Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

^APRIL The Lake

It’s nine in the morning. I’m reading Michel Déon’s novel about a man who withdraws to the Irish countryside, where the people are passing strange, when I come upon these words: ‘But you know, in spite of all my willpower, solitude is the most difficult thing to protect’ – and my door flies violently open. Displaying typically Russian energy, four fishermen burst into the cabin without warning, as if they intended to beat me senseless.

They bellow exuberant greetings. They’re driving to Severobaikalsk, a large town on the northern end of Lake Baikal, to sell the fish they’ve caught in the southern sector of the reserve. I hadn’t heard their truck engine and in my fright have spilled my tea all over Un taxi mauve. There’s Sasha, who’s missing some fingers; my old acquaintance Igor (also missing some digits), whom I met five years ago out on the ice; Volodya T., whose former cabin I now inhabit; and Andrei, a Buryat I’ve never seen before. I perform the ritual: slice up the sausage they’ve placed on the table, open a bottle, bring out the glasses. Two of my visitors abstain, but the rest of us set about getting drunk.

I ask each of them to tell me how he spent his military service. Volodya was in a tank in Mongolia (a toast to tank crews); Sasha was a radio operator on the shores of the Arctic Ocean (a toast to those Arctic shores); Igor, a sailor in the Crimea (a toast to the fleet); and Andrei, a gunner in Cherkasy, in central Ukraine (a toast to the Russian politics of pacification in the Caucasus). The postings of Russian conscripts form a trans-Siberian journey to rival the one in Blaise Cendrars’s modernist poem about his Russian travels in 1905. My camera is in position on the shelf; I press the button. The conversation grows livelier, fuelled by the bite of Kedrovaya vodka in a 104°F cabin.

That’s where the recording ends. The Russians make a few more toasts to weird stuff and then suddenly they’re shouting that they’ve got to ‘get the fucking hell going’ and they put on their jackets, curse their gloves and their caps and their scarves and one of them kicks the door, calling it a fucker and, leaving me that good sausage barely half gone, off they go and there I am on the shore, a little the worse for wear, looking at a day wrecked by vodka.

Every time Russian fishermen visit my cabin I feel as if a cavalry division has come to bivouac in my kitchen garden. Fatalism, spontaneity, despotism: Mongol character traits have been injected into the Slavic venous system. The nomad shows through the woodsman. The dreadful Marquis de Custine, who wrote a celebrated account of his visit to Russia during the reign of Nicholas I, was right: Russia is ‘charged with conveying Asia to Europe’. In consideration of which, I spend an hour setting my trashed cabin to rights.

It was −4°F last night and I finally got around to nailing strips of felt on the underside of the door. This morning I drank my tea while checking messages left on the window panes by the frost. Who could decipher them? Is there writing hidden in these things?

This evening, I at last make a success of my blini. Blini are like children: you can never take your eye off them. I invent the blini stuffed with spotted char. First, catch a char. Cut wood. Make a fire. Cook the fish in the embers with some dill or fennel. Make the blini (with a few drops of beer if you have no yeast). Pull the flesh of the char to pieces over a blini. Put another blini on top of that one. Wash the whole thing down with half a pint of vodka at room temperature.

I dine, gazing out of the window. Some people can dine exclusively by feasting their eyes on a landscape. That is one definition of Eden. To live ensconced in a space one may encompass with a look, circumambulate in a day and envision in the mind.

My dinners at Baikal comprise a faint glimmer of grey energy, which is embodied energy. Grey energy skyrockets when the caloric value of the food is less than the energy necessarily expended in its production and transportation. The orange once offered at Christmas was a treasure. Everyone knew it was swollen with grey energy, and they appreciated the cost of its voyage. A catfish pulled from a bend in the Mekong by a Laotian fisherman and grilled on the river bank has zero grey energy. Like my chars, cooked a few yards from the fishing hole. Steak from Argentina, however, from cattle who feed on soya beans on the estancias of the pampas before being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe, is tarred with the brush of infamy. Grey energy is the shadow of karma, the balance due for our sins. One day we will be called upon to pay it.

In spite of appearances, the bears killed by famished Ukrainians after the fall of the Soviet Union were full of grey energy: the beasts had been brought from Siberia and raised in captivity. Forty years ago, the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes ate the flesh of their dead companions. They consumed a high-grey-energy meal: the meat had been flown in to the site.

The nutrients of the lake and the forest enrich the blood of the fishermen of Baikal. The air, water and humus of Siberia pulse through their arteries. In light of these biological findings, the rights of the soil should be taken into consideration. Since blood draws upon the substance of the soil, your identity would take root in the geographic space that nourishes you. If you partake of imported jams, you are a citizen of the world.

