DEER ON A WIRE

PLOTS

The room in which we are talking with Alexei Vaisman is so faceless that it seems non-existent. All of it is the common place of a modern office, a set of objects that do not have color and intelligible form; objects disappear from memory, it is worth taking ...

The room in which we are talking with Alexei Vaisman is so faceless that it seems non-existent. All of it is the common place of a modern office, a set of objects that do not have color and intelligible form; objects disappear from memory, it is worth looking away from them. Perhaps this is good - through the meaningless, melting in the bright spring light, the contours of the furniture shine through those things and entities that we are talking about. The world's blue ocean is shaking, from which fishing trawlers are scooping fish with huge trawls, the Far Eastern taiga is rustling, which is converted into logs by millions of cubic meters and illegally transported to China, a small, dark-colored deer with a light belly and large, rounded ears - a musk deer - freezes on the green grass.

At WWF - World Wildlife Fund - Aleksey Vaysman is engaged in the TRAFFIC project, the task of which, as he defines it in quite clerical language, is "monitoring the situation that exists in the trade in wild species of fauna and flora." TRAFFIC offices are located all over the world (the main one is in Cambridge), and they are all engaged in one thing: they keep track of which species of animals and plants are involved in illegal circulation, and which routes they move, and what damage they suffer. In the world there is a constant processing of the living into the inanimate: sables - into fur coats, crocodiles - into handbags, deer - into pantocrine. “If a species enters commercial circulation, then it can be said to be condemned,” Weissman says.

He is a stocky, broad-shouldered, somewhat overweight man in a plaid shirt with a Wrangler label. A section of the shirt shows a dark green T-shirt, which is worn in the US Marine Corps. He is 45. Curiosity for nature has owned him since childhood - as a boy he brought earthworms home and observed their life, then he studied at a school with a biological bias, then he graduated from the biological faculty of Moscow State University. He speaks about the beasts he met during his travels (their routes stretched from the Tver forests to the forests of the Amur region), without the excitement and enthusiasm that are characteristic of amateurs, but with a calm, even feeling of affection. A two-meter bear, which once stood up five meters from him from tall grass, he affectionately calls a small animal, and a small musk deer deer, which does not have horns, but has fangs, is a creature. I interrupt him: “What is the difference between an animal and a creature? Do you like the creature less? - "No! No! The creature is God's! I like them equally!"

Alexey speaks globally - in his monologues, the whole variety of animals and plants is mixed up and linked into a single lump. In his stories, little baby monkeys suffer - in the spring, thousands of them are brought into Russia for the needs of photographers who lure the public with them on the squares, and in the fall they are thrown into a park or forest, where they are found by environmental inspectors. These monkeys must be affectionate, and therefore they are always children - "sucking babies", as Alexey calls them. “You need to understand what this cub means. This is the dead mother. This is a child slave trade. This conveyor of death is spinning from year to year.

He talks about the anecdotal new Russians, among whom at one time it was prestigious to have pythons that cost a hundred dollars a centimeter. “It was at a time when clever people made money by kicking the air with their feet, and also spent thoughtlessly. We bought ourselves a meter, two, three pythons. Well, they’ll drink there, then he, once, went into the next room and went out with a three-meter snake, everyone is dead, the girls are lying! That's cool!" he laughs with the joyful laugh of a new Russian idiot with a shaved head and a gold chain around his neck. And again he returns to himself, switches to his restrained language, dotted with scientific terms, speaks in a low voice, disappearing for the recorder.

If I now simply write down and publish everything that he told me, this will be a report of one hundred and fifty pages, which can be entitled "On the Doom of Life on Earth." This is an apocalypse - cut down forests, poisoned air, dead saigas, oil dripping from pipelines. But the most terrible thing in this quiet story of a biologist is a man. A person in the stories of Alexei Vaisman appears as a predatory and corrupt creature, ready to kill and trade in corpses for his own pleasure.

But this is not enough - the creature turns out to be deceitful and hypocritical. In Russia, millions of cubic meters of forest are illegally cut down, and the forest academician, whom Weissman gives the nickname Sidor Matrasych, confidently lies on TV that the percentage of illegal logging is vanishingly small. He talks about the fact that timber trucks in the Far East are already called "vorovaiki". And he talks about the corruption that has corroded the country like rust, the corruption that allows poachers to do whatever they want by presenting to customs "a certificate in the form of a green ticket issued by the US Treasury."

The Italians are proud of Ancient Rome, which arose seven hundred and fifty years BC, the Jews are proud that they roamed the deserts of Sinai three thousand years ago, but these proud peoples are young compared to the musk deer. This small archaic deer, which ran along the mountain steeps of Altai twenty million years before man appeared on earth, never, of course, knew and had never heard of either the Romans, or the Jews, or the Russians, or the Chinese . Nobody needed this small deer - half a meter in height and weighing 15 kilograms - and did not interfere. It is impossible to eat its meat - Alexei Vaisman, who tried everything on his expeditions, claims that it tastes like rubber lichen.

The musk deer lived its special free life, suffering little damage from hunters. The male musk deer has a musk gland, and musk is used in the manufacture of perfumes - but the perfume industry needs very little musk. In Soviet times, it was mined in small quantities according to plan, and hunting licenses were pushed into hunters almost by force: “If you don’t bring five musk deer navels, you won’t get a license for sable!” But everything changed when the border with China opened. The fact is that musk is a component of almost half of all drugs of oriental medicine. And for the musk deer, this is a sentence.

For the Chinese, having a piece of musk is the same as having a piece of gold. The cost of musk taken from the musk deer gland can be five times higher than the price of gold. In fact, once the Chinese had their own musk deer, but they completely knocked it out. And then suddenly a wild country opened up before the hardworking, diligent Chinese, where, as Aleksey Vaisman says, “kabaroks run like mice.” “I saw places,” he says, “where there are six climbs of musk deer for eight kilometers of the route, she jumps up from behind a snag and runs away.”

The Chinese rushed to buy. “The neighborhood of China for our nature is a terrible scourge. This is a black hole where everything is sucked in: a stream of kabