Sylvain Tesson - Consolations of the Forest - Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

Refuseniks of every country, take to the woods! Consolation awaits you there. The forest judges no one, and imposes its rule. It stages its annual party at the end of May: life returns and the copses swell with an electric fever. In winter, you’ll never feel alone: the cries of the crow family, the visits of titmice, and the tracks of lynx dispel all anguish. As for melancholy, simply consider this beautiful principle of regeneration: trees die, fall and rot. And on the humus, which is the memory of the forest, other trees are born and begin their one or two centuries of reaching for the sky.

Bek, the little white dog, is bleeding. The ice has scraped his right front paw pads. I massage them with a mixture of catfish fat and oil. Has evolution foreseen the eventual use of silurid liver for the healing of small Siberian dogs?

Across the grey and white plain fractured by its live-water wounds, I’m off to Elohin for a courtesy visit to Volodya. Bek’s paw pads are better. The dogs trot along side by side, and we cover the distance in five hours. We had to find a way through the labyrinth of fissures in the middle of Elohin Bay; a big eagle was soaring overhead, keeping tabs, perhaps, on a dead seal.

I’m sitting at Volodya’s table looking through the window at eternal Russia passing in a series of images. Russians use the word glubina – depth – to refer to these far-flung zones, the deep country of the nation. Irina, her kerchief on her head, is feeding her goose in the vegetable garden. A billy-goat goes by, followed by a cat. This window, which could be entitled A Day in Siberia , is like a painting by Ilya Repin, a Ukrainian whose realistic depictions of life at all levels of the social order became archetypes of the ‘Russian national style’.

Now the dogs are fighting. When they arrived in Elohin, Bek and Aika, all of four months old, rushed at Volodya’s five mastiffs to have their hides. They took a drubbing, but I congratulated them on their fighting spirit. Volodya is holding a cup of tea in his huge mitt and eating a lemon as if it were an apple. On the radio, Yves Montand is singing ‘Autumn Leaves’, which crackles a bit. An announcer launches into a tribute to the glory of the Red Army. Tomorrow is 9 May, Victory Day. It’s 2010 and the Russians are still amazed at having beaten fascism. Sixty-five years are as nothing: they speak of the victory as if it were yesterday.

‘Volodya, what’s the news, aside from the fact that you won sixty-five years ago?’

‘Nothing. Wait, yes, in Florida there’s a black tide: all the American coasts are gummed up.’

A tour of the stag traps. A simple procedure: a piece of sheet metal with five cuts sawn into it to form a central star is placed over a hole and covered with grass. A block of salt attracts the animal. When it steps onto the trap, it’s snagged. Stag trophies go for a pretty price in the city. Man has felt himself duty-bound to empty the forest.

That evening: ‘Chess, Volodya?’

‘Yes. The second most intelligent game after tug-of-war.’

We play, I lose, and finish Morand’s biography of Fouquet, the fabulously wealthy superintendent of finances whom an envious Sun King finally sent to prison for life. I like to immerse myself in reading that transports me to the precise antipodes of my actual life. Exoticism: while the wind rustles gently through the Siberian cedars, I navigate through the political intrigues and dirty tricks of the court at Versailles, the animosities of Louis’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and the battles within the Roman Catholic hierarchy in France over the theological movement of Jansenism. Question: who would have lasted longer, Volodya at the court of Versailles, or the king’s great general, le Grand Condé, out on the taiga? ‘Before Fouquet, nature itself trembles,’ writes Morand, evoking the monumental construction of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, the first example of le style Louis XIV . ‘It is as if nature were razing herself to the ground, seeking to be forgotten, so often have the tragedians and preachers informed her that she has no rightful claims over mankind.’ It was to forget the warbling of tragedians and preachers that I installed myself in a cabin.

Morand, chapter 2: ‘There are three ways to begin one’s life. With pleasure at first, and serious things later, or by working hard at the beginning so as to ease up towards the end, or by managing to pursue both pleasure and labour at once.’ The cabin follows that last prescription.

At eight in the morning, a bear of well over 600 pounds comes prowling around the sandy embankment to the south of the small clearing at Elohin. Volodya has filled some cans with seal fat to attract the animals, and now he murmurs: ‘Ah, too bad it isn’t about a third of a mile to the north, outside the reserve, we could shoot it.’ I feel suddenly numb with despair. We ought to have a little bit of our neocortex removed at birth to neutralize our desire to destroy the world. Man is a capricious child who believes the Earth is his bedroom, the animals his toys, the trees his baby rattles.

Yesterday’s lesson has borne fruit. Aika and Bek stay close to me and away from the other dogs. When we return to the enclosure around the izba, my two little darlings are set upon by Volodya’s howling pack. I plunge into the mêlée, kicking furry flanks right and left to protect my puppies while Volodya yells at me over the barking to ‘let them follow their fucking rules!’ That’s when the black cat that palled around with Aika the night before comes flying to the rescue and with a few swipes of his claws, routs the ringleaders. I immediately bestow upon him ‘the Imperial Order of the Northern Cedars for service rendered to my personal guard’, and I head home after kissing Irina on her rosy cheeks and getting my chest crushed in Volodya’s parting hug.

On the way back, a seal. He’s sunning himself near a handy emergency escape fissure. I crawl over the ice, concealed by a ridge of ice chunks. Did he hear me? Was it Aika’s black stain on the ivory tablecloth? I’m some 200 yards away when he vanishes.

The weather has warmed up, and the chimney plume from my stove traces persistent spirals in the air, as reassuring as the evening cloud of cigarette smoke.

This morning, dawn has kept its promise again: the sun appeared, punctually, and the sky became a ceiling for an operetta theatre. I go out onto the lake to get a good look at the mountain cleared of its snow. Only the summits and the depths of canyons are still white. On the lake, I leap over a fault – and its far edge snaps off: I’ve jumped too short and fall into the water, where the main thing is not to slip under the ice. I have a chilly walk back. The faults in the lake, like the crevasses of glaciers, greet overconfidence with the kiss of death.

In the afternoon I go up to the waterfall. The snow in the understorey still sticks to the snowshoes, and the dwarf pines hamper me more than ever. To make any headway, I have to use the scree slopes. As for the dogs, they’re mastering the art of frisking among the rocks. At the edge of the cut leading to the waterfall, spring is preparing its rite. Fragile forces are erupting; velvety mountain anemones quiver in the sunshine; grasses are growing among the patches of crystalline snow. An expanse of white still shows my footprints, which a bear has followed before turning back to the river below. Ants flow up and down their towering cities of ice needles; it’s as if they were observing some solar cult around a (slightly eroded) pre-Columbian temple. The torrent has broken free and dives beneath the ice down at the mouth of the valley. The mountain is melting. Its flanks are striped with living streams hurrying with girlish haste to plunge into the lake. Alder buds have popped out of their sheaths. Clumps of azaleas are sprinkled with violet flowers. Glossy leaves smell like bee’s-wax polish. Nature’s timidity is a prelude to its triumph.