I’ve begun Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, have finished Tournier’s Friday and An Island to Oneself, Tom Neale’s account of the six years he spent on the tiny deserted island of Anchorage in the atoll of Subwarrow.

One can establish certain traits characteristic of castaways, common similarities that outline the archetypical figure of the solitary survivor washed up on a shore.

A sense of injustice at the time of the shipwreck, followed by curses directed at the gods, men and sailing ships in general.

The appearance of a slightly megalomaniacal syndrome: the castaway convinces himself that he is a privileged being.

The feeling of being the lord of a realm and of ruling over all animal, vegetable and mineral subjects: ‘If I pleased, I might call myself king, or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals,’ says Defoe’s Robinson.

The need to constantly confirm the merits of the solitary life by insisting to oneself at every occasion on the beauty of such an existence.

The contradictory wavering between the hope of prompt rescue and revulsion at any contact with one’s fellow man.

Panic over the slightest intrusion of human beings on the island.

Empathy with the natural world (this may take several years to appear).

An insistence on strictly regulating varying periods of action, meditation and leisure.

The temptation to transform each moment of existence into a staged game.

The slightly euphoric feeling of playing the role of an observer or watchman on the margins of a humanity gone astray.

The risk of contracting the ‘ivory tower syndrome’, which in its extreme form leads the castaway to see himself both as the repository of universal wisdom and the redeemer of the sins of mankind.

Today I read a lot, skated for three hours in a Viennese light while listening to the Pastorale, caught a char and harvested a pint of bait, looked out of the window at the lake through the steam of my black tea, chopped up a tree trunk nine feet long and split two days of wood, cooked and ate some good kasha, and reflected that paradise was right there for the taking in the course of my day.

Gusty weather last night. Northern winds thrashed the edge of the woods until noon. The thermometer says −9°F. What a delightful spring! When the afternoon turns mild, I begin building a table. Thick cedar branches for the legs, with a braced frame, and for the top, four planks that had been slumbering sheltered by the porch roof. Three hours of work, and by nightfall, I have my table. I take it down to the beach and set it out in the snow, where the clearing opens in front of the cedar shaped like a shell. Then I sit down on a log and lean back against the tree trunk. Those people who forbid you to put your feet on a table… do not understand the pride of a woodworker.

In the evening, I smoke a Partagás out in the cold, with my elbows on my new ‘observation deck’. The table and I, we already love each other very much. On this Earth, it’s good to lean on something.

This life brings peace. Not that all longings fade away. The cabin is no tree of Buddhist Enlightenment. A hermitage draws ambitions back to proportions of possibility. By restricting the panoply of actions, one goes deeper into each experience. Reading, writing, fishing, scaling heights, skating, strolling in the woods… Existence becomes reduced to a dozen or so activities. The castaway enjoys absolute freedom – but within the limits of his island. At the beginning of all Robinsonian narratives, the hero tries to escape by building a boat. He is convinced that anything is possible, that happiness lies just over the horizon. Cast up once again on the shore, he understands that he will not escape and, at peace, discovers that limitation brings joy. He is then said to resign himself. Resigned, the hermit? No more than the city dweller who, haggard, suddenly realizes beneath the twinkling lights of the boulevard that his whole life will still not be enough for him to sample all the attractions at the party.

In the fourth century, in Upper Egypt, the shifting sand dunes of the Sahara in Wadi Natrun were swarming with monks in rags. The anchorites ran to the desert to follow in the footsteps of Saints Anthony and Pachomius. Their eyes gazed with an unhealthy light out of leathery faces. Reality horrified them: they found life degrading. Spectres nourished on lizards, they rejected the world, fearing its savours. Their sensations were their enemies. If they dreamed of a pitcher of water, they believed Satan was tempting them. They wished to die to attain the other realm, the one guaranteed by Holy Scripture to be eternal.

The hermit of the taiga is a world away from such renunciation. The mystics tried to disappear from this earth. The woodsman wants to be reconciled with it. The ascetics waited for the advent of something not of this life, while the forester seeks the serendipitous appearance of brief pleasures, here and now. They wanted eternity; he craves the granting of prayers. They hoped to die; he desires felicity. They hated their bodies; he hones his senses. In short, if you want to have a good time around a bottle of vodka, you’re better off running into a hermit in the woods rather than a holy fool perched on his pillar.

