KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, Far East -- There are parts of the world so wild, so distant from places inhabited by people, that when things happen, they happen without witnesses. The traces slowly disappear; they melt with the snow in spring, get washed away by rain, carried off by ravens. Eventually, it becomes unclear whether they happened at all.
Such a thing happened here.
Charlie Russell closed up his cabin at Kambalnoye Lake, on the remote tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the country's Far East, and said goodbye for the winter to the bears he had studied for seven years.
There were 20 in all. Among them: Brandy, who often left her three cubs with Russell for baby-sitting while she went fishing; Walnut, a young male; Biscuit, whom Russell had raised as a cub and who, pregnant with her own offspring, would sometimes come bounding to greet him when he landed his plane, brushing against his leg or nibbling his boot.
Russell left last November for his home in Canada, confident that the bears would soon be safe in their snow-shrouded slumber. He returned, as usual, in spring. But instead of finding Biscuit emerging with blinking cubs from her den, all he found was stillness.
Biscuit did not appear. Nor did Walnut or Brandy or any of the bears. Russell searched for two months without finding a trace of any of them. What he did find when he opened his cabin was a bear's gallbladder, hung from a nail on the wall.
What had happened during those weeks before impenetrable drifts of snow settled over the valley, before the bears would have lumbered off to the safety of their dens? Who left the gruesome artifact on the wall, and was it an oversight or a message? And the question that haunts Russell most of all: Did Biscuit walk up to greet her killers?
Kamchatka prosecutor Alexander Voitovich is investigating the case as a poaching. The "mass killing" of an estimated 20 bears, he said, appears to have been the result of a search for gallbladders, whose contents are valued in Asia for use in folk medicines. "There is a strong possibility that we will solve this ugly crime very soon," he said.
But Russell and others who work around Kamchatka's famous brown bears aren't so sure. For one, it is not clear why someone who wanted gallbladders would have wasted one on Russell's cabin wall. For another, a lot of people had reason to resent Russell.
In fact, singling out someone who might have wanted to send a warning to the Alberta rancher -- who helped uncover corruption in the Kamchatka government, warred with the local scientific establishment and organized measures to thwart the region's billion-dollar poaching industry -- is like trying to find the bad bean in a pot of chili.
"This was obviously an action to prevent Charlie from doing his work. And it achieved its result," said Alexei Maslov, a scientist who has worked frequently in the South Kamchatka Wildlife Reserve, where Russell's project was based.
"It was a demonstration of power," added Maslov's wife, Yekaterina Lepskaya, also a scientist. "They demonstrated that they own the lake, not Charlie."
The poaching to which Russell's bears probably fell victim has become a potent economic engine on the 1,600-square-kilometer peninsula. Riverbanks this summer and fall were littered with dead salmon cast aside by villagers who had stripped them of eggs to be sold as red caviar. Fishermen in the Okhotsk Sea off Kamchatka routinely ignore their fishing quotas, and bears -- already shot at the rate of up to 1,000 per year, legally and illegally -- will face critical food shortages if the salmon poaching isn't stopped, biologists say.
As a Soviet military outpost, Kamchatka had a robust fish-processing industry and state farms that produced milk, meat and vegetables for markets all over Russia. But the post-Soviet economic collapse hit here hard. Even as military forces drew down, the economic transition led to the closure of most state farms and fish plants.
Now there are entire villages without a single job, and the regional government, officially bankrupt, announced recently that it can't afford to buy sufficient fuel for the coming winter. Many apartment buildings and most schools have no heat. It is perhaps not surprising that most Kamchatkans are losing little sleep over poached fish or dead bears.
Wildlife managers say bears -- harvested legally at the rate of 500 per year -- often die at the hands of American and European hunters, who pay $8,000 or more to hunt a big, male, trophy bear. "American hunters would come, they were 70 or 80 years old. They were hunters with poor eyesight," said one former hunting guide, who said he quit because the abuses "made me sick."
An important industry has grown up around guiding foreign hunters to their targets, but critics say even the legal hunts are often conducted using illegal tactics.
Russell and his partner, artist Maureen Enns, were not unaware of the dangers facing Kamchatka wildlife when they arrived for their first summer in 1996. But it was only here that they could realize their dream of living side by side with wild brown bears and raising orphaned cubs -- which would not have been sanctioned in North America.
