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Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)

FOR MORE THAN A WEEK last spring, the dismal Hotel Petropavlovsk had become home. Each day, in the gloom of its barren lobby, Kamchatka's strange mix of foreigners—the snowboarders, the heli-skiers, and the hunters—gathered to wait for "weather," as the Russians call skies clear enough to fly. While we waited to get permission to visit Russell's ranger station down at Kurilskoye Lake, I spent the days cautiously talking to the locals, while Russell fumbled around town trying to get his plane back from the reserve.

Finally, one morning, the smokestacks in P.K. belched straight up. We decided to forget about getting permission and recruited Viktor Podakysonov, a burly helicopter pilot famed among the cognoscenti as Kamchatka's ace. Viktor, who'd known Russell for years, cut us a bargain rate.

Viktor's ride was a tiny, 18-year-old Soviet Mi-2 helicopter. He lifted the rust bucket up high; almost immediately the solitary huts and swirling snowmobile trails receded and Kamchatka's geography took center stage. Each window of the Mi-2 revealed the range of the possible—jagged peaks and sudden valleys, veined with rivers and crowned by volcanic lakes the color of gemstones. When a skylight of blue opened before us, you could see beyond the volcanoes to an immaculate coastline. The tundra turned pure white, a desert of plush, untouched snow.

Russell looked sideways at me, shaking his head. "Never seen it so deep!" he screamed above the chopper's roar. The snows would mean that we couldn't walk along the lake, close to the bears. But Russell was delighted. Most poachers, he knew, used snowmobiles—and couldn't reach the sanctuary.

All the way south, Russell scanned the cliffs and valleys. On occasion, his eyes would come alive. "Skid marks!" he'd yell, pointing to ridges where newly risen bears had come out to play. But now, as Viktor swooped low across the lake, just 50 feet above its silvery sheen, we saw one: a dark mass lumbering alone on the rocks at the water's edge. Our first live Kamchatka brown bear, massive and contented, was peering up at the steel bird in the sky.

Viktor set down near the forlorn little ranger post, a ramshackle assemblage of logs, smoke, and half-starved dogs a hundred yards from the lake. The four rangers, a scruffy lot who did not inspire confidence, scrambled to fetch us on snowmobiles. These were the best the reserve could offer—the special forces vets were gone—and Russell was already disgusted with them. The previous winter, after a band of caviar poachers had been discovered operating unchecked in the sanctuary, he had stopped paying them.

Inside, the cabin air was heavy with the stench of Russian tobacco and lonely men. Brown bread and ramen noodles crowded the table. The rangers sat drinking vodka-laced tea, which they offered to our pilot. The head ranger, Timofei Dokhno, wore a silver Russian cross around his neck and blue tattoos on his arms. "These bears are our national treasure," he said, asking me to translate for Russell. "If we don't protect them, we'll lose the entire ecosystem." These men, he said, were "the last line of defense."

Russell didn't want to hear it. Timofei, he growled to me, was the reason he had stopped paying the men in the first place.

The snow was too deep to hike, so we again took to the sky. Suddenly, not in minutes but in seconds, bears were everywhere, the dark centerpieces of the white landscape. First one boulder came to life, then another. As we circled up high over the woods, the windscreen filled with a gorgeous female clambering up the ridge. Two cubs scampered behind, struggling in the snow. Russell yelled at Viktor to fly higher.

Viktor lifted up fast, executing a 270-degree turn back over the lake. Everywhere in the dark copses I saw bears. Russell and I counted nearly 50. "Too many," Russell yelled, "to keep track."

Russell was smiling wide for the first time in two weeks. I thought of his odd place in this remote world. His eyes glued to the glass, his face seemed almost beatific. He hadn't slept much for days. He'd been seized by a new idea—a vaguely articulated dream to start a foundation that could give the bears a safe future. He only needed the money. Half a million dollars a year, he reckoned, could lock up the whole reserve. Russell already had a plan to start over: He would turn his old cabin into a permanent rehabilitation facility. He would raise the cubs we'd seen at the zoo.

To an outsider, the scheme may have seemed delusional, but sitting in the deafening Mi-2, it felt entirely within reach. I looked hard and saw Russell for the first time. Here was a self-made naturalist, all alone in his 64th year, but more determined than ever to save a slice of the world's remaining wilderness—not, truth be told, so that humans could delight in its wonders but to ensure the survival of his truest friend on earth.

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