Out in those deserts, encountering one’s fellow man was an event. The anchorites forgot what a human face looked like, and when a visitor appeared, many of them fell to their knees, convinced this apparition was a demon.

Which is what happens to me when Volodya T. pops in on me this morning, arriving in a jeep to collect some belongings. Why doesn’t this damn door ever open to reveal a svelte Danish ski champion come to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on the shores of Baikal?

‘A vodka?’ I ask Volodya.

‘No,’ he says.

‘You’re not drinking?’

‘I stopped.’

‘When?’

‘Twenty years ago, before I came here. One day I woke up and my wife and children were gone. Family is better than booze. They came back later but I haven’t gone back to drinking.’

‘So, how’s your new life in Irkutsk?’

‘Not great.’

‘Why?’

‘Money. I keep having to shoot bears. I can get 6,000 roubles for a skin, a month’s salary! I’ve promised one to two or three people who’ve already paid me.’

‘In France we have a saying about people who sell a bearskin before…’

‘I know, don’t tell me. So do we.’

‘Really, not even one small vodka?’

‘No, I told you, fucking hell.’

A whole hour cleaning the cabin. My reed broom works wonders. I sponge off the oilcloth and polish the windows with vodka. Since it’s housekeeping day, I prepare my banya. In the evening, shiny as a rouble, I’m at the table with my glass of vodka, the kasha is cooking, the kettle’s on, the candles are dripping and the lake is creaking: everything’s in its place doing its duty. The barometer is dropping like a stone; I can hear the tops of the cedars whistling…

Storm.

All that’s left of my life are the notes. I’m keeping a diary, as a supplement to memory, to stave off forgetting. Without a record of one’s exploits, what’s the point of living? The hours stream by, and each day vanishes into a triumph of nothingness. The private diary: a commando operation against the absurd.

I archive the passing hours. Keeping a journal makes life fruitful. The daily appointment with the blank page forces one to pay better attention to the doings of the day – to listen harder, to think more clearly, to see more intently. It would be grim to have nothing to inscribe in one’s notebook in the evening. The daily composition is like having dinner with a fiancée: in order to know what to tell her later on, it’s best to think about it during the day.

Outdoors, chaos. The wind is carving the snowdrifts with its teeth. Gusts are giving the edge of the forest a whipping. The cedars are in the front line, taking their punishment. Torn branches sail over the crowns of the trees, which the tempest seems bent on uprooting. A sad force, the wind, labouring in vain. Watching this fury with a good smoke, warm by the stove, is one definition of civilization.

In the evening, I slowly get drunk. The cabin: a cell of inebriation.

Still storming. Inexhaustible, the wind, leading the assault against the skirt of the forest. Why this thirst for revenge? Its rage against what endures… The lake, perfectly polished, gleams, stripped of all snow. I go for a little walk on the ice, pushed along by the wind. A blast tears off my shapka, which whirls out of sight in ten seconds, carried off at sixty miles an hour. I’m almost two miles out on the lake. I rig up a turban from my scarf and pull my hood down tight. I hadn’t anticipated having so much trouble getting back to the shore without crampons, going against the wind. I have to get down on my knees to offer less resistance. I progress by wedging my feet into the edges of cracks. Crawling across a frozen lake, bowed down before a storm, is a lesson in humility.

With a few more miles-per-hour, the wind would sweep me off to the middle of the lake like a hockey puck, forcing me to go ask for help on the other shore, fifty miles away in a village in Buryatia: ‘Hello, pardon me, the wind just blew me in.’

Tonight the cabin creaked in every joint, adding the moans of the wood to the explosions of the ice. If I were superstitious, I’d be aghast at the noise.

Trapped, I’m angry. And calm down when I read this in Defoe’s Crusoe: ‘The 24th [December]. Rain all day all night, no stirring about for me.’

Dawn revealed a cold, blue day. The lake, washed. The world is new, burnished by forty-eight hours of fury. I drink my tea outside, at my table, in the refreshed atmosphere. Not a breath of wind. I detect a muffled humming, the tinnitus of solitude.

A visit to my wooden crates. My supplies are dwindling. I have enough pasta left for a month and Tabasco to drench it in. I have flour, tea and oil. I’m low on coffee. As for vodka, I should make it to the end of April.

