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Between Russia and China
by Colin Thubron
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These hours became a time of drowsy companionship. On a tree-sheltered ridge or knoll, under the waxing moon, Mongo and Ganpurev would talk of their hunting expeditions, guiding oligarch Russian sportsmen in search of game. There was always a tang of danger, they said. In early spring, when bears came out of hibernation, they could be hungry and a little mad. After pillaging ants' nests, the formic acid went to their heads and they ran amok. You had to watch for wild boars too, which turned savage and cunning when injured. Mongo had a deep gash down his thigh to show for it. 'You think you're hunting them, but after they're wounded they will be hunting you.'
No, they didn't mind the Russians. The Russians weren't like the Chinese. Mongo admired Putin, even Trump. He revered rulers with a semblance of strength. Ganpurev stayed silent and Batmonkh shook his head. The horsemen wondered who governed Britain. Wasn't it the royal family? Strange that in this Mongolian fastness they had heard of a British royal prince marrying a mixed-race American. And she from a split family ...
Batmonkh suddenly said: 'That was my mother's situation too, and mine. Her father was angry with her. "You know what people will say," he told her. "Everyone will say it. Marrying a mixed-race man. Third World Africa. And your children" – that's me – "will show it too. But if you want to do it, all right, you do it." And she did, although they had to separate, and my grandfather supported her to the end.' He shared this with the horsemen in terse phrases.
Hesitantly Ganpurev said: 'I think intermarriage is good. In Mongolia we are too enclosed.'
Suddenly, beyond the thickening darkness, came the cry of a wolf. At first it was only a thread of sound, like a distant scream. Mongo got to his feet, circled his hands round his mouth, and answered it. And the cry came back, closer, from the thickets a hundred yards away: a disembodied howl, pitched high and fluting, then falling away in an inconsolable lament. When Mongo responded again, his cry sounded identical, and the replies were now echoing back to us – or perhaps to one another – from still-invisible wolves. Our horses stirred uneasily. They would come closer to our tents tonight, Mongo said. The wolves were circling around us, unsure. Something was not right. We never saw them, but they could see us, Mongo said, and now our fire would have disturbed them.
For a time we went on sitting in the dark, while the howling faded away. We were all weary. In more than twenty years' trekking, the horsemen said, this was the worst terrain they had ever known. When the moon sank and our campfire died, the flare of their cigarettes lit their faces with a delusive softness; then they left for their tent.
Batmonkh stayed on, as he often did, staring into the campfire embers while I sat beside him. Usually he liked to talk about his reading. He'd long ago left behind the old Soviet favourites like White Fang and The Last of the Mohicans, and was devouring books on world history and astronomy, or the origins of humankind, modern warfare, the history of the Huns. But tonight he said: 'I have much to be sad over.' He was remembering his grandfather, the powerful old man, his surrogate father, whose funeral he had left to accompany me. 'He was the one who encouraged me. When I guided historians and palaeontologists in the Gobi Desert, he said that was a fine thing to do, that was my contribution to the world.' Then Batmonkh voiced the old lament of the bereaved. 'I never told him how much I loved him.'
'He must have known,' I said.
'He knew he was near the end. He had blood entering his brain. He went to a river to die. They found him after four days, with a bottle of vodka, barely touched. They identified him only by his watch.'
*
Dawn brings a soft illumination to the land, as if the night had cleaned it. Below our camp the still-weak sun lifts a long sheet of mist above the valley, where the river meanders in and out of sight through scrub burnishing into autumn. I emerge from a sleepless night with aching body. But the land's human emptiness and its deep silence stir a pang of wonder, as if the world were young again. The keen eyes of the horsemen descry Siberian red deer grazing more than a mile away. Batmonkh puts his binoculars to my eyes. The animals have moved out from protective trees, and are standing in open meadowland. The distance, and the pale pink light, turn them a little spectral. They seem to be grazing in another ether than ours, in the peace of a different sunlight.
Excerpted from The Amur River by Colin Thubron. Copyright © 2021 by Colin Thubron. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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