Have you ever read stories about the punishment that was common among the taiga peoples: a naked man was tied to a tree, made a couple of cuts on the skin and left for several days?
It is possible to imagine such a thing, of course, but it is impossible to fully experience the horror of this execution on paper. In my life, I was “lucky” to learn in practice what kind of animal this is - a midge. Once we went rafting on the Kan River, which is in the Krasnoyarsk Territory: from the village of Irbei to the confluence of the Kan with the Yenisei. There were four of us on two rubber boats, and we had a Saiga shotgun, this is important.
By the end of the fifth day of rafting, we got to the Komarovskie rapids. Not that they are too serious, but still people drowned there and continue to drown regularly. Including my childhood friend once drowned, whom half the town of Zelenogorsk was looking for downstream …
However, closer to the topic. In view of the rather high complexity of these rapids, we decided that we would slow down in front of them, spend the night and in the morning, with fresh forces, we would slip through. Fortunately, they noticed an excellent clearing a hundred meters before the rapids: a real sandy beach near the coast, then a neat, wild lawn with an area of one hundred square meters, and immediately behind it was a steep mountain as high as a standard nine-story building. Not vertical - overgrown with pines and cedars, between which it was quite possible to walk.
Two of us, including me, stayed on the beach with the task of setting up camp and making a fire, while the other two, taking a shotgun, said pathetically: "We will go up the mountain, shoot someone for dinner." “Don't return without a boar,” we answered and got down to business. We set up two tents, chopped up firewood, put up a fish soup, took out some vodka and, therefore, we were sitting there.
The view - you can't imagine any cooler: around the mountain, taiga, to the left along the course there is white foam of rapids, the noise of a stormy river, and most importantly - a breeze and almost complete absence of any gnat. Alas, we did not enjoy ourselves for long: about ten minutes after we had everything ready, a thunderous sound was heard about fifty meters above us, into which the mountains turned a shot from the "Saiga". After a couple of seconds, a second shot was heard. We giggle: well, now we will try the boar meat.
Another five minutes pass, and we hear something flying from above with a wild crash. We turn around and see how almost head over heels in our hands these two idiots, but poorly distinguishable, are rolling, as if the screen on which they are shown was covered with ripples, for some reason black. And after a couple of moments we understand what kind of ripples it is: the guys are tightly taken into the ring by a cloud of midges.
No, not so - CLOUD. No, again not so - MIRIAD. At first, the entire horror of the situation did not reach us. They just laughed at them and said: since you returned without a boar, here's a flag in your hands - cook your ear and chop some more wood. However, they did not succeed in getting started, just like us - to continue enjoying the views.
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The midge began to eat us on the way. More precisely, even devour. It was absolutely impossible to do anything: as soon as you stopped fanning yourself, this beast covered every area of the skin free from clothes, which immediately began to blaze with fire. It feels like it can only be compared with the fact as if your skin was sanded with coarse sandpaper.
Moreover, if everyone else was dressed in pants and jackets, then for some reason I managed to change into shorts and in addition to my face I had to rake this black filth off my bare feet, along with glasses of my own blood, which was not slow to pour naturally in streams. I didn't even think about trying to get into the backpack where I packed my pants, and then change clothes, because five minutes after the start of the attack I was confident: stop for a moment, and this evil spirits will simply devour you.
We defended ourselves with all the methods invented by mankind: first, we doused each other from head to toe with repellents, which until that moment lay almost without demand. I suspect that from the outside it looked very funny: with one hand, with the other, you furiously smear the black-and-red goo over your face and legs, with the other, no less violently shaking your friend around you dancing in front of you, who in turn waves both arms around you.
The repellents are not that they did not help - it seems that the midges even liked them, because the density of the attacking layers has tripled. Well, or so it seemed to us. Then we threw spruce branches into the fire, causing a real column of smoke. We climbed right inside, not giving a damn about the fact that breathing in the fire is rather difficult. Believe it or not, it never helped: the midge seemed to have gone mad. I climbed through the smoke, through a thick layer of repellent, through the spruce branches with which we fought off it …
No longer able to stand, someone shouted: into the water! And we, right in the suits we were in (here I was just the smartest of all: just shorts and a T-shirt) jumped into the river, since the bottom there was sandy, beach. We climbed chest-deep into the water, began to take in more air and dive headlong. I remember the first time I inhaled and went under water for a minute and a half for sure. When the air ran out, I raised my head and without the slightest pause, the midge again stuck to it.
