lifts, a picturesque port rimmed by volcanoes emerges.

I joined Russell on his difficult return trip in 2004. We met in May, when the spring thaw had already lured the first Westerners: heli-skiers taking advantage of the last snows and American hunters streaming in from the backcountry in mud-caked jeans, carrying long rifle cases and duffels heavy with skins.

At first glance, Russell looks better-suited for retirement than for animal wars; his unruly curls long ago turned silver, and he moves in an easy shamble. Mindful of his blood pressure—he has had surgery on his aorta—he tries to stay away from sweets and stress. But his face is craggy from years in the wild, and his large hands are like paws. You can't spend much time with him without being awed by both his ease in the natural world and his willpower.

The Yelizovo Zoo, naturally, distressed him. Tucked away in a grim Soviet-era outpost half an hour northwest of P.K., it could easily have been mistaken for a roadside animal market. Two new cubs had come in—orphaned, like Russell's, by poachers. Anatoly Shevlyagin, the stout director who had given Russell his first three bears, knew the cubs could drum up business, but it would be hard to keep them. I'd seen him on the local news asking for donations of food. Now the zoo was swimming with parents and toddlers, all carrying candy and tins of sweetened condensed milk. The sight of so much sugar headed for a species accustomed to salmon and berries made Russell pale.

Though he's spent a decade navigating Kamchatkan officialdom, Russell speaks only two words of Russian comprehensibly—da and nyet. He asked me to translate as, shyly, he gave Shevlyagin a wad of rubles to help support the cubs. The zookeeper thanked Russell warmly. But he warned that the money wouldn't go to the cubs. He had to buy a new pump for the zoo's tiny pond. The water had become fetid, he explained, and he'd lost two crocodiles in as many years.

Across town, in the cinder-block headquarters of the Kronotsky Reserve, it was so cold that the staff wore down jackets. To some in Kamchatka, I was starting to see, Russell was a source of amusement or, worse, a thorn in biologists' sides. Vladimir Mosolov, the head of Kronotsky's scientific department, was candid about this. "Our Canadians dreamed of becoming famous like those Brits in Africa with their lions," he said, alluding to Born Free, George and Joy Adamson's 1960 tale of returning the lioness Elsa to the Kenyan grasslands. But any talk of ascribing emotions to predators made his face contort. "This isn't Africa," he huffed. "We have our own scientists and our own ideas about science."

As for the massacre, the reserve had taken a hard line, refusing to believe that any bears had been poached. " ‘Twenty bears familiar to me,' " Mosolov said, mocking Russell's claim about the number killed. "What does it mean, 'familiar to me'? It's nonsense. Absolute nonsense."

I heard more of the same when I phoned the regional prosecutor, Aleksander Voitovich, to ask about the investigation. "What investigation?" he barked. I mentioned that, in November 2003, the Los Angeles Times had reported that Voitovich was "investigating the case as a poaching." Apparently not. "There is no case, because there is no proof these bears were killed," he said. How was that? No carcasses had been found. With no carcasses there was no case, and with no case there could be no investigation. With this circular logic, he called the matter closed.

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