The Incredible Human Journey (28 page)

So, for the time being the question of whether it was climate change, overkill by humans or a mixture of the two that eventually
did in the mammoths is far from settled.
^13
,
14

After the worst of the Ice Age, while megafauna like the mammoths had disappeared for good, other plants, animals and humans
started to spread northwards again as the climate warmed. But using a word like ‘warm’ to describe Siberia is somewhat misleading,
as I was about to find out: I was going to stay with the reindeer hunters of the north.

Meeting with the Reindeer Herders of the North: Olenek, Siberia

I was heading for the coldest inhabited place on earth: northern Siberia. Winter temperatures there can fall to below –70 degrees. First, I flew to Yakutsk, where, as I stepped off the plane and inhaled
the icy air, I felt my bronchi constricting in protest. It was about –20 degrees. At the airport, I met my guide, anthropologist
Anatoly Alekseyev. From the airport we drove through snowy streets, past ramshackle houses that were visibly subsiding into
the permafrost, and past a huge statue of Lenin in the square, his right hand outstretched. Although I’d heard Yakutsk described
as a modern Klondike run by diamond merchants, there was little outward evidence of this wealth. There were lots of new bars
and casinos, and very smart women in chic fur hats and high-heeled boots, but the whole place still felt very run down. Arriving
at the hotel, and stepping from the icy cold into an overheated foyer, I was clearly entering a different culture from European
Russia. There were woven panels of horse hair depicting long-bearded old men and reindeer. People’s faces – including Anatoly’s
– were also very different here from those in St Petersburg or Moscow. Gone were the large noses and long faces. The majority
of people were now much more oriental-looking, with broad cheeks, narrow eyes and small noses.

The following day we caught another, smaller prop plane and flew further north, from Yakutsk to the village of Olenek. We
were sharing the aircraft with a crowd of very smart-looking Siberians: men in suits and women in exquisite long fur coats
and hats. The flight took us over a snowy landscape sparsely covered in larch forest. We followed the meandering River Lena,
icebound and covered in snow, northwards, then peeled away to the west.

The plane landed at Olenek, and from my seat just behind the wing I could see the wheel make contact with the runway, kicking
up an impressive plume of snow. And as we slowed to a halt we could see a welcome party assembled on the runway: a group of
women dressed once again in long fur coats, one in a crimson coat lined with white fur, like a female Santa Claus, and a circle
of dancers dressed in traditional fur outfits that looked almost Native American. One woman held out a round loaf with a small
pot of salt embedded in the middle of it; I tore off a piece of bread, dipped it in the salt, and ate it. Children ran up
with necklaces made of reindeer antler and hung them around our necks. I had arrived in Olenek on the eve of their annual
reindeer festival, as had many others from the region, including diamond-mine owners and politicians – ‘Big Fircones’, as
the Russian phrase puts it.

Anatoly and I somehow got swept along with the diamond oligarchs, and ushered into the Regional Administrators’ office, where
we were treated to a discourse on the progressive changes being made in the village. Although I had never been to Russia before
this trip, the whole meeting felt rich with Soviet overtones. When the meeting drew to a close, I was given a key-ring emblazoned
with a badge of the Reindeer Festival. Then Anatoly and I took a rugged little Toyota van across the frozen River Olenek
to our lodging on the opposite bank.

We were staying in Marina Stepanova’s single-storey wooden house, with a woodshed and an outside toilet near the fence, flanking
the driveway. There were steps up the porch and a heavy, felt-edged front door (which had to be shut quickly as you passed
through so as not to let the heat out of the house). Inside, a small hallway, with hooks for coats, led straight into a room
with a tiny kitchen on the right and a dining area on the left. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house. The house
was toasty warm: a central wood-burning stove was kept alight during the day, to melt ice for water as well as providing heat,
and at night hot water flowed into radiators in each room from a remote boilerhouse. Marina was staying with family, though popping in to cook us meals – very generously letting us take over her house for a
while.

As Anatoly and I settled in, Piers Vitebsky appeared: a great bear of a man, he would help me understand Evenki culture as
I experienced it over the coming days. Piers was an anthropologist who had specialised in shamanism, spending time with tribes in India
and northern Siberia. He headed up Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, and
it was through Piers that Anatoly had developed his interest in anthropology and become a historian of his own people.

Marina’s dinners were generous and unchanging. There were hunks of white bread, biscuits and sweets, arranged on a cake stand
in the centre of the table. We had cups of tea made with hot water from electric urns, and cranberry juice. There were small bowls
of carrot and cabbage salad, and, when we sat down, huge steaming dishes of potatoes and reindeer meat would appear. Essentially,
every time we left the house for any length of time, when we returned this spread would be awaiting us. I was reading Piers’
book on his experiences living with the Eveny reindeer herders (Anatoly’s people), where the camp cook would always have dinner
ready in the tent for the herders returning from working in the cold. Marina was maintaining the custom in the village.

Later that day we crossed back over the frozen river to visit the museum in Olenek, where Piers gave me a guided tour of local
Neolithic pot and stone tools, scale models of Evenki ‘sky burials’ with coffins on stilts, items of clothing stitched together
from reindeer skin, and shamanic paraphernalia – including a shaman’s coat adorned with iron animals and complete with reindeer-hide
‘tail’. The shaman’s assistant would apparently hold this two-metre-long tail to anchor the shaman and pull him back to earth
after he had been flying in a trance. I had hoped to see a shaman, but the Soviet regime had made them particularly rare and
shy. That night, though, we went along to a concert in the village hall, where, along with folk rock and pop, we were treated to
full-on shamanic kitsch with a folk singer dressed in a quasi-traditional costume, beating a skin drum, accompanied by reindeer
dancers. This was the opening night of the Reindeer Festival.

