Bear Killings in Russia | Outside Online

Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)

NO ONE HAS FORMALLY accused Kovalenkov of anything—nor are they likely to—but Roman, who worked for him for more than a decade, felt sure he would have no qualms about being involved in the bear massacre if it suited his interests.

In the boss's employ, on too many hunting trips to count, Roman said, he'd done what he was told to do: He'd rousted bears from their dens, herded them down mountains toward hunkered-down American hunters, cut open their fresh carcasses, and dug deep to pull out their gall. But one day he decided he'd had enough. "Ever since I quit hunting," he told me, "I can sleep."

Roman is a big man, deaf in his gun-side ear like many lifelong hunters, and his hands are covered

Whoever killed Russell's bears was not out poaching gall, Pavel believed. You'd need a lot of men and a helicopter to hide the evidence, but it could have been done: "Just cut the skins clean, drag the carcasses in the chopper, and dump 'em in the lake."

in calluses. He wore all black—old jeans and a leather coat creased with wear. As for why Kovalenkov might go after Russell, he said that was simple: "Charlie flew. That was his offense. He could see."

Early in his Kamchatka adventure, Russell had brought over from Canada a Kolb ultralight, a small aircraft powered by a 65-horsepower engine and built by Russell himself. The Kolb was his magic carpet; flying low over the sanctuary, he started to see snowmobile tracks and other poaching evidence that no one else could. One September afternoon in 1997, from a thousand feet up, Russell and Igor Revenko spotted a Soviet military ATV churning up a hillside deep inside the sanctuary. Russell swooped lower, bringing the Kolb in close. Inside the ATV, he'd later learn, were freshly poached snow sheep and brown bears.

Maybe it wasn't the smartest move to buzz a posse of well-armed Russian hunters deep inside a protected area. But the bet paid off. Revenko captured the scene on video and presented it to prosecutors in P.K. It turned out one of the passengers was Valery Golovin, the director of the sanctuary himself. To everyone's surprise, prosecutors brought criminal charges in the winter of 1997.

In court, Golovin played dumb. "I can't imagine how all this happened," he told the judge. "I blacked out." Golovin was fined 56 billion rubles—$9.3 million, a sum so outlandish as to be unpayable—and allowed to disappear quietly. His boss, Sergei Alekseev, the director of the Kronotsky Reserve, lost his job. (He landed on his feet; he now runs his own hunting trips.)

Emboldened, Russell had gone further. "I couldn't believe what was going on around Kamchatka," he told me. "It was just poaching everywhere—for caviar, for salmon, for bears. And if there's no fish, there are no bears. It's all one circle. That's why I realized we had to go after the poachers, of all kinds, no matter their prey. The reserve wasn't doing it. They couldn't—just didn't have the money or the means, even if they had the will, which only some of them did."

Cobbling together more small grants, Russell gave the reserve money to pay four rangers and build a cabin for them at Kurilskoye Lake. In 2000, when the reserve's crew proved inept, he brought in two Russian special forces officers who had come home from the bloodbath in Chechnya. The men loved their summer in the bush, and they did their job well. They not only found caviar poachers; they arrested them.

In P.K., the news made headlines. But to Enns, in retrospect, it was probably the last straw. "When Charlie took on the caviar poaching," she said, "that's when the tide turned." The tax police and the FSB, the secret police who are the heirs to the KGB, went after Russell for flying an unregistered aircraft in the sanctuary—a border zone, they claimed, with military significance. The local tabloids were more direct: They called him a spy. The battles in local government and in the papers dragged on for years, but in 2003 the reserve took possession of the ultralight.

Roman said the saga made his stomach turn. He spoke in a torrent, his words tumbling out and his foot leaned on the gas. His was a canto of loss, regrets piled up over a lifetime. He had a grudge against his old boss—no question about it. But he also had a conscience to clear.

Did he have any evidence Kovalenkov was involved? Only circumstantial. He said he heard Kovalenkov's guides—his old colleagues—on the field radio in the days after the killing. The Canadians, they'd said, had gotten what they deserved. Roman knew that, given the way things on Kamchatka worked, the proof would likely never come to light. But to him the economics were damning enough. No small-time poacher would rent a helicopter—at $1,200 an hour—to kill 20 bears. No, he said, "this wasn't about the gall."

That week last May, I got a chance to run Roman's theory by a poacher, whom, for his own protection, I'll call Pavel. Pavel made no effort to hide that he hunted illegally; for him it was a means of survival. He put the lie to the line, often repeated across Russia, that big-time poachers were the problem. A heavyset former border guard on the cusp of 50, he'd come home after the Soviet fall, like many military men, to find himself out of work. There was a wife and son up north, and a grown daughter on the mainland. He lived in a two-room apartment on the far side of Avacha Bay, with two stuffed bears for company. "Sometimes," he said as he showed me around, "it gets lonely, just the three of us."

Pavel agreed with Roman that no one would fly all the way to Kambalnoye Lake for the gall. "Can't sell the stuff anymore," he said, slicing me a sliver of dried gall he had on hand. He opened his fridge wide, and visions of Jeffrey Dahmer surfaced. First he pulled out a massive, skinned bear paw, frozen white and nearly as long as his forearm. Then a tall jar.

"Pure fat," he said, swigging the dark liquid. "Best cure for a bad stomach."

Whoever killed the bears put in too much effort to be merely poaching, Pavel believed. You'd need a lot of men to hide all that evidence. But it could have been done. "Just cut the skins clean," he said, "drag the carcasses in the chopper, and dump 'em in the lake."

With the guts cut out, the remains would sink like stones.

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