Five times the size of France, Yakutia, at the eastern end of Siberia, is the coldest inhabited place on the planet. Two thousand kilometres north of Yakutsk, Olenyok was built under communism with the sole aim of settling the Evenk nomads. Houses have replaced tents, snowmobiles have replaced reindeer, and Evenki, their language, has disappeared. Eighty kilometres away, in the taiga, a handful of men still spend the winter under canvas with their herds, waiting for the call of the forest to ring out.
With its 200,000 inhabitants, Yakutsk, the largest city in the world built on permafrost, is the obligatory stop before the great cold. At the Chinese market, Christophe finds himself a fur hat and a thermometer: it is minus ten. His only lead to the nomads is called Simeon, thirty, a computer scientist living in the city. “I come from Olenyok and my father was a nomad, like all my ancestors.” He never misses the reindeer herders’ festival: they will go together. A power cut keeps the plane on the ground, then the tundra rolls by for two thousand kilometres, and the pilot announces minus thirty on the runway. In the Evenki language, Olenyok means “little reindeer”, but its history is less bucolic: the village was built to settle the nomads, and its inhabitants still live off the administration, the only source of jobs. Simeon’s grandfather was a nomad; his father became a forest ranger in the service of the Russian administration. In the evening, in the family home, the family tree is unrolled: fifteen metres of names, back to the first nomadic ancestors.
In Olenyok, “the new generation no longer knows much about the forest”.
Half past ten at night on the Arctic Circle: at the spring equinox, the sun sets late there.
“In Siberia more than anywhere else, the family is a hearth”, a gentle, warm place where the generations love to gather.For hundreds of years, the spring equinox has been marked by a great festival on the frozen river, where reindeer herders from all over the region converge. Christophe goes in the furs lent to him by Simeon’s family, Soviet-era plastic buttons included. They celebrate the victory of the sun over the world of night; in a few weeks the great migrations of wild reindeer will begin. At the sledge races, everyone tries to prove he is a little more nomadic than the rest of his clan, and the winner, paradoxically, goes home with a snowmobile, a buran, as they call it here. Grisha, the contender to watch, finishes tenth. In the children’s race, the finish is judged on video, fathers defend their champion before the judge, and number 7 wins a television; the programmes are broadcast in Yakut or Russian. In his tent, Svetik, an Evenk chief, serves the guests fermented reindeer milk. For fifteen years he has pitched it here for those who are hungry or cold, one of the last to live in the tradition of his ancestors. Life in town seems harder and harder to him, “and when I see everything that is happening in the world, all the changes, I am convinced that man’s salvation lies in returning to the forest”.
They thought there would be barely ten of them on the river; “everything converged, the reindeer and the nomads”.Eighty kilometres separate Olenyok from the nomads: a day by buran along the snowmobile tracks, sitting on the luggage. The camp looks tiny, three small tents for a handful of men who have spent the whole winter there. For his first visit, they light the fire and drive out the evil spirits; Christophe must walk around it sunwise before entering the tent. Anna learned these gestures from her grandmother and her mother, her grandfather and her father: “For all these reasons, I am not Yakut, but I am Evenk, I am a nomad.” The whole life of the camp revolves around the reindeer and the fire, which you must know how to revive quickly when night falls at minus fifty. An old man carves a stick to drive the animals: “The reindeer is used for everything.” A good reindeer, he insists, lives to forty. Released at night to look for lichen under the snow, they have to be found again every morning. Ice is fetched from the river, purer than snow, for tea and boiled meat, and people eat five or six times a day to keep warm. Under communism, shamans were persecuted; Anna passes her stones over Christophe, and finds that his heart is ailing.
Her stone, says Anna, “heals diseases of the teeth and of the heart”: the shaman is the very example of “the survival of traditions”.
The children take advantage of the school holidays to live at the camp: this is how traditions pass from the elders to the young.One morning, the tracker and Christophe walk for an hour and a half without finding the reindeer: the snow erases their tracks. Christophe heads back alone following the trail, like Tom Thumb, and the animals suddenly appear between the trees. It has taken three hours. An old herder is not worried: they left the day before, they are not far, and he has never lost them. In the tent, while little Misha gnaws on a bone, Svetik tells where he comes from. “In my culture, man is born a nomad. He is born in the forest.” His mother, pregnant, was left alone in a tent for the last three days; if she survived, she returned to the clan; if not, she was left to die. “She and I survived.” With communism and collectivism, his grandparents had to give up a large part of their herds and became livestock breeders. School became compulsory, and grandparents whose children refused to go were threatened with prison. His two sons are grown up now. The oldest man in Olenyok once dreamed that he saw Svetik walking ahead of his people, among the reindeer herds.
Semi-wild, the reindeer sometimes travel several dozen kilometres to find lichens and mosses, their only food, under the snow.
At the camp, a speciality: reindeer spinal cord, eaten raw.
From every glance exchanged, Christophe takes away “this pride in being Evenk and in being able to live as a free man, as a nomad”.“I would be happy if one of them became a banker. But I would be the proudest of men if one of my grandchildren wanted to be a nomad.”Svetik