The peninsula, on which I left a considerable part of my life, looks like a stone knife, which they managed to sharpen only on one side.
And the east coast remained uncultivated, bristling into the ocean with the thorns of capes and the rams of the peninsulas. From the Pacific Ocean, waves beat against rocky spurs, but the Sea of Okhotsk remains basically only to smooth out the sands of the deserted edge of the coast and build up long pebble spits.
Do not listen to the waves at night
But salmon there, in good years, is such immeasurable darkness that fish-processing shops and barracks for seasonal people who came to work from all over our homeland have long been dumped in the mouths of the most catchy rivers. Old-timers, whose ancestors moved to Kamchatka during the reign of the tsar-father, preferred to bypass the seasonal audience, especially fearing the Rostovites, who could easily put on the line at twenty-one anyone they didn’t like.
During the day, the seasonal workers gutted pink salmon and chinook salmon or sockeye salmon with chum salmon, smoked bedtime in the evenings, slept at night, and in the mornings after spree sometimes yesterday's comrades were missing. Someone was sometimes looked for, and someone was dissolved in space forever.
I recall a conversation with an inhabitant of the Bird Island Lily Yevlak, whom I once listened with curiosity, although not without distrust, on this cliff, protruding from the sea just west of Kamchatka. Once upon a time there was a plant on the island that produced canned food from crabs, but in the seventies of the last century, the production itself was transferred to the main Kamchatka land, and only meteorologists constantly lived on Ptichy, and the crab catchers based there appeared only at the beginning of the spring season in April and departed home by August.
Lilya was listed on the local coastal collective farm as a debauchery, and the tradesmen, who always had one thing on their minds far from their families, called her and her workmates "debauches". The nickname had nothing to do with the moral character of the venerable representative of the Koryak people, but how could one not change the name of the profession in salty conversations, the representatives of which were engaged in meticulous untangling of nets to catch crabs.
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The debauchery was of a respectable age and lived on Ptichy for more than half of her sixty-odd years, often she did not return to Kamchatka even in winter.
“At night, don't go to the sea alone to look for a crab,” she lectured me, puffing with a hand-rolled cigarette, “and if you go, don't listen to the waves. In summer it is not yet scary, but in winter after a storm the sea can be talkative. When he mutters louder, when in a whisper. Listen … and you will go to the voice.
- Here in summer the water is icy, - I joked, - you will come to your senses from the cold, and back …
- But you won't be in time, - the narrow-eyed interlocutor assured without a smile, - I have been on the island for thirty years, I have heard it myself more than once, and in the morning there is no one. The police will come by boat, interrogate everyone, but they cannot find anyone.
- Yes, they have been on the mainland for a long time, - I insisted …
- In November, what a continent, - Lilya gloomy from my skepticism. - A month since the last steamer left, we drank all the alcohol, we went sober for a long time.
- Not otherwise as sirens live here, - I recalled the adventures of Odysseus. - Ears should be plugged so as not to listen to too much.
However, Lilya did not read Homera, and therefore, offended, cut off her stories about the former island life.
My colleague from long-term work in Kamchatka, Vladimir Lim, talking about his childhood on the sandy Okhotsk Sea spit, also recalled the strange rumble that excited Korean fishermen who came to Kamchatka to earn money during the war between the North and the South. On the whole, they lived correctly - without vodka and drunken fights, but during a long stormy winter at least someone disappeared. Rumor claimed that they themselves went into the fog, as if someone was calling, moreover, not a stranger, but a long-awaited one …
I won't argue about the latter. Koreans are by nature marvelously poetic people, therefore, in the retelling of tales and semi-legends about past adversities, embellishment could not do without embellishment. However, I heard something similar from other inhabitants of the village of the Kirovskiy fish processing plant, who could hardly have been caught in the deification of everything in the world.
The most terrible was the long strip of bare sand between the houses of the village and the fish factory. "People of Grebenshchiks", as the workers from the Land of Morning Freshness were called in Kamchatka, by the name of the recruiter who hired them in Korea, tried not to leave there unnecessarily, but anything happened during the winter. It was necessary to collect the fin to heat the hearth, and for the tree trunks thrown out by the surf, inevitably, it was necessary to go to the very edge of the water.
It would be tempting to reduce all these fables and tales to something purely real, like the quicksand from "Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins. Having arrived once on the "killer scythe" and proceeding to the last hut or the skeleton of a rusted seiner, I did not find any earthly swells. The people on the spit changed a long time ago, and the new inhabitants did not find anything mystical in the dull severity of the monotonous surrounding landscapes.
