Last year, environmental campaigners from the Siberian city of Tomsk made regular trips along the Ob river, looking at the levels of poaching in the surrounding forest; and produced a report on its effects in different localities.
Top of the table was the small town of Krasny Yar. There used to be an enormous logging plant here, and the local shops stocked red caviar even at times of dire shortage elsewhere (the locals fished for the black variety themselves – the Ob was full of starlet and sturgeon then). Krasny Yar is only 80km from Tomsk as the crow flies – but it has to fly over impassable swamps. By road it’s more like 300km. In winter the journey involves a half-hour drive over the frozen Ob; the bus disgorges its passengers so that it can drive safely on the ice. In the summer there’s a ferry, but in spring and autumn the town is only connected to the outside world by occasional flights in ‘cropduster’ planes.
The locals liked it this way – everyone knew everyone else; very few strangers ever came. It was here that I first held a shotgun in my hands. My father, a teacher and keen hunter, decided that at 15 I was old enough, and we would shoot grouse and muskrats all year round; shooting seasons meant nothing to us then. At school I would spend breaks with the boys, all of us boasting about our catches. And a year and a half later it was poachers like us that felled first an elk and then a new forest ranger, the father of one of my classmates. We kept quiet about it, but not for long: nobody saw anything wrong in poaching, as long as you didn’t get caught, so we could see how it could have happened. The crime remained unsolved; nobody tried very hard to solve it.