Russell wanted to prove that brown bears -- Kamchatka's are larger but otherwise identical to the widely feared North American grizzly -- could co-exist peaceably with humans, so long as people adhered to a protocol of respect and caution.
Russell rejected the conventional wisdom that bears need to maintain a healthy fear of people and that those who become too accustomed to humans will inevitably display aggression and end up being shot. "Bears tend to like to be around people. A lot of them do, anyway," he said. "So these bears often come toward people when they meet them on a trail and that makes people uncomfortable."
Russell hoped his work in Kamchatka would answer two questions: Are brown bears as unpredictable as most biologists believe? And are bears that lose their fear of people invariably dangerous?
Russell and Enns chose one of two federally managed wildlife reserves in Kamchatka as their base, built a cabin and began quiet interactions with bears. Over the vehement objections of local scientists, they adopted three orphaned cubs and raised them as essentially wild, encouraging them as they grew to feed themselves and roam the surrounding hills.
Biscuit and the other orphans, Chico and Rosie, would disappear for days at a time, then reappear to seek out Russell's company for walks or play. Several other bears seemed to grow comfortable around the couple, allowing them to walk the trails with them or watch them fish.
"Some of the bears would come and sort of invite us on a walk. They'd come to the cabin, and if we made a move to get our pack ready, they would kind of wait for us," said Russell, who wrote about his project in a popular book, "Grizzly Heart."
As his friendships with the bears progressed, Russell racked up enemies as well. In his plane, he frequently spotted large-scale fish poaching along the rivers, and one of his reports resulted in charges against a prominent local official. He reported poachers trapping a large male bear in a snare, then leaving it to storm and bleat for days to increase the volume of valuable bile in its gallbladder.
Russell managed to raise more than $25,000 per year from North American contributors to support new rangers in the southern reserve, supplementing their salaries -- most earn about $83 per month -- and building new cabins to house them. But he also managed to alienate potential allies in the Russian scientific community, who had opposed his petition to raise the cubs and saw him as a foolhardy amateur.
One of Russell's main adversaries was the man with whom he probably had more in common than anyone in Kamchatka: Vitaly Nikolayenko, a ranger and amateur scientist who had spent 25 years living with bears on the 1.1 million-hectare Kronotsky state reserve, 176 kilometers north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The reserve is one of two managed by the federal government in Kamchatka. The South Kamchatka reserve, where Russell operated, is more remote.
Nikolayenko had made a life's work of harassing poachers and monitoring bears, naming them and chronicling their habits. For 22 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up for a nap just a few meters away from him.
Russell and Nikolayenko clashed when the Russian ranger was called in to review Russell's project. Nikolayenko strongly objected to feeding the half-grown cubs, arguing that it rendered the research meaningless and had the potential to make the cubs dangerously eager for human handouts. Russell felt the cubs needed the kind of nourishment they would have received from their mother to make them strong enough to fend off predators. The two men argued bitterly throughout their acquaintance.
But they perhaps also wound up having something tragically in common. Dobrynya disappeared in 2001, sometime after Nikolayenko saw the bear to his den and stood by as he fell into his deep sleep.
Dobrynya was not seen in the spring, nor during all of 2002. When Nikolayenko returned to his cabin this spring, he found large tufts of hair and bones -- obviously the remains of an enormous male bear -- less than half a meter from his window.
It could have been a bear injured in a fight; but why so close to his cabin? "I think it was my old Dobrynya who came and died near my hut, early in spring, when I was not there," Nikolayenko said. "I try not to think about it, but sometimes, I can't help but see him injured and bleeding, running to my hut for help when I am not there."
At the reserves' headquarters in the town of Yelizovo, near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, manager Valery Komarov sat in his dark, chilly office. The building was in a thicket of high weeds, its paint peeling and concrete crumbling. It looked, a Russian translator observed, "like the last building standing in Stalingrad."
Nonetheless, it is the bureaucratic fortress from which the fight to protect Kamchatka's wildlife is fought. Although the reserves were relatively well-funded during the Soviet era, Komarov said, his staff now includes only 30 rangers and six scientific researchers. Once there were twice that many. "No one wants to work for a miserable salary," he lamented.
