The next step is breaking brushwood for the fire to process “pioneers’ fav’rite food-ood-ood”, as a sometime jolly Soviet song baptized baked potatoes. Which piece of work I had to do by bare hands equipped not even with a knife. At times the fact of my hiking unarmed astounds people, and they start to pour forth their stock of horror stories about hungry wolves and cruel robbers. As it stands, in all my annual escapes to the wilderness, I’ve only seen deer and foxes, and a couple of times bear steps, but no robbers ever bothered to ambush me in the toombs.
The only but ever present inconvenience is getting jumpy at close unidentified shrieks in the night forest, still I’m not sure if the possession of a loaded AK would improve symptoms. Yes, once I got attacked indeed, while spending the night under a bush nearby the Mekdishen village in my sleeping bag additionally wrapped into a piece of blue synthetic burlap. (The shoddy crap drenches thru in the rain before you say “knife”, but that had happened before 2000 when I got this Made-in-China tent.)
It was about midnight, when two wolfhounds, escorting a belated horseman, ran into me nestled under that bush. Damn! What a hell of barking broke loose over my head! Their master arrived at the scene with his flashlight and was stunned by the unseen sight in his native quarters, yet the blue bundle yelled from under the bush that it was a tourist from Stepanakert and let him call back his bloody beasts.
The mujik started the all too familiar hooey about wolves, for which I was not in the mood and just retorted curtly that after his gumprs nothing would ever scare me anymore…
And at the sleepover upon the Dizzuppaht, which is the third highest mountain in Karabakh, half an hour after me there climbed up a party of guys from the Halo Trust. So is named the international organization headquartered in Great Britain, who finance and teach techniques of mine clearance to the natives of hot spots at war all over the globe because different conflicting sides have the same nasty habit of setting up lots of minefields to kill as many people from the opposite side in the conflict as possible. The side effect is genocidal decimation of animal populations—both wild life and domesticated—the poor creatures, as a rule, are fully unaware of the areal political situation. We are responsible for who we housebreak. (…whom?. Hmm… I’m not a Sir Winston Churchill, man…)
Now, the local sappers (instructed by native Britons) climbed the Dizzuppaht on their off-duty time at night closing in after a day in the field to perform a pleading