In the afternoon, I try out a new fishing spot an hour’s tramp to the north, at the mouth of a little river, below a slope covered with sturdy conifers. The hole doesn’t produce much: an hour to catch one char. I stay there until dusk, sitting on the stool, waiting for a twitch on the line. Fishing: the last clause in the pact signed with time. If you go home empty-handed, it means that time made the only catch of the day. I’m willing to spend hours sitting still. All that patience might bring me a fish. If not, too bad; I won’t be angry at those hours for my disappointment. There aren’t that many activities that risk being reduced to a vague hopefulness. Personally, I don’t believe in messiahs any more, and will await the coming only of fish.

In the evening, after dealing with the sole char of the day, I finish Crusoe and begin Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue. These two books should be read together. Not in order to imagine Justine arriving on a castaway’s island, but because Robinson tries to re-create civilization and reinvent morality, whereas the Marquis de Sade tries to dynamite the former and soil the latter. Two servants of culture at opposite ends of the spectrum.

After an overnight lull, the wind has doubled in strength. At two in the afternoon, it dies down again. The clouds open, soaking Baikal in sunshine. When a cloud counterattacks, the ice grows dull, and areas still bathed in light become striped with shadows. The grey knife blade gains ground, sliding over the ivory; the sun regroups, breaks through, and darkness ebbs away. The light is playing at games of wind and chance.

Amid all this mottling, four points stand out. My binoculars reveal some people on bicycles. For a moment I consider putting out the stove to keep the chimney from revealing my presence, but then feel ashamed of that thought.

They have passed Middle Cedar Cape and have altered course. They’re coming towards me. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.

Sergei, Ivan, Svieta and Igor work in the hydroelectric plant in Bratsk. During their winter holiday, they get on their bikes and ride along the frozen trails. I serve them tea; they unpack quantities of cold cuts and a huge jar of mayonnaise, which they carefully spread on every slice of sausage.

‘Would you like more tea?’ I ask.

‘No,’ replies Igor, dipping a sausage in the mayonnaise. ‘We’re going to have lunch in Elohin in about an hour.’

‘You’ve got a lot of titmice around here,’ remarks Svieta.

‘Yes. They’re my friends and they’re teaching me Russian.’

They give me strange looks, and eventually pack up to leave.

I’m going to Elohin. I felt like having one of those banyas Volodya knows how to prepare, with the temperature at 200°F and beer to drink outside, our bodies steaming under the wooden awning as we look out at the mountains. En route, two hours north of my cape, I leave my sledge at the mouth of a frozen river that slices through the forest with its icy blade. The crampons are gripping well and I climb up from 2,600 feet through walls of schist bristling with denuded fir trees. The surface is only a bridge: I can hear water running beneath the vault. Red saplings grow along the edges, and their frozen debris streaks like blood through the crystal body of the ice. Winter is a vice.

From the lower river, it’s still a little over seven miles to Elohin. Some wide faults force me to make many detours, seeking a way through the labyrinth of gaps and sometimes leaping over the fissures. Gusts of wind chivy along snaking lines of fine snow. I like walking on ice; in moonlight, it’s one of the few places where you can be sure you won’t be crushing little critters. The perfect terrain for those Jain priests who strive not to harm the tiniest gnat…

The veins in the ice. Like following the thread of a thought. If nature thinks, landscapes express the ideas. We ought to draw up a psychophysiology of ecosystems by attributing an emotion to each one. There would be the melancholy of forests, the joy of mountain torrents, the hesitation of bogs, the strict severity of peaks, the aristocratic frivolity of lapping waves… A new discipline: the anthropocentrism of landscapes.

Volodya teases me when I show up at his door.

‘You didn’t bring any flowers for Irina?’

‘Offering women flowers is a heresy. Flowers are obscene sex organs, they symbolize ephemerality and infidelity, they spread themselves wide open at the roadside, on offer to every passing breeze, the mouth parts of insects, clouds of seeds and the teeth of animals. They’re trampled, picked and sniffed by noses. One should bring the woman one loves stones, fossils, some gneiss; I mean something that lasts for ever and won’t wither and fade.’

That’s what I would have liked to reply to Volodya, but my Russian is too weak so I say: ‘Yes, I did have some, but they shrivelled on the way. The banya, Volodya: it’s ready?’

‘It’s waiting for you, pal.’

That evening, I sit on the bench with Volodya’s cat on my lap and watch Buryatia’s lights go out. It’s 10°F; the horizon is a sheet of satin. A snapping noise makes the cat’s ears prick up; a dog barks.

Eleven o’clock. Volodya hasn’t turned off the radio. I’m lying on the floor in the toasty cabin; we’re listening to the main station. They announce the disaster. The Polish government’s Tupolev jet has crashed near Smolensk. The Polish president and dozens of officials are dead. It seems there were no survivors. The plane was bringing a Polish delegation to a ceremony in honour of the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre, for which Moscow has finally agreed to admit responsibility.