Russell hired former soldiers who had fought in Chechnya and were unafraid to chase poachers into remote corners of the peninsula. But there were never enough of them, he said. Now, although he initially thought about leaving Russia forever after the horrors of the spring, he is considering returning again next summer to help expand the ranger program.
Such a thing happened here.
Charlie Russell closed up his cabin at Kambalnoye Lake, on the remote tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the country's Far East, and said goodbye for the winter to the bears he had studied for seven years.
There were 20 in all. Among them: Brandy, who often left her three cubs with Russell for baby-sitting while she went fishing; Walnut, a young male; Biscuit, whom Russell had raised as a cub and who, pregnant with her own offspring, would sometimes come bounding to greet him when he landed his plane, brushing against his leg or nibbling his boot.
Russell left last November for his home in Canada, confident that the bears would soon be safe in their snow-shrouded slumber. He returned, as usual, in spring. But instead of finding Biscuit emerging with blinking cubs from her den, all he found was stillness.
Biscuit did not appear. Nor did Walnut or Brandy or any of the bears. Russell searched for two months without finding a trace of any of them. What he did find when he opened his cabin was a bear's gallbladder, hung from a nail on the wall.
What had happened during those weeks before impenetrable drifts of snow settled over the valley, before the bears would have lumbered off to the safety of their dens? Who left the gruesome artifact on the wall, and was it an oversight or a message? And the question that haunts Russell most of all: Did Biscuit walk up to greet her killers?
Kamchatka prosecutor Alexander Voitovich is investigating the case as a poaching. The "mass killing" of an estimated 20 bears, he said, appears to have been the result of a search for gallbladders, whose contents are valued in Asia for use in folk medicines. "There is a strong possibility that we will solve this ugly crime very soon," he said.
But Russell and others who work around Kamchatka's famous brown bears aren't so sure. For one, it is not clear why someone who wanted gallbladders would have wasted one on Russell's cabin wall. For another, a lot of people had reason to resent Russell.
In fact, singling out someone who might have wanted to send a warning to the Alberta rancher -- who helped uncover corruption in the Kamchatka government, warred with the local scientific establishment and organized measures to thwart the region's billion-dollar poaching industry -- is like trying to find the bad bean in a pot of chili.
"This was obviously an action to prevent Charlie from doing his work. And it achieved its result," said Alexei Maslov, a scientist who has worked frequently in the South Kamchatka Wildlife Reserve, where Russell's project was based.
"It was a demonstration of power," added Maslov's wife, Yekaterina Lepskaya, also a scientist. "They demonstrated that they own the lake, not Charlie."
The poaching to which Russell's bears probably fell victim has become a potent economic engine on the 1,600-square-kilometer peninsula. Riverbanks this summer and fall were littered with dead salmon cast aside by villagers who had stripped them of eggs to be sold as red caviar. Fishermen in the Okhotsk Sea off Kamchatka routinely ignore their fishing quotas, and bears -- already shot at the rate of up to 1,000 per year, legally and illegally -- will face critical food shortages if the salmon poaching isn't stopped, biologists say.
As a Soviet military outpost, Kamchatka had a robust fish-processing industry and state farms that produced milk, meat and vegetables for markets all over Russia. But the post-Soviet economic collapse hit here hard. Even as military forces drew down, the economic transition led to the closure of most state farms and fish plants.
Now there are entire villages without a single job, and the regional government, officially bankrupt, announced recently that it can't afford to buy sufficient fuel for the coming winter. Many apartment buildings and most schools have no heat. It is perhaps not surprising that most Kamchatkans are losing little sleep over poached fish or dead bears.
Wildlife managers say bears -- harvested legally at the rate of 500 per year -- often die at the hands of American and European hunters, who pay $8,000 or more to hunt a big, male, trophy bear. "American hunters would come, they were 70 or 80 years old. They were hunters with poor eyesight," said one former hunting guide, who said he quit because the abuses "made me sick."
An important industry has grown up around guiding foreign hunters to their targets, but critics say even the legal hunts are often conducted using illegal tactics.
Russell and his partner, artist Maureen Enns, were not unaware of the dangers facing Kamchatka wildlife when they arrived for their first summer in 1996. But it was only here that they could realize their dream of living side by side with wild brown bears and raising orphaned cubs -- which would not have been sanctioned in North America.
Russell wanted to prove that brown bears -- Kamchatka's are larger but otherwise identical to the widely feared North American grizzly -- could co-exist peaceably with humans, so long as people adhered to a protocol of respect and caution.
