Gordon Wiltsie

Feral kingdom: Carpathian Large Carnivore Project field headquarters.

NOT FAR FROM where we stood, pondering the whereabouts of Tsiganu, lay a snowbound hamlet of thatch-roofed cottages, conical haystacks, and a few shapely farmhouses with gabled and turreted tin roofs, all hung like a saddle blanket across the steep sides of the ridge. It was called Magura. It seemed a mirage of bucolic tranquility from the late Middle Ages, but it was real.

Gordon and I had been there a few days earlier with another project worker, Andrei Blumer. In bright sunshine and stabbing cold, we had skied up from another valley on the far side, stopping to visit an elderly couple named Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu. The Surdus live in a trim little cottage they built 50 years ago to replace a 500-year-old cottage on the same spot, in which Aurica had been born. Aurica is a pretty woman of seventysome years, with a deeply lined face and a wide, jokey smile. We were greeted effusively by her, Gheorghe, and their middle-aged son, another Gheorghe but nicknamed Mosorel, who himself had boot-kicked up through the snow for a Saturday visit. Passing from deep snowbanks and icy air into a small narrow room with a low ceiling, a bare bulb, and a woodstove upon which simmered a pot of rose-hip tea, we commenced to be steam-cooked with hospitality. Aurica, wearing a head scarf and thick-waled corduroy vest, spoke as little English as Gordon and I did Romanian, but she made herself understood, and her motherly eyes missed nothing. She stood by the stove and fussed cheerily while Andrei traded news with Mosorel, Gordon thawed his lenses, and I waited for my glasses to clear. Have some rose tea, you boys, get warm. Here, have some bread, have some cheese, don't be so skinny. The tea was deep-simmered and laced with honey. Have some smoked pork. And the sausage too, it's good, here, I'll cut you a bigger piece, don't you like it? You do? Then don't be shy, eat. We had set off without lunch, so we were pushovers. Mosorel, give them some tsuica, what are you waiting for? Mosorel, grinning broadly, poured us heated shots of his mother's homemade apple-pear brandy, lightly enhanced with sugar and pepper. Tsuica is more than just the national moonshine; it's a form of communion, and we communed.

Mosorel's right hand was swaddled in a large white bandage. It testified to a saw accident several months earlier, Andrei explained, in which Mosorel had sliced off his pinky and broken his fourth finger while cutting up an old chest for usable lumber. Mosorel is a carpenter, sometimes. Sometimes too he's a tailor; his nickname means, roughly, "Mr. Thread." Until the saw accident he had also been pulling shifts at a factory down in the nearby town. Like his parents, who still raise pigs, cows, sheep, onions, corn, beets, potatoes, and more than enough apples and pears for tsuica, Mosorel is a versatile man of diverse outputs. The hand injury didn't seem to dampen his spirit, possibly because some joyous aptitude for survival runs like a dominant gene through the family, homozygous on both sides of his parentage. As the sweet liquor spread its heat in our bellies, the talk turned in that direction—to survival, and how its terms of demand had changed.

During the Communist era, Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu had been required to supply 800 liters of milk each year to the state. Andrei translated this fact, Aurica nodding forcefully: Yes, 800. There were also quotas to be met in lambs, calves, and wool. Since the revolution, things had changed; no longer were Gheorghe and Aurica obliged to deliver up a large share of their farm produce, but market prices were so low that, rather than selling it, they fed their milk to the pigs. So, I asked simplemindedly, is life better or worse since the fall of Ceausescu? The talk rattled forward in Romanian for a few moments until Andrei paused, turned aside, and told me that Mosorel had just said something important.

"At least we're not scared now," he had said.