‘Volodya?’

‘What?’

‘This isn’t the first time a Russian plane has wiped out some Poles.’

‘That’s not funny, fuck that, not funny at all.’

Throughout the night the radio spat out its news. In my half-sleep, I heard the growing toll: ninety-five dead… ninety-six dead… ninety-seven dead… At around two o’clock I stopped up my ears with chewed paper. I tore out a page of Lord Jim, masticated it slowly (evil-tasting ink), and used Conrad’s literature as earplugs, thinking I would hear the sea.

This morning, Volodya takes me along to inspect his trap line. The job of a forest ranger is to keep poachers from massacring the animals. Volodya carries out his mission strictly, and strictly within the boundaries of the reserve. His cabin sits on the southern bank of the River Elohin, the northern boundary of the nature reserve. On the other side, the taiga is no longer protected, and that’s where Volodya sets his traps.

He’s wearing his skis: horsehide strips tacked onto a pair of wooden runners. I’m wearing snowshoes. It takes three hours to check the traps. We sink deeply into the powder, working our way along the joint between the mountain slope and the wooded shelf at its base. The jays signal our approach. Volodya’s young dog keeps raising false alarms, having not yet learned that one doesn’t disturb the master over a squirrel. Volodya is training him with gobs of yelling: ‘These dogs don’t know a thing, fucking hell!’ Out of fifteen traps, two minks. Volodya swears that the forest is empty and that life was better in the old days. What the Americans did with the prairie bison, the Russians did with their mustelids: they’ve exterminated the weasel family to put people in furs. One day, man enters the woods, and the gods withdraw.

I will have learned that one can live near a gigantic skating rink, feed on caviar, bear paws and moose liver, wear mink, stride through the woods with a rifle slung over one’s shoulder, witness each morning, when dawn touches the ice, one of the loveliest sights on the planet, and still dream of life in an apartment equipped with the latest robotics and high-tech gadgetry. The eremitic temptation follows an immutable cycle: one must first suffer from indigestion in the heart of the modern city in order to dream of a cosy cabin in a clearing. Bogged down in the grease of conformity and padded in the fat of comfort, one becomes attuned to the call of the forest.

At noon I head for home. A dusting of snow covers the ice; slippery going for my boots. I’m eager for a solitary evening. Mist veils the slopes. The shore changes shape again and again.

The winter just won’t quit. Last night, 5°F. No sign of a thaw. Snowflakes fall from dawn to dusk, making a silky rustling. I spend the day in my mother cabin, my egg, my lair, crossing the threshold gratefully, feeling myself enveloped in that good warmth. The hours pass slowly through the window. I’m a bit bored. This day is a slightly leaky tap from which every hour slowly drips. As a companion, boredom is passé, but one adjusts anyway, although time does start tasting a little like cod-liver oil. Then suddenly, that taste is gone and with it, all boredom: time has become once more that light-footed and invisible procession, making its way through Being.

It takes me two and a half hours to get out of the forest. I’m heading up the second valley to the south of my cabin, looking for a bivouac. Despite my snowshoes, I sink in halfway up my thighs. Every step is a major battle. I reach the upper edge of the forest at seven in the evening, soaked. I choose a shelf at an altitude of 4,000 feet, above a scree slope. About 300 feet below me, I can make out the tracks of a wolverine. Wolverines don’t hibernate, and this one has trekked across the flank of the mountain. The cold is brutal. Dwarf pines exposed by the wind crawl up among some rust-coloured boulders. Buryatia is a red streak to the east. I cut armfuls of branches to make myself a mattress, and start a fire in the gathering darkness. I pitch the tent, toss in my mattress and sleeping bag. I cook some pasta over the fire, then lounge on my bed of branches, softer than a Byzantine sofa. My fire sits between two boulders about five feet high, and their sides reflect the heat. It’s minus ten or twenty degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m warm in my band-shell of rocks heated by the flames. And I stare at the precise spot where sparks from the fire, shooting into the sky, grow pale and glitter with a last brilliance before melting into the stars. It’s hard to convince myself to go inside my tent; I’m like a kid who doesn’t want to turn off the TV. From my sleeping bag, I can hear the wood crackling. Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

I open the zip, blink in the raw sunshine, rejoice in the blue sky, sit up, and discover the image of the plain, gloriously empty at the bottom of its basin, 2,600 feet below. That’s how today begins. Last night a lynx visited my camp, leaving tracks around my tent.

