Far From The Madding Crowd

At this time of year the bears are skinny and hungry. They comb the coastline, feasting on rucheiniki, fat flying insects that swarm in their millions and flop on the edge of the lake where bears suck them up. Along the western coast, bears have been reported taking cattle, and often wander into settlements in search of food. That evening Isaikin dumped us at our watching point, a wooden tower that once guarded a mining warehouse. Before we left Zavorotnaya, Burmeister handed me a small gun to scare the bears if they turned nasty; the gun had no safety, he said, but added reassuringly that the trigger was very stiff. Isaikin left us with words of encouragement and black humor about coming to look for whatever was left of us if we were not back by 10. Our perch was only a couple of meters above the ground, up a rickety and we hoped bear-proof ladder. I was disconcerted by our instructions to climb down and walk back to the settlement when we felt we had seen enough.

That night the bears were early. The first one, a well-muscled male with a brutal look, ambled confidently through the woods straight at us a few minutes after we arrived. He checked out a metal canister, nosed around, then paused as cameras clicked. He looked warily up at the tower, hesitated, then slowly and suspiciously strode back into the woods, pausing for a while to stare morosely at us from behind a tree. Ten minutes later, a younger male approached from another direction, stopping in a stand of young trees to snuffle or chew loudly on something before strolling past. Quickly sensing a foreign presence, he backed away, stopping to sniff the air, trying to identify the intruders, then cantered over a hedge into the woods. Curiosity got the better of him, though, and he came back for a second look.

Later Bradner showed Burmeister some photographs of the first bear. Burmeister has lived in close proximity to the animals since he was a child. At 9, he said, his hunter father would send him out with Laikas to find a bear, force it to take refuge in a tree, and then take a good look at it to decide whether the animal would be worth shooting at some future date. He looked at the sharp but worn claws and the powerful snout; "at least 4 years old, serious beast," he concluded admiringly.

days 4-5 tonkiy island We reached the smallest of the Ushkaniy Islands in the evening after stopping off at Snake Bay, a broad inlet on Svatoy Nos, a large peninsula jutting out from the eastern coast of the lake, to soak in the hot springs located along the wooded, deserted shoreline. The waters were 45°C, and hotter where the sulphur and other gases bubble up. The grass snakes that give the bay its name sun themselves on the warm stones of the beach and sometimes swim in one of the cooler springs.

At this time of the year, Tonkiy, which is several hours' sail west of Snake Bay, is the best place to see the nerpa, Baikal's freshwater seals, whose ancestors came here by river from the Arctic hundreds of thousands of years ago. Early in the morning we crept across the narrow, pine-covered island, moving slowly and as quietly as possible. At sunrise, after a night feeding in the lake, the nerpa head for the marble rocks a few meters offshore. When we arrived, some were already clambering onto the rocks, others were swimming in. They haul their fat bodies clumsily out of the water, squabbling with those who get there first. Once established, they fart loudly and turn their bellies toward the sun, while their drying fur turns from deep gray to silver. In late evening, they are cautious and easily spooked as they soak up the last rays of the sun, but on a warm morning they are noisy and not inclined to abandon their perch unless seriously worried.

Heidi Bradner

AT HOME IN BAIKAL The first of two bears visit the hide near Zavorotnaya.

For the past 17 years, Yuri Budeyev has been in charge of protecting the couple thousand nerpa on the Ushkaniy Islands. He lives on the main island with his wife, a meteorologist, in a hamlet with a couple of others. Their two children spend most of the year in Irkutsk, many hours away; their son is in high school and their daughter is training to become an advertising executive. When Budeyev and the other islanders need basic provisions, they go to the single shop in Kurbulik, a fishing village of 20-30 houses, several hours away by motorboat. For more serious purchases or official business, he goes to the larger settlement of Ust Barguzin, five hours by fishing boat. But after a few days in places like these, he says, "You get tired of the hurly burly and want to get back."

Day 6 KHUZHIR We sailed back into Khuzir, Olkhon's only real village, at 6 in the morning, grabbed some tea, said our farewells to Burmeister, and scrambled over the decaying remains of the pier back onto dry land. The village was quiet as usual, single-story log houses set in a grid along earthen streets, with the odd cow grazing outside its owner's gate. By Baikal standards, though, this is pretty much a metropolis, home to at least 1,000 people, several shops, a large school and a delightful little museum run by Kapitolina Revyakina, whose father founded it about a half-century ago. Here, as everywhere else in the Russian countryside, the world as people had known it ended in 1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The lights went out as the state stopped supplying fuel for the local power plants, the plane service to the mainland ceased and the fish cooperative went bust, leaving a rotting pier and little else. A majority of the villagers are unemployed and alcoholism is rampant.

But Olkhon's stunning scenery of taiga (subarctic conifer forest) and coves draws several thousand adventurous tourists a year. Most end up at Nikita Bencharov's homestead, a sprawling, whimsical collection of wooden houses on the northern edge of the town. In 1988, Bencharov — an all-Russian table-tennis champion — went to Olkhon for a month to visit a friend. Many months passed and he finally realized he would never leave. He started working with the children, teaching table tennis and organizing an ecology group to clean up the island. Locals looked askance, he said, wondering why this member of the Soviet sporting élite was not making a bundle of money somewhere. "They thought I was an eccentric," he says, "but money has never played a role in my life."

A room and three meals a day at Bencharov's costs about $20 a night. He is eccentric, of course. A good part of his time and proceeds from tourism go to children's programs in the village. The ecology group continues; Bencharov's is one of the few places in Russia that recycles its waste. But now there is a children's village, accessed by a hole in the fence, where Khuzhir's kids come to play, do theater groups and art, and as Bencharov puts it, "learn a little more about the world than they do in school." And every year Bencharov leads a children's expedition — often to France, Germany or Poland. For j200, Bencharov says, he can get a child to Western Europe for a month and back, all in. They travel by the cheapest means available and occasionally earn money with their performances. The result, he says "are children who are more self-confident in everyday life and in their studies." And possibly a generation better equipped to protect Baikal's increasingly vulnerable environment.

Baikal will need all the help it can get. It is a powerful work of nature, but also a fragile one. Global warming could lead to a dramatic shortening of the lake's ice season and major changes in its ecosystem. It is caught up in a struggle against the encroachment of man: pollution on one hand, the desire to develop the southern part of the lake for leisure, tourism and luxury homes on the other. And more than anything it will need protection from a very Russian phenomenon: bureaucrats who proclaim concern for the lake but close their eyes to projects — of which the planned oil pipeline is only the latest — that could destroy its pristine beauty forever.