A sober perspective on the old local passions was later offered to me by the Kamchatka ichthyologist Igor Ivanovich Kurenkov. The erudite, who was interested in absolutely everything that is worthy of attention in the changing world, was not at all surprised by the gossip about calls from the depths of the Sea of Okhotsk. According to him, the "voice of the sea" really exists, but it is heard extremely rarely and is practically not studied. It is awakened, apparently, by a unique coincidence of natural conditions, under which the generation of infrasonic oscillations is likely.
Dog head
However, far from the sea you can disappear without a trace. One such story in Kamchatka was investigated for a long time, persistently and without the slightest result. The hunting expert and ornithologist Nikolai Gerasimov, who told me it, knew quite well the family couple of hunters, who were thrown by helicopter into distant lands for the winter sable season, and a month later they were not found in the right place.
In the taiga hut there were neither living nor dead, nor traces of a struggle. It seems that the hunters did not even open the doors of the winter quarters, since the backpacks and guns were found outside. When the snow melted, a dog's head, mercilessly cut off from the body, melted from a snowdrift near the trees surrounding the hut. The rescuers failed to find other remains of the husky.
None of the reasonable explanations fit here. The connecting rod bear would not have been able to lift two of them without evidence of his bloodlust. And it's hard to imagine that the beast would have pounced on them right after the helicopter left the ridges. True, there are peoples in the Far East for whom dog meat is a delicacy, but it is unlikely that rogue intruders would leave their equipment and food intact. Let us recall, for example, Robinson Crusoe, who scrupulously dragged almost every nail from the ship broken by storms to his island. And in these places winter life is much more painful than on his island twined with grapes …
Dyakova Dolinka
Hermits, or simply outcasts for various reasons and occasions, of course, met in Kamchatka, and now, obviously, they do. I myself have seen such people near the Dyakova Zaimka - a tract about fifty kilometers from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. This valley got its name from a certain Dyakov, to whom fate smiled in the 80s of the nineteenth century, but, as it turned out after a couple of years, the smile turned out to be very bitter.
Itelmens
This dyakov was from Kamchadals. So even sixty years ago, the mestizos were officially called - the descendants of the pioneering Cossacks and indigenous Kamchatka peoples, primarily the Itelmens. For belonging to the aborigines and for some other merits, the trace of which I could not find, Dyakov was honored to be present at the coronation of Emperor Alexander III, who replaced his father on the throne of the Russian Empire, who was killed by the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries. Then there was no Trans-Siberian Railway even in the most daring projects, and one can only guess with what hardships and adventures his trip to the capital and back was connected.
With honor and gifts, Dyakov triumphantly returned home, but … from the first days his fellow countrymen simply laughed at him for the stories about steamers, steam locomotives and God knows more about what he had seen enough in his travels. The insulted and humiliated poor fellow left his family and retired to the Kamchatka jungle, where he whiled away the rest of his days.
According to Kamchatka concepts, he chose a refuge almost heavenly. Nearby is a spawning river, nearby, again, healing thermal springs. There were also enough sables at that time. For furs, he exchanged gunpowder and other supplies, bitterly experiencing, apparently, the fruits of a collision with human envy and human distrust.
In these "clergy" once lands about thirty years ago, something like a commune arose spontaneously for those who had nothing to do in a more or less civilized world. The way of life they led is truly "Dyakov's", they maintained purely exchange ties with the "outside world", supplying their people with fish and caviar.
For this business, a good friend of mine came to them, combining teaching music with a passion to drive a motorcycle on the fierce Kamchatka off-road and drive acquaintance with the public of varying degrees of inveterateness. It was he who persuaded me to go on a visit to those who, in the full sense of the word, are not of this world. These robinson-cruz-like acquaintances of him possessed a very peaceful disposition and dreamed only of being invisible and unnoticed. Perhaps they washed little by little or tried to wash the gold. However, the placer precious metal in Kamchatka is incomparably less than in Kolyma in the old days, and they would have been able to get rich only with the most fantastic luck.
My friend knew about the story with the dog's head and tried to ask his cunning but cunning clients-partners about the likelihood of the existence of some secret settlement in those parts. From my words, he already knew that not the slightest hint of a hermitage of any sectarian Satanists when searching from the air did not find any hints of the existence of even robbers, but still homo sapiens.