The euphoria of camping mornings! There you are, above the forest; you have survived the night and received a little lagniappe of life.

I climb 1,300 feet higher, straight up from the campsite. At ten in the morning, I’m only 1,640 feet from the summit ridge. The lakeshore traces a sine wave: the capes for crests, the bays for hollows. The black scallops of the wooded salients bite into the icy plain, undulating like a battle diagram of enemy lines falling back and charging forward. I return to my fire, rekindle it, make tea, break camp and go home. The lynx checked out the wolverine’s tracks before heading into the forest. The snow is crisscrossed by the tracks of minks, hares and foxes. The forest thrums faintly with invisible life. Bushy lichens caress my face. I squint at the larches: they look like giants armed with bludgeons. If the desert hermits had retreated to the taigas, they would have invented religions peopled with joyous spirits and animal gods. The desert is desiccating, and I think about St Bernard congratulating himself, after a walk, for having noticed nothing of the outside world.

I’m back in my cabin in three hours. It’s 28°F and I have lunch outdoors, at the lakeshore table. The titmice waltz, intoxicated with warmth. The first full-blown all-out day of spring is an important date in a man’s year.

Shadows descend and, nibbling at the white plain, cross the lake to enshroud the Buryat mountains lounging on the opposite shore, convinced that sunset would pass them by.

A hermit does not threaten human society, of which he is at most the living critique.

The vagabond steals and scrounges. The rebel-of-the-moment declaims on TV. The anarchist dreams of destroying the society in which he conceals himself. Today’s hacker plots the collapse of virtual citadels in his bedroom. The anarchist tinkers with his bombs in saloons, while the hacker arms his programs at his computer, but both need the society they deplore and target for destruction – which is their raison d’être.

The hermit stays off to one side in polite refusal, like a guest who, with a gentle gesture, declines the proffered dish. If society disappeared, the hermit would go on living as a hermit. Those in revolt against society, however, would find themselves technically out of work. The hermit does not oppose, but espouses a way of life. He seeks not to denounce a lie, but to find a truth. He is physically inoffensive and is tolerated as if he belonged to an intermediate order, a caste halfway between barbarians and civilized people. The chivalrous hero of the twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, driven mad by the loss of his lady-love, wanders naked in a forest until he is taken in and cared for by a hermit, who restores his reason and leads him back to civilization. The hermit: a passeur, a go-between of worlds.

At four in the afternoon, I close Chrétien de Troyes and set off to fish at hole no. 2, an hour’s slog to the north. (Hole no. 1 is the spot out in front of the cabin.) The shore slips by, harsh and austere. There is joy in these woods, but not an ounce of humour. Maybe that’s what makes the faces of hermits so stern and Thoreau’s writings so serious. I catch three char just under eight inches. They wind up on the stove, stuffed with blueberries, in a drizzle of oil. The flesh is tasty. Fresh, it goes well with vodka. Everything goes well with vodka. Except a woman’s kisses. No danger of that.

Sergei arrives at my cabin at eight in the morning. He’s been visiting the Volodya up in Elohin, and I didn’t hear his car out on the lake. As usual, he pops in without knocking – and I let out a yell, then take a long minute to recover my inner equilibrium, upended by the intrusion. My tea isn’t even ready, so at least I didn’t spill that.

‘Your cabin, you keep it nice. With Volodya, it’s what we call a German cabin.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘You want to come to Pokoyniki? I’ll bring you home again.’

‘Okay… We’ll have some tea, though?’

‘No, just come, we’re in a hurry.’

Ten minutes later, I shut the padlock and climb into the car. We slip off to the south. In Russia, everything happens in a hurry: life is a drowsy thing shaken by spasms.

In Pokoyniki, big doings. Sergei and Yura-with-the-pale-eyes have taken advantage of the frozen lake to build a pontoon on pilings – a platform baptized ‘the island’ – out in the big marsh that prolongs the bay on its northern flank. With wooden levers, jacks and ropes, we spend the afternoon hoisting a metal railway car onto the wooden platform. Inside: a bed and a stove.

‘The shoreline marks the boundary of the reserve, and the limit of its jurisdiction,’ announces Sergei. ‘So the island will be independent territory.’

‘Free?’ I ask.

‘Yes, free and independent. We have just created the free and autonomous territory of Pokoyniki.’