Russell rejected the conventional wisdom that bears need to maintain a healthy fear of people and that those who become too accustomed to humans will inevitably display aggression and end up being shot. "Bears tend to like to be around people. A lot of them do, anyway," he said. "So these bears often come toward people when they meet them on a trail and that makes people uncomfortable."
Russell hoped his work in Kamchatka would answer two questions: Are brown bears as unpredictable as most biologists believe? And are bears that lose their fear of people invariably dangerous?
Russell and Enns chose one of two federally managed wildlife reserves in Kamchatka as their base, built a cabin and began quiet interactions with bears. Over the vehement objections of local scientists, they adopted three orphaned cubs and raised them as essentially wild, encouraging them as they grew to feed themselves and roam the surrounding hills.
Biscuit and the other orphans, Chico and Rosie, would disappear for days at a time, then reappear to seek out Russell's company for walks or play. Several other bears seemed to grow comfortable around the couple, allowing them to walk the trails with them or watch them fish.
"Some of the bears would come and sort of invite us on a walk. They'd come to the cabin, and if we made a move to get our pack ready, they would kind of wait for us," said Russell, who wrote about his project in a popular book, "Grizzly Heart."
As his friendships with the bears progressed, Russell racked up enemies as well. In his plane, he frequently spotted large-scale fish poaching along the rivers, and one of his reports resulted in charges against a prominent local official. He reported poachers trapping a large male bear in a snare, then leaving it to storm and bleat for days to increase the volume of valuable bile in its gallbladder.
Russell managed to raise more than $25,000 per year from North American contributors to support new rangers in the southern reserve, supplementing their salaries -- most earn about $83 per month -- and building new cabins to house them. But he also managed to alienate potential allies in the Russian scientific community, who had opposed his petition to raise the cubs and saw him as a foolhardy amateur.
One of Russell's main adversaries was the man with whom he probably had more in common than anyone in Kamchatka: Vitaly Nikolayenko, a ranger and amateur scientist who had spent 25 years living with bears on the 1.1 million-hectare Kronotsky state reserve, 176 kilometers north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The reserve is one of two managed by the federal government in Kamchatka. The South Kamchatka reserve, where Russell operated, is more remote.
Nikolayenko had made a life's work of harassing poachers and monitoring bears, naming them and chronicling their habits. For 22 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up for a nap just a few meters away from him.
Russell and Nikolayenko clashed when the Russian ranger was called in to review Russell's project. Nikolayenko strongly objected to feeding the half-grown cubs, arguing that it rendered the research meaningless and had the potential to make the cubs dangerously eager for human handouts. Russell felt the cubs needed the kind of nourishment they would have received from their mother to make them strong enough to fend off predators. The two men argued bitterly throughout their acquaintance.
But they perhaps also wound up having something tragically in common. Dobrynya disappeared in 2001, sometime after Nikolayenko saw the bear to his den and stood by as he fell into his deep sleep.
Dobrynya was not seen in the spring, nor during all of 2002. When Nikolayenko returned to his cabin this spring, he found large tufts of hair and bones -- obviously the remains of an enormous male bear -- less than half a meter from his window.
It could have been a bear injured in a fight; but why so close to his cabin? "I think it was my old Dobrynya who came and died near my hut, early in spring, when I was not there," Nikolayenko said. "I try not to think about it, but sometimes, I can't help but see him injured and bleeding, running to my hut for help when I am not there."
At the reserves' headquarters in the town of Yelizovo, near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, manager Valery Komarov sat in his dark, chilly office. The building was in a thicket of high weeds, its paint peeling and concrete crumbling. It looked, a Russian translator observed, "like the last building standing in Stalingrad."
Nonetheless, it is the bureaucratic fortress from which the fight to protect Kamchatka's wildlife is fought. Although the reserves were relatively well-funded during the Soviet era, Komarov said, his staff now includes only 30 rangers and six scientific researchers. Once there were twice that many. "No one wants to work for a miserable salary," he lamented.
Russell hired former soldiers who had fought in Chechnya and were unafraid to chase poachers into remote corners of the peninsula. But there were never enough of them, he said. Now, although he initially thought about leaving Russia forever after the horrors of the spring, he is considering returning again next summer to help expand the ranger program.