The following day, I went to the festival itself, held on the frozen river. Two ‘chums’, tepee-like tents, had been erected
within an arena framed with coloured flags. People were out in their best furs: little girls dressed cutely, head to toe
in white fur, women in long fur coats, men in fur jackets. Teams of reindeer waited patiently inside the enclosure, tethered
to their sleighs ready for the races and some of the animals were wearing beautiful bead-embroidered headdresses and trappings.
I don’t think I’d ever seen a real, live reindeer before arriving in Siberia. Now there were reindeer
everywhere
, looking like mythical creatures in the bright snow and sunshine. Throughout the day there were various reindeer races:
children riding reindeer, women racing single-reindeer sleighs, men racing double-reindeer sleighs on 3 to 8km tracks up and
down the frozen river. People had come to the festival from all over Yakutia and the neighbouring district of Zhigansky, a
geographically enormous area, something like the size of Britain and France combined. Some of the reindeer had literally flown in – by helicopter. It was still, as these festivals would have been when all the
reindeer herders were truly nomadic, an opportunity for a scattered population to come together, and, in particular, for young
men and women to meet up.

I went up to the river cliffs above the festival to get a panoramic view of the sleighs as they approached the finishing
line, the arena and the chums. Then we headed back to Marina’s where dinner was waiting for us. But we weren’t stopping long.
The time had come for the next leg of my journey, to an even more remote place. All around Olenek, reindeer herders lived
in mobile camps – and I was going to one of them, some 70km from the village.

I packed up my gear in a kitbag and wrapped myself up in layers and layers of merino wool thermals, fleeces, a jacket and,
finally, a reindeer fur coat. My feet had got cold in the afternoon, walking around in my Baffin boots. Marina looked at them
with disdain and produced a pair of reindeer boots, so I stuffed my feet into two pairs of thick woollen socks and then into
the furry-inside-and-out boots. On my head: a black woollen hat, two buffs around my neck, pulled up over my nose, and sealed
with a pair of ski goggles so that no skin showed. I tugged a hood trimmed with wolf fur firmly down and around my well-wrapped
face, and pulled on two pairs of gloves: an inner silk pair and an outer, fleece-lined, wind-proof pair. Then I walked stiffly
out of the house and down the steps of the porch to where some of the men we’d seen racing earlier in the day were loading
our gear on to sledges behind snowmobiles.

We had planned to leave for this journey at six o’clock. Piers had warned us about the difference between ‘intentional time’
and ‘real time’ in northern Siberia. It was gone nine o’clock when we left and the orange sun was resting on the horizon.
Piers, Anatoly and I were each to travel with a reindeer herder, on separate snowmobiles pulling sledges. I jumped on to a sledge, sitting with my back against a pile of bags. Then we set off – bumpily – along the snowy road, heading west into the setting sun. My goggles started to ice up almost immediately;
all I could see were occasional glimpses of trees in the upper margins of the goggles, but most of my field of vision was
a uniform yellow-grey. We hurtled along, with the sledge riding up over the bumps and crashing down on the other side.

It wasn’t long before we started to spread out, travelling far apart, as the air darkened and cooled around us. It was like
a strange exercise in selective sensory deprivation: all I could see now was dark grey, and my ears filled with the chainsaw-like
drone of the snowmobile. As tempting as it was to sleep, I had to be an active passenger: as we veered, rolled, pitched and
jolted along, I concentrated on hanging on to a thin rope binding down the tarp under me. Failure to hang on would mean coming
off at the next bend or bump. And as I was effectively blind, I could not anticipate when the sledge would try to buck me.

The cold gradually seeped in through all the layers of thermals and fur. My feet were distinctly chilly and my toes started to feel numb, so I had to focus on keeping all my toes moving as well as
hanging on, and every now and then I thrashed my legs up and down on the tarpaulin-covered sleigh, to encourage warm blood
to flow down to my extremities.

After a few hours, the snowmobile stopped and I raised my goggles again. Darkness had properly fallen by now, and we were
in a long, snowy valley with larch forest on each side. I drank some hot water from my thermos. After a few minutes, Piers
and his reindeer herder arrived and stopped to check that I was all right. The air was thick with alcohol fumes: Piers’ driver
seemed to be keeping himself going on the long, cold journey with the help of a couple of bottles of vodka. I got off the
sledge and sat on the back of the snowmobile instead, and prepared myself for the final leg, even though we were still apparently
at least two hours away from the camp. I had taken my gloves off for about two minutes to find things in my stiff, frozen
rucksack, and my fingers were already hurting. I wriggled them inside my mitts, where I had also stuffed a small bag of hand-warmer granules, and my fingers started to
sting and warm up.

Back in that dark grey space behind the iced-up goggles, I felt myself drifting into a strange internal world, as though one
part of my brain was looking after the physical challenge of holding on while another part let me revisit earlier parts of
my journey. In my head I was examining enormous, dusty bones in the vaults of the mammoth museum in St Petersburg, and drifting
around rooms of French Impressionist, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings in the Hermitage. I thought about family and
friends back home, and my garden where daffodils and primroses were coming into flower. I felt a very, very long way away.

We seemed to be going up and down over hills and very bumpy ground. Other snowmobiles – carrying more herders returning from
the festival – would catch up and then overtake us; their headlights would turn my world a lighter grey as they approached,
then it would go dark again when they passed. A couple more hours and we stopped. I hoped we had reached the camp, but when
I pushed up my goggles we were still in the snowy woods. My driver had stopped for a cigarette. My hands and feet were very,
very cold by now. I swapped my gloves for enormous boxing-glove-like down mittens. It would be harder to hold on, but my fingers
would be less cold. Before we set off again, I looked up at the sky and saw skeins of bright light flowing and dancing across
the backdrop of the stars. It was stunningly beautiful.