In the forest, shadows slip through the larches: horses are moving fluidly among the tree trunks. Their hooves crunch through the snow crust with the sound of a fist punching a feather pillow, and their nostrils give off plumes of vapour. These animals belonged to a herd maintained by the employees of the meteorological station at Solnechnaya, a little over a mile north of Pokoyniki, but they returned to the wild in 1991, when their caretakers abandoned the station at the collapse of the Soviet Union. At dusk, a four- or five-year-old horse comes wandering among the cabins, his head hanging. He has left the herd to die, and lies down facing the lake. Sergei heaves a sigh, then dispatches him with a dagger thrust to the carotid. We chop him up with axes. Jays take their posts at the tops of the pines, and the entrails tumble out with a slurp, silky and perfectly coiled together, steaming in the cold. Night falls on this bloody affair. The dogs, who had been awaiting their turn, are given the go-ahead.

That evening, Pokoyniki is the scene of considerable excitement: the new director of the nature reserve, S.A., has come to visit his rangers, accompanied by his henchmen, who busily unload the vodka and cognac. I look longingly at those crates, because there’s enough there to erase from my memory the sight of that horse panting hard as it gave up the ghost. Natasha has prepared some venison soup. A buffet in the Russian style is spread out on the table: a pell-mell of grilled catfish fillets, a haunch of moose and Siberian sausages. Everyone drinks into oblivion.

‘Where were you born, director?’ I ask.

‘In the Republic of Tuva.’

‘That’s Lenin’s native region,’ says Sergei.

‘Well, then,’ I suggest, ‘let’s drink to dictators who govern empires and nature reserves.’

‘And also to Tupolevs,’ adds one of S.A.’s thugs.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘The best plane in the world: the Poles just bit the dust in one.’

Natasha offers the director a bag of frozen fish. Businessman though he may be, S.A. can’t conceal the twinkle of delight in his eyes. Hereabouts people still haven’t forgotten the hard times of the past.

The cognac didn’t agree with me. It’s nine in the morning and I have a railway tie stuck crosswise in my head. Yura with the fog-grey eyes awakens me: we have to go pull in the nets. Sasha of the missing fingers accompanies us. I nurse my hangover in the van, collapsed on some coils of rope, and listen to the two men rattle on about their favourite theme:

‘Why are there so many Muslims in your country?’

For a muzhik, France offers two subjects of astonishment: that the people of Napoleon’s Grande Armée beg for government help when faced with not even an inch of snow, and that they let their cities burn while they have 3,000 soldiers deployed in the mountains of Afghanistan. Sasha asks me about these things every single time we meet.

The ice-fishing shelter is nine miles from Pokoyniki. Inside the corrugated metal cabin, a wooden floor with a cut-out allows access to the fishing hole below. A gas stove heats the place, and we work in woollen shirts. We begin by raising many hundreds of feet of cordage with a hand winch that creaks at each turn. For two hours, Yura turns the handle, staring into space. The net surges up from the depths. The two Russians haul the nylon tresses from the water and harvest the omul, a freshwater whitefish endemic to Lake Baikal. The plastic tubs fill with hundreds of fish. In the eerie turquoise light, the lake offers its treasures. The strangest thing is that it keeps giving them to us on demand after thousands of years. Lunch: five fish tossed into a pot and sluiced with three glasses of samogon, the caramel-coloured moonshine Sasha makes himself in his dacha at Severobaikalsk. Sergei drives me back home. We sit silently, gliding slowly over a surface worthy of an artist’s brush: the marbling of the ice, the chaotic sculptures, the army of pines beneath their snowy burden, and the black granite draperies compose on the canvas of the sky a tortured tableau compared to which the desolate landscapes of the nineteenth-century German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich look like Haitian folk art.

We’re stopped short by a crevasse.

‘This one opened up today,’ Sergei announces.

‘How will we get past?’ I ask.

‘A “trampoline”…’

‘And for your return trip?’

‘A detour.’

The two edges of a fracture are not always on the same level. As it shifts, the ice may raise one of the lips, and by using this discrepancy, drivers sometimes succeed in launching their vehicles over such obstacles. I have confidence in Sergei, but I feel a twinge when, going full blast from a head start of a good 160 feet, he crosses himself.

We make it.

Here the journal breaks off for eight days for administrative reasons. The Russian authorities require my return to civilization to seek an extension of my visa. I tear myself away from the lake, take planes, besiege diplomatic and cultural officials who hibernate year-round more deeply than bears, obtain the stamp I covet, batten down my hatches so I won’t get sucked into the big city, sleep five tense hours a night, get horribly drunk, heave another load of provisions and summer equipment into the back of a truck, retrace my steps, arrive at the lakeshore off the southern tip of Olkhon Island, and find the hydrofoil that had recently delivered me waiting for me there.