Our dashing interlocutors studied the map, exchanged remarks among themselves and said in a voice that they themselves would not get into such a distance, and no one would go there of their own free will in any degree of conflict with the law. You can't get into those jungles on dry land, but hopes for helicopter pilots are fake. You can try to bribe one more, but the whole crew - and there are three in it - is very expensive. On my own behalf, I will add that the control over the aviators was incredible at that time …
Yrhuim - the good master of the tundra
The riddle, even the most puzzling one, implies an indispensable and final answer. Intermediate versions scatter like a dandelion in the wind. Mysteries are more complicated. It costs them nothing to freeze, like a capricious computer program. There are, of course, exceptions. Nobody has canceled the biblical thesis, according to which there is no secret that would not have become obvious sometime. Another thing is that the whole life of an investigator may not be enough to clarify the unknown …
"I should feed you to Yrhuim!" - I once heard at a fair in the northern village of Khailino from a tundra inhabitant who was almost sober and in full dress attire. A brand-new red-brown kuhlyanka, embroidered with beads malakhai, a torbaza made of white kamus - extra strong leather from the legs of a deer - everything seems to be from an ethnographic exhibition. Stern, judging by the gloomily drawn eyebrows and villainous intonations, the appeal was addressed to a fellow tribesman and companion of the Koryak on a sortie to the village for supplies.
The reindeer breeder's fellow countryman had so much “fiery water” that he lay down in a snowdrift without the slightest desire to get up. He was not threatened with a cold, because the all-season life in the “goyang” society, as the reindeer are called in Koryak, hardened the northerners to trials more serious than the present. The tipsy Koryak was eventually seated in a sled and, for reliability, was secured in it with a rawhide chaut - the Kamchatka-Koryak version of the lasso, so that he would not fall out on a passing hillock, when the sled dogs, carried away by speed, rush along the tundra with all the might of their canine forces.
The reindeer herders dashed off beyond the hazy horizon, leaving me in great perplexity about the mysterious yrhuim. Who is he? Daemon? A ferocious primal deity? Or maybe a completely real and familiar predator under a different name, so called in one of the Koryak dialects?
A little later, the well-known ethnographer, Professor Ilya Samoilovich Gurvich, with whom I happened to see during one of his Kamchatka expeditions, helped me a little to dispel the fog. According to his explanations, the northerners call the legendary beast yrhuim, which, according to descriptions, resembles a giant bear.
The monster, supposedly reaching three and more meters in height, standing on four legs, seems to live in the caves of the Koryak Highlands, rarely gets out, but then it does not spare any of the running, jumping and even flying animals. It is better for a person not to meet with him, although there are stories that yrhuim is even able to come to the aid of a lonely traveler, driving away wolves from his camp. Gurvich did not believe in the reality of Yrhuim, considering him not even a mythological, but a folklore character of the Koryak folk fantasy.
The skepticism of the famous scientist, however, was completely rejected by the Koryak self-taught artist Kirill Kilpalin. The ink drawing he sent to the editorial office of Kamchatskaya Pravda, where I worked at the time, depicted a monster, like a prehistoric dinosaur such as a brontosaurus, but with a bear's head and with a bear's skin. From his descriptions it followed that yrhuim is a good master of the tundra, who can even warm a freezing wanderer in the folds of his fur.
One of Kirill's relatives seemed to have seen the yrkhum walking about his business, not choosing a path, since none of the tundra barriers could stop him anyway.
We published Kilpalin's letter with a commentary from a biologist who, in full agreement with Gurvich, assessed the hypothetical beast as a fairy-tale character. The very description of yrkhum prevented him from recognizing him as a semblance of an alien from the past millennia, who miraculously survived in the Kamchatka tundra. Such a beast was doomed to clumsiness and slowness, which would inevitably devalue the gigantic growth and the terrible power attributed to rumor.
Our commentator nevertheless admitted some theoretical probability of the existence of a natural prototype of yrhuim, stipulating that complete certainty can be achieved only after the capture of the animal or at least reliable photographs.
Kilpalin responded to the publication with an angry letter, in which, without choosing expressions, he cursed the very possibility of hunting for a relic dear to his heart and demanded that the animal be taken under protection in advance, including it in the international Red Book for a start. After reading his letter, I was tempted to forward it straight to Buenos Aires to the famous writer Jorge Borges. He published the "Book of Fictional Creatures", on the pages of which he settled many monsters such as basilisks, godzillas and similar products of folklore and cinematic fantasy, mentioned in folk tales or invented by writers of various degrees of celebrity.
Kilpala yrhuim, you see, would decorate the next edition of Borges' bestseller. Alas, correspondence with the capital world was not encouraged at that time, so my editor flatly rejected the idea. Now the famous writer has already moved to another world, from a journey through which only Odysseus, Dante and Baron Munchausen managed to return. So Borges is no longer able to supplement his fantastic reference book …
Oleg Dzyuba
