vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #156 / Special reports / Reading article...

Gennady Protasov was busy with a buckknife at the table out in front of the cabin, slicing meat into tiny strips. He was one of the backwoodsmen who planned to take me boar hunting the next day, and it seemed important to learn from a man who had shot scores of the tusked wild pigs that in some circumstances are capable of goring a tiger to death.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Raw moose," he said.

"How do you cook it?"

"I don't. You eat it raw. You'll love it."

I had prepared to stand and face an enraged boar armed only with a jittery rifle and the knowledge that statistically speaking, even a bad shot must occasionally hit something. I wasn't ready for raw moose. When Gennady left that evening, the moose strips sat on the table and froze solid. Nobody touched them.

I had gone hunting on a whim, really. While touring the V.K. Arseniev Museum of Local Lore, I noticed a stuffed boar, glowering through eyes that looked like wads of papier mache painted black.

"I want to shoot me a pig," I said. "I want to eat boar steaks and boar sausage and boar borsch. I'm going carry the head home in a hat box when I go home for Christmas and mount it on a plaque and give it to my dad to hang on his office wall. I'm going to make a jacket out of its hide."

It was one of those inspired proclamations I occasionally spout off and forget within an hour. My girlfriend, however, took me at my word. She found friends who knew Gennady and Vanya Toporkin, and within a few weeks I was out hunting.

I have now been boar hunting twice, and just so the reader is not kept in suspense followed by anticlimax, I still don't have any strange animal products to declare when going through customs. But I did have a fun time away from the city, with its smoke and grit and stripped-down car hulks.

First, the basics of human habitation. Both times, we stayed in a log cabin where the entire group slept on a wide plank that runs along the back wall. These hunters' lodges are scattered throughout the Sikhote-Alin. There's a wood-burning stove - so warm, you wake up gasping in the night even in late autumn and fling open the door to cool the room.

The second place we stayed at also had a log-cabin banya with room for four people, so that we took turns broiling, first the men, then the women.

As for the wildlife, the boars are the big draw, though hunters also shoot deer, moose and other creatures. The boars travel in groups ranging between a few couples to 80 animals, searching the forest floor for food such as the nuts from cedar cones, Gennady said. Hogs can be ferocious when wounded, he cautioned.

"A tiger or a bear is an individual wandering around the forest," he said. "A boar has bigger responsibilities. He has females and piglets to take care of. If he's wounded, he will try to protect them from behind."

The hunt started in the afternoon, when the boars become active.

Gennady, his friend Vanya, Alexander Rakul, and I piled into a microbus and set off into the mountains driving up what was more like a creek bed than a road. After bouncing around for a half hour, we reached our destination, and Gennady armed me with a 9 mm Loss. We split up, and Vanya and I headed up a steep trail.

One of the pleasures of hunting is your intensity of observation. Perhaps the bird-watcher or wildlife photographer is as alert to the environment - watching for signs of his quarry, pausing to listen, smelling the cold mountain air - but the hiker slogging along under a weight a backpack is not. We found a cedar cone, and Vanya broke it to pieces and harvested the nuts. We ate them as we hiked. Once we crossed a cold stream and lay down on the rocks to drink.

Of course, intensity of observation has never been a sustainable skill for a city-slicker like me, and soon I fell into rumination about fiction I was writing. I followed as Vanya plodded up a snowy ravine, and he pointed out boar tracks in the snow.

There were signs of boar recently killed by a tiger - torn-up duff, hair, tiger scat. But someone had been through a day or two earlier with dogs, and that was sure to scare off the boars (hunters like Vanya and Gennady have contempt of those who hunt with dogs).

Vanya had his hand on his back right at belt level. Bad back? I wondered idly as I tromped after him. Then I realize he was waving me off. I froze. When he started forward I followed him carefully, acutely aware of my stick-snapping footfalls compared to his Indian-like stealth. We crested a ridge, but found no boars.

After an afternoon and evening of hunting, we hiked back in the dark without having fired our guns. Hunting is often like this - there is a certain satisfaction to keeping your rifle shouldered, a respect for the silence of the woods. Vanya charged down the mountains into the dusk, and I struggled through vines and creepers to stay up with him.

I was hungry and tired, but pleased with myself nonetheless. We saw the campfire flickering through the trees. There would be no boar steaks to throw on the grill tonight.

But then again, there was plenty of raw moose. I ate with relish.