Hydrofoils are the gem of Russian iron and steel metallurgy. Powered by a propeller, the machine moves on a cushion of air. So it couldn’t care less about the fissures that scar the ice this late in April. Within four hours, we reach Pokoyniki, making as much noise as a massive Antonov airlifter. While I was gone, the lake surface has turned milky: melting slightly, the ice now has a nacreous crêpe surface that crackles faintly underfoot. Passing the hamlet of Zavorotni, I stop in to visit V.E., who entrusts two of his twelve dogs to me. Aika is a black female; Bek, a white male. They are four months old. They will bark if bears begin approaching the cabin towards the end of May. I also have my distress flare gun. If attacked, you just fire at the animal’s paws: the detonation and fireworks usually persuade the bear to buzz off.

I regain the cabin as happy as a foot-soldier diving into his bunker. Depending on my mood, my shelter is an egg, a womb, a coffin or a wooden ship. I bid farewell to my friends. Oh, the happiness that wells up as the rumbling of their engine dies away…

Winter is still here. Only the pale face of the lake signals that spring is waiting in the wings.

Some snow has melted in the clearing, revealing the detritus my predecessor accumulated over twenty years. Capable of superhuman efforts to repel an enemy, Russians can’t summon the energy to throw rubbish into a ditch. I cart tyres, wrecked engines and damaged motor parts off behind the banya. I restore the clearing to emptiness. A mist runs along the shores, snagging itself on the pines, sometimes dawdling enough to let a beam of sunshine slip through. Surrounded by fairyland, I go fishing. The dogs follow me everywhere. My shadow has become a dog. The two little creatures have placed themselves in my hands. A humanist animal, the dog believes in us. Wherever water seeps onto the ice, lapis-blue reflections bloom on the creamy glaze. The dogs wait patiently by the ice-hole. I give them the guts of the three char I catch.

My round trip to the city has reinforced my love of cabin life. Cabins are the votive lights hung on the roof of the night.

The taiga is black. The trees are shedding their snow. Dark patches appear on the mountains. Aika and Bek rush up outside the window at first light. When two little dogs celebrate your advent in the morning, night takes on a flavour of expectation. A dog’s fidelity demands nothing, not a single duty. Canine love is satisfied with a bone. Dogs? We make them sleep outdoors, we speak roughly to them, snap at them, feed them on scraps, and now and then – whap! A kick in the ribs. What we deal out to them in blows, they give back to us in drooling adoration. And suddenly I see why man has made the dog his best friend: this is a poor beast whose submission demands nothing in return, a creature corresponding perfectly, in other words, to what man is capable of giving.

We’re playing on the lakeshore. Aika has found a deer bone, and I’m throwing it for them. They never tire of bringing it back to me, they’d keep going till they dropped dead. These masters teach me to inhabit the only country worth living in: the moment. Man’s particular sin is to have lost this frenzy the dog has for retrieving the same bone. For us to be happy, we have to cram our homes with dozens of more and more sophisticated objects. Advertising urges us to ‘Go fetch!’ The dog has admirably solved the problem of desire.

A long trek to South Cedar Cape with the little chaps. The wind has come up and the sky is in shreds. Shafts of sunlight strafe the taiga through the clouds with tawny streaks and stamp it with yokes of gold; sometimes the light strikes a section of mouldered cliff face, bathing it in brightness. Old ice faults can be treacherous where they haven’t refrozen solid, because the eye cannot gauge the thickness of the surface. The dogs stop short, whimpering, before an area gorged with water, and I must advance carefully to show them they can follow. An eagle wheels high overhead. The wind kicks up sheaves of spangles, which turn into pyrite dust when they hit a sunbeam. The forest grumbles at the gusts. Spring has marshalled its forces here; I feel them, ready to attack, not yet daring to retake the territory.

The sky is insane, in a fluster of fresh air, dazed with light. Images of intense beauty spring up – and vanish. Is that the apparition of a god? I’m incapable of taking the slightest photo, which would be a double offence: a sin of inattention and an insult to the moment.

When we reach the cape where I wanted to test the fishing, a little over six miles from the cabin, I don’t even have time to get out my ice drill. The enraged wind orders a retreat. I go home at a run, the dogs on my heels. We’re waylaid by some fierce blasts, which suck up particles of abrasive crystal. The dogs protect their noses with their forepaws. For two hours, we fight our way towards the cabin against an invisible hand.

Tomorrow is May Day. Will the traditional lilies-of-the-valley bloom on the taiga?