Duck Devil and Little Wolf

A Search for Koryak Reindeer

We threaded our way down the aisle of the stuffed Yak-40 airplane, between bundles of dried fish and bags of onions, to claim the last three empty seats. Incongruously, a huge bouquet of crimson, long-stemmed roses occupied in its own seat.

We were flying to Tilichiki, a small town on the east coast of Kamchatka. But our ultimate destination was the tiny Koryak village of Vvenka, and the only way to get there in April was a two-hour snowmobile ride south from the airport.

The summer before, Jon (my husband) and Misha had been storm-bound in Vvenka for three days during their sea kayak journey from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Alaska (see Russian Life, March/April 2001). After the storm, while Jon and Misha were loading up their kayaks to continue their journey, Moolynaut, the grandmother and shaman of the village, hobbled down to the beach. She urged them to return for the spring festival and to help her adopted sons, Oleg and Sergei, buy some reindeer for Vvenka. It’s not everyday one is invited on a pilgrimage by a Siberian shaman, so Jon and Misha accepted immediately and asked me to come along.

As the airplane started to descend, the flight attendant announced that the temperature in Tilichiki was -17o C (+1o F), with a 50 km/hour northerly wind. Swirling snow gave the asphalt runway an ephemeral appearance as our huge balloon tires touched down. I quickly donned anorak, hat, and gloves to wait on the frigid runway as baggage was passed from hand to hand down the narrow stairs that extended from the tail section. The other passengers stood calmly without hats or gloves, as if -17o was normal for the sixth of April. I watched the roses, inside their silver and blue foil wrapper, flap frantically as a man in a fur hat whisked them into the terminal.

Our Koryak friends, Sergei and Oleg, stood out from the Russian-looking crowd waiting on the other side of the gate. They wore sealskin mukluks, deerskin pants and boxy canvas anoraks. They were dressed in the muted colors of the land, but for their colorful malahi hats. The hats gave them a canine look: their top corners standing up like dog’s ears. Sewn of sheepskin, the hats are dyed dark brown or black, trimmed with dog hair, and decorated with brightly beaded medallions. Loopy, beaded garlands connected the medallions like the shills on a Las Vegas dancer.

We gathered our mountain of gear and hauled it to the snowmobiles parked outside the gate. Oleg opened the flapping canvas tarp on a sled of hand-carved wood and Sergei loaded it with our duffels. Then their machines roared to life and they sped off through the iced-over streets of Tilichiki. We walked, following the lingering smell of two-cycle engine exhaust. Five minutes later, we caught up with them in front of Sergei’s sister’s apartment where he tinkered with his ancient, red Buran snowmobile, the workhorse of Siberia.

Jon, Misha, and Oleg went off to buy a few provisions in the big city, while Sergei tied another sled behind the one filled with camping gear. Sergei’s sister spied me from her apartment window, and signaled me to come up for tea. Twenty minutes later, the others returned with bulging bags of fresh onions, eggs, milk, and other goodies for the folks in Vvenka. We then packed all our things and ourselves onto the snowmobiles and sleds and began the drive south.

After an hour of bumping over sea ice and frozen tundra, we climbed over a divide and descended to the Vvenka River, which meandered like a smooth white highway all the way to the village.

Oleg’s wife Lydia met us in front of her house with a small shovel full of glowing coals. Before even saying hello, she picked small pieces of lint from our jackets and put them into the coals. While I rubbed my frozen cheeks, Lydia explained that burning a small piece of our clothing was a Koryak custom—it was meant to frighten off any evil spirits that might have arrived with us. She was following every custom so that we would be purified when Grandmother Moolynaut came to greet us.

Within five minutes, the old woman limped into the room. She took off an ordinary looking coat and hat just as would any old woman. I started to wonder if Jon’s imagination had cooked up this whole expedition. Then Moolynaut turned to face me. While hardly imposing at four and half feet tall, her deeply-lined Koryak face and intense eyes seemed to probe the depths of my soul.

Now ninety-six, Moolynaut has been Vvenka’s cultural mentor and healer for over 70 years. Through the upheavals caused by the change into and out of the Soviet system, Moolynaut has healed the sick, herded reindeer, fished in the sea, and raised displaced children like Sergei and Oleg. Locals claim she kept wolves away from the reindeer herds by whispering spells. And she remembers when the last American ships came to trade with her father before the Cold War. Most importantly, Moolynaut now believed that the post-perestroika despair in modern Vvenka could only be cured if the Koryak—the people of the deer—were reunited with the reindeer.

The last of the Vvenka herds were killed off a year ago. Once, this region and neighboring Chukotka were home to the world’s largest domesticated reindeer herds. But, decimated by poaching, predation by wolves, and newer, more difficult economic conditions (including a steep fall in demand for reindeer meat during the 1990s), domesticated reindeer have dwindled to a few small herds hidden in the vast Siberian tundra.

Without deer, the Koryak lifestyle has lost its compass. Moolynaut said that, although the younger generation will adapt to new ways and new foods, the older villagers have a difficult time living without the reindeer. The villagers want to start herding again, and Oleg and Sergei hoped that, if we traveled west and north, we could find one of the remaining herds and bring reindeer back to Vvenka.