I yelled, breathed in again, grabbing at least a couple of hundred of this scum into my lungs, and dived again. He sat even longer until red spots appeared in his eyes - the result was the same: there was a feeling that you were surfacing not into the air, but into disheveled glass wool. While I was diving, one of the guys managed to get ashore, realizing the futility of trying to escape in the water, and yelled to me at the moment of my next appearance: “Lech, it's useless! You go under water, and this crap hangs right over the place where you dived."
With a howl, I get out to the shore, where real panic already reigns. We don't know what to do, everyone is literally roaring wounded moose. All have blood on their faces and hands, the eye sockets are stuffed with brown stuff, and in their very eyes there is primal fear. We understand that here we will no longer be saved: in such conditions, trying to cook something, and even more so to go to bed, is simply madness. Under the pressure of circumstances, without discussion, we make a collective decision: get out of here as soon as possible.
In the "yard" meanwhile, let me remind you, it was almost dark, the time is about ten, ahead - dangerous rapids. But we have no time for them. We, continuing to twitch, like clockwork, collect anyhow like tents, without even trying to do it neatly: we literally break the arches on the knee, and crumple the panels and ram into the covers with our feet.
We throw the things taken out of the boats back, simultaneously soaking half of the food in the river, one of us grabs an armful of five or six bottles of vodka standing by the tent, but he can't hold them for a long time, because … Because they are eating. He starts throwing bottles into the boat with one hand, with three of them he misses, and they hit the stones near the shore. It seems that in this place we should all be upset, but everyone is so scared that there is not the slightest desire to tell the thrower that he is wrong.
In general, my boat and my partner (the owner of the "Saiga") are somehow loaded, we push it from the shore and jump with a swing, knocking over a couple of things from the pile of belongings heaped in a hurry into the river. Roughly the same picture in a nearby boat. In general, the evacuation from the mosquito coast was not what looked like a shameful flight from the battlefield, but it was exactly what it was. And that was not all: we hoped in vain that by going out to the middle of the river we would get rid of the midges. It wasn't like that.
These creatures crammed between the sides of the rubber bands, turning it into a container with this very "trepang" made of glass wool. Now I think that it was possible to rake this cocktail with a shovel, but alas, then we did not have it with us. Without saying a word, we divided the roles: the partner sat down on the oars, his back downstream, and I was commanding in my voice where to row in order to correctly enter the rapids, at the same time beating him and myself from the midges continuing to attack madly.
And it should be noted that the evil spirits that had packed into the boat were not yet all: over both boats, patches of the primordial cloud circled, noticing that this was the middle of the river and a normal breeze was blowing over it. So, with one hand I beat myself and the oarman from the midge, with the other I continuously take these creatures out of the eyes and nose. And although I must look at the stones and breakers along the course, I don't see a damn thing from this, but I just scream almost at random: to the left, to the right, to the left, to the right.
I do not observe the neighboring boat either, and I do not understand what is going on with the guys … In general, we, frankly, did not even notice the rapids. Then I tried to remember if we passed the right way between the largest stones that frighten us all, from pioneers to pensioners, but could not. Not imprinted. We jump out, then, into clean water, but the final is still far away.
The midge continues to advance on all fronts. We no longer have any strength, we breathe with difficulty, and the sounds we make are more like a death rattle. We notice the second boat, which sways on the water with the same jerky rhythm as ours: the guys also fight off the flying creatures. With great difficulty we swim up to each other and together think what to do. We think, however, this is said loudly - rather, in snatches, we try to voice each of our ideas of salvation.
Suddenly one of the guys on the second boat screams in a bad voice: look, catch! Indeed, we see on a hillock above the shore, to which we paddled in between times, a solid village house, seemingly abandoned. With the last of our strength we dock, throw the boats at random on the sand, without even thinking of tying them, and break through the bushes that overgrown the shore to this house. It was built, I must say, competently: experienced people, taiga made.
According to the scheme, it resembled a shell: the door from the street led into the entrance, the second door led into the second entrance, from those into the third, and only from the third into the main room with the stove itself. It turns out that the three hallways were twisted into a kind of spiral around the center of the house. In general, the first door cut off the bulk of the midges that chased us all the way to the house, the second - almost all, but the third and fourth protected us from the last monsters.
Sinking down on the sofa in the room, I personally felt as if I had emerged from a depth of 40-50 meters, where I was already running out of air: I was greedily grabbing it with my mouth, trying to get back to normal. The guys, judging by their appearance, were not feeling better. But still, it was the worst for me: my legs, which, let me remind you, were in shorts, were covered with blood, don't play with it, and all in lacerated wounds, from which the meat shone through. Ten minutes after the rescue, I felt the skin tightening like a drum.
