Free Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin­

Taishet in the morning.
    We were met by men driving solid Siberian carts, hot sunny weather, and clouds of mosquitoes. I had never seen such quantities of bloodsucking insects in the air before. Everyone was given a panama hat with cheesecloth netting, manufactured according to Kulik’s design, since he had a great deal of experience in dealing with the local mosquitoes. In these identical gray panamas we looked like Chinese peasants. Loading ourselves onto the carts, we set off for our distant destination along a tract that our drivers called “the highway” — a wide but uneven packed-earth road, pocked with ruts and potholes. Fortunately for us, June 1928 turned out dry in eastern Siberia, and the mud puddles on the road were entirely surmountable. The bridges over small rivers, however, were almost all in a sorry state and required repair. Some of them had been almost completely destroyed by the spring floods. We had to go around them and cross at a ford. When, once more pushing our carts over a shaky bridge in a hurry, Kulik would quote a French traveler: “And along the way we came across constructions that had to be circumvented, and which in Russian were called ‘Le Most.’”
    The road lay through the hilly taiga, where a mixed forest grew. But the summits of these smooth hills, which the locals called mounds, were entirely covered in thick pine growth. These amazing virgin woodlands reminded me of the manes of sleeping monsters. The slender ship timber grew incredibly thick, and when the wind began to toss the trees, they came alive, and with them the whole mound appeared to awaken, and it seemed that a sleeping monster was just about to rise up, straighten himself out, and fill the taiga expanses with a powerful, resounding roar.
    Despite the primeval nature of this region, we rarely came across actual animals: someone spotted a marten once, and a moose.
    We traveled very slowly, taking almost a week, spending the nights in small villages that looked like northern Russian farmsteads. The endless taiga spread out around five or six isbas made of hundred-year-old pines, enclosed with high pike fences to keep out animals. The locals were always happy to see us. Simple-hearted people, inured to hardship by Siberia’s harshness, they lived primarily by hunting, fishing, and income from people passing along the “highway,” for whom a separate hut with a stove and bunks always stood ready. We paid them with gunpowder and alcohol. Soviet money was still rare here, and Stalin’s program of mass collectivization had not yet reached these wild places. The villagers fed us freshly caught fish, fried mushrooms, dried game, and the customary flour-meal soup, spiced with wild garlic, wild onions, dried carrots, and salted deer or moose. We slept side by side in huts, bathhouses, sheepfolds, and haylofts. But our undemanding drivers would place their carts in a circle at night, bring all the horses inside the circle, light campfires in a circle around them, and sleep on the carts, covering themselves, despite the summer weather, with the ever-present sheepskin.
    On the sixth day our wagon train arrived in Kezhma.
    A large settlement with a hundred or so houses stood on a high, beautiful bank of the Angara — a wide, powerful river. Dropping off sharply, the banks turned into a small shoal beyond which this mighty river flowed. The water in it, as in all Siberian rivers, was cold and unbelievably pure. The wooded shore on the other side stretched steeply into the distance.
    The village was inhabited primarily by Russians, who were called Angars, and the rare, Russianized Evenki. Everyone worked in hunting and fishing. The hunted pelts were handed over to the government for very small sums, and fish, moose, and reindeer fed them reliably all year long. The Angars did not keep domesticated animals.
    In Kezhma our expedition’s Gostorg credit kicked in: we received eight sacks of dried pike, muksun whitefish, and peled