Jon had theorized that mountain bikes would be the perfect way to travel across the frozen tundra. Two days after the spring festival, we assembled the bicycles in the tiny kitchen of our borrowed apartment. Lydia sat near the stove and wistfully told stories of how the Koryak had lived with their herds on the tundra. She also told us that Oleg’s Koryak name translates to “Duck Devil” and that he is the most successful hunter in the village. His hunting skill isn’t confined to shooting ducks. Because there were no deer to eat, he had killed two moose, numerous ptarmigan, and hares to feed the village and his family during the winter.

Very early the next morning, Oleg drove up on his snowmobile. With a rifle strapped across his broad shoulders, his malahi hat, and a pair of Russian flight goggles, he looked very much the demon. A small gray dog, a husky named Little Wolf—Volchuk in Russian—perched on the seat behind him. We loaded our gear on the sleds and helped lash on the three, 55-gallon drums of fuel for the journey. Then Jon, Misha, and I pedaled out of town in hope that the snow would be firm enough to support the bikes. But the theory that it might prove possible to ride mountain bikes on the frozen tundra did not pan out. Little snow had fallen during the winter and the snow pack was unconsolidated and spotty. Less than a kilometer from the village, we left the firm snowmobile track. Our wheels broke through the surface and churned down to the hubs. We pedaled and pushed, but, by the end of day, we had pedaled only one of the 33 kilometers that we gained.

Duck Devil, Little Wolf, and Sergei left ten hours after we did, but caught up to us just before we reached a hunter’s shack where we spent the night. Over the next several days, we tied the bikes on the sleds and tried skiing, but a lack of snow and rough country also made skiing difficult and slow. Then a blizzard held us down for two days, and we all realized that, in order to find the reindeer people before we ran out of gas and food, we had to move faster. I climbed on the passenger’s seat behind Duck Devil. Little Wolf jumped up and wiggled his way in between us and the three of us shared this seat for the rest of the 500 kilometer journey. Misha and Jon perched on one of the sleds that Sergei towed behind his snowmobile. They bumped along only slightly cushioned by a reindeer hide on top of an extra motor, an ice drill, a shovel, and a spare ski for the snowmobile.

Misha called this big, open expanse of the snow-covered “tundra”—the white desert. But it seemed more like being on an immense, white ocean. When I sat nestled on the rear seat of the snowmobile, I felt as though I was traveling on a snow yacht. Captain Duck Devil navigated us through wind-sculpted snow that undulated in wave-like mounds in every direction. There were no trees, no buildings, nothing but rolling white and blue sky. Without anything vertical to use as a reference point, a tiny alder bush looked from a distance like a house or a rock. When Sergei, Jon, and Misha traveled ahead of us, they soon became small dots on an infinite white plain.

Fruitlessly, we wandered around for a week looking every place where Duck Devil and Sergei expected to find reindeer people. When another blizzard blew in from the north, we quickly pitched our canvas-walled tent in a sheltered gully.

After two days, the storm let up. Duck Devil did a short reconnaissance on his snowmobile, and returned to tell us we were only 10 minutes away from an abandoned geology village. The next morning, we followed the smoke coming from the chimney of a dilapidated house. Constantine and Anatoli, caretakers for the mining company, were the only inhabitants. Constantine was also a hunter, and knew the exact migration route of a group of herders. Earlier in the winter, they had hired him to trap a wolf that threatened their herd. We pulled out the map and he pointed out the route to their base.

By early afternoon, we had turned up the third stream that flows into Talovka Lake, and followed it toward the Parapalsky Mountains. The Parapalsky valley lies about 200 kilometers southeast of Manily on the west coast of Kamchatka. We stopped on a small rise to scan the horizon with binoculars. The day wore on and I felt like we were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. We continued driving toward the mountains. Then suddenly Little Wolf’s ears perked up, and I noticed that Duck Devil was staring intently toward a thicket of bushes near a small stream. He stopped the snowmobile and pointed to brown spots beyond the brush and all but shouted an enthusiastic, “oleyn, oleyn!” My less-trained eyes required binoculars to see the well-hidden reindeer herd.

Four herders met us at the stream. They crowded around us to share their excitement about a tiny deer that had just been born. The still wet baby deer wobbled on long, gangly legs to hide behind its mother. Transfixed, we watched until one of the herders offered to lead us to the herding base. He tied his small sled to the toboggan of extra fuel we were towing behind the snowmobile, and careened back and forth whenever Duck Devil hit the throttle.

We skirted the base of the mountains, crossed a stream, and climbed to the top of a vast plateau. When we arrived, a cluster of people had gathered outside a one room, squared-log cabin covered with tarpaper. The reindeer herders were amazed to meet Americans. They had only seen foreign visitors once before, when a Japanese photographer had helicoptered to their base camp in 1997. He shot photos of their funeral ceremony and two hours later disappeared into the sky.