Legs and arms literally blazed with fire, and then the head joined them. It seemed that the body temperature jumped somewhere closer to 40. I felt sick more and more … In short, I crawled under the covers, where I was pounding for about three hours while I was half-forgotten. With difficulty I regained consciousness when it was already deep night outside. Heard voices. I go out into the street, and there are some cheerful guys with a company of three local fishermen who sailed about an hour after us. Naturally, they drink.
There are no midges on the street, only mosquitoes. The answer is, at that moment I was ready to kiss these mosquitoes: after the horror that we experienced, they seemed completely cute and harmless creatures, who just wanted to stretch out their hand as a friendly treat. I join a company that jokes about fishing, booze, broads and boat motors. For some reason, the guys don't remember about the midge, but I just can't forget the nightmare and bring up the topic.
One of the fishermen is suddenly alarmed and asks: where did you raise this swarm? Two fools who followed the wild boar say (and before that, as you understand, we had not the slightest opportunity to discuss their sortie) that they climbed the mountain pretty decently and saw some kind of red rock sticking out in the middle of the taiga, like "Fucking finger".
Near the finger, the taiga, they say, seems to have gone bald: only a few yellowed pines and a rare rare grass. Except that some thick and eerily thorny bushes grew close to the rock itself: they tried to wade through them higher up the mountain, but got stuck at the very first centimeters. We tried to get around - there are cliffs from all sides. We stood there, thought about what to do, and suddenly noticed some movement in the bushes. It was not possible to make out clearly whether the wind was stirring the bushes or some animal, because by that time only one name remained from the sun.
It was getting dark, in short. Again we got closer to the bushes, says one of the guys, knelt down, stuck a shotgun between the branches (the density was less near the ground) and began to look out. And then, he says, right half a meter from his face, under the bushes, someone's yellow eyes opened and even the shine of teeth appeared. The reaction was correct, like the cowboys of the Wild West: shoot first, and then talk.
In short, he shot those eyes, and it was then that the same swarm rose from the back of the bushes. And it rose, they both swear, like an endless tornado, from inexhaustible reserves, forming directly above them into a huge cloud. As if spellbound, they watched for several seconds, until the midge formed a kind of black fist, and then fell on them. Then they ran in terror. The fisherman, who asked for stories, listened silently without blinking an eye, and then said:
- You shouldn't have stuck in there. Places forbidden there, the locals know. I cannot guarantee that this whole story is true, but grandma told me. It seems like Capel with his soldiers passed here to Civil. And to the grandmother (she was then a little girl), in the village of Kazachka, one of Capel's officers came, asked around the courtyards: is there a serious healer in the village?
They sent him to his grandfather-Evenk, who once nailed to convicts, and with them he settled down in those places. That grandfather lived on the outskirts, he talked with few people, but everyone knew that it was better not to be at enmity with him. He knew how to heal, he knew how to cripple. Once two hunters boasted that they had robbed his snare and nothing - the second year they are alive and well …
So the next spring both disappeared, not even bodies were found. This officer was sent to this grandfather. It is not known what they agreed with him there, but the village thought that to treat Kapel himself - the same frostbitten his legs on this campaign. But then, two months after they left, the grandmother heard that the adults began to whisper about the Tsar's gold, which seemed to be transported in this wagon train. Rumors of different kinds spread: they say, the shaman was called in order to hide the gold more reliably: there were too many hunters before him in those years.
It is not surprising that the whole village believed in this, and the next summer people began to flock to the surrounding area, looking for an enchanted place. They searched until three or four men were missing, two drowned, and three more were found under the cliff of that very mountain, in front of the rapids where you climbed with a shotgun. In short, the village ended up with a pitchfork and went to that same Evenk.
The grandmother did not see this anymore, she only said that the parents, having returned quiet, strictly ordered all their children, under fear of the most severe flogging, to stay away from that mountain. Since then, no one from all the surrounding villages has pushed in there, only from time to time the children on a bet tried to get closer to the “finger”. Including me. But each of the disputants had to run after two or three minutes: now some howl, then laughter, then eyes …
For example, I saw how the pine's eyes opened. And he was no longer a little boy, but such a solid teenager, about 15 years old. He hunted with his father already with might and main, spent the night at the cemetery for a bet, but there he could not stand it - he ran away. By the way, I argued about a kite: then they were in price. That's it, guys. I don’t know who or what you disturbed there, but as far as I understand, Evenk witchcraft is still working …
After this story, the conversation subsided on its own, and for the rest of the night we looked anxiously around, expecting that the pines were about to speak to us and tell us how difficult it is to bear a human curse.