Nikolai, the leader, beckoned us into the cabin that the clan uses as its permanent base, which is situated at the best birthing place on their migration. By the time my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, Nikolai’s oldest daughter Lucia had cleared a low table, filled cups with tea, and dished up plates of moose meat and kasha. A younger woman, Nadia, continued her daily task of making bread dough in a metal bucket. After we were served the meat and kasha, the women formed the dough into flat rounds that they fried in a pan fitted directly over the flame of a wood-fired iron stove.

The herding group moves with their herd of 800 deer over a 300-kilometer migration. During the coldest months of the year, they travel between three different cabins that align with their route. The birth of the new deer had brought them to this small enclave of buildings and corrals. The rest of the year they travel with the herd, staying in small canvas tents, with a larger hide tent for cooking. Nikolai’s brigade, (the name has stuck since Soviet times) is composed of 12 adults and two little girls. About half of the group is from Nikolai’s immediate family.

The next day we walked out into the bright, icy sunlight and the herders gave me a handful of dried fish with which to tempt a flock of sled deer into a small corral. These deer had been selected from the main herd and were trained to pull sleds. Nikolai supervised the selection of six deer. The herders hitched two deer each to three small wooden sleds and led them to where we stood. A herder sat on the front of the sled and motioned me to sit behind him. Then he whipped the sled deer into a trot and we jostled along, back to the main herd. The jingle of bells and the soft click of hooves crunching through the snow was muffled by the hood of the deerskin anorak that the women insisted I wear against the cold. When we got to the herd, Nikolai’s son-in-law, Vladimir, stiffly stood up to greet us. He had been out with the deer all night. He welcomed us to sit by his fire, which he had built in the lee of a sled tipped on edge and covered with a sheet of plastic as a windbreak. Even on the coldest, stormiest nights of winter, the herders sit without a tent or even a sleeping bag, watching over the herd.

On our thirty-hour flight to Kamchatka, I had read George Kennan’s classic Tent Life in Siberia, about scouting for a Trans-Siberian telegraph line in the 1860s. Kennan traveled with the wandering Koryak herders for months and his book described the herder’s life almost exactly as it still exists today. While watching and moving the herds, the herders still prefer to wear skin clothing made by the women. Sleds and herding equipment are also made by hand. Besides herding deer, the men hunt for moose, ptarmigan and bear (and fish and seals when their migration takes them close to the Sea of Okhotsk).

Today, the sovkhoz—a remnant of the herding cooperatives of Soviet times—provides very little money for food and equipment to keep the group going. Nikolai’s herd migrates over the second largest platinum deposit in the world. Last year, mining companies removed over $180 million in ore from the region. To keep relations friendly, the companies who want to mine the rich ore of the Koryak Autonomous Region have started to contribute money to preserve the herding lifestyle. Nikolai’s brigade uses the money to buy tea, rice, kasha, flour, materials, and gasoline.

Sergei and Oleg had planned to ask Nikolai about deer to restart the Vvenka herd. But, after five days, it was obvious that the brigade would not sell any of their deer. Nikolai explained that during Soviet times, his clan had herded 2000 deer. But today the herd stood at just 800. He would not sell deer until he was able to build the herd back to its original size. However, we did not go back to Vvenka empty-handed. The women piled hides in shades of creamy tan and rich coffee to send back to the old people.

That evening, they prepared a special dinner with stacks of fried bread, huge kettles of boiled moose, plates filled with dried salmon and salted wild onion, dishes of cloudberries and blueberries, and cup after cup of dark black tea and sugar. We joked and chatted. Nikolai told how much of the Koryak tradition had been destroyed during the Soviet era.

“Before, we had many, many ceremonies and festivals and contests where we would race our deer and make sacrifices to our gods. I don’t think that we will ever get back everything that we lost, but I hope that things will be better now. Three of my four children still want to live the herder’s life and these two granddaughters enjoy our life here at Parapalsky valley.”

At dawn, we packed the sleds for our return to Vvenka. As we got on the snowmobiles, one of the little girls came out carrying a small shopping bag and handed it to Sergei. Inside was a husky puppy curled up in a furry ball on a small piece of deerhide.

“Come back when the puppy grows up and then we can talk about herding some deer to Vvenka,” Nikolai said.

Moolynaut did not seem surprised when we returned to Vvenka without any reindeer. The villagers say that seeing the future is another one of her many powers. Her equanimity about the events of the last 96 years is amazing. Again we sat in the small kitchen and Lydia translated Moolynaut’s memories of the wonderful Winchester rifles that the American traders had brought in the 1930’s, and how Moolynaut had cried when she saw traders put live deer into a boat to take them away to the American ship. She told us of her nomadic life with the four husbands she has survived. All the while, villagers kept coming by to welcome us back to Vvenka with plates of food. Soon, an impromptu banquet was spread across a tablecloth on the floor. The children inflated the balloons we had given them and after dinner the whole group batted them around in a giggling version of “hot potato.” Moolynaut rocked back on her haunches and swatted a green balloon. Her eyes sparkled with joy and mirth—a smile that seemed to say that Vvenka’s people of the deer would one day soon get their reindeer and their lives back.  RL

Christine Seashore is a freelance writer who makes her home in Darby, Montana, with her husband, Jon Turk. Her story on Kayaking Kamchatka appeared in the March/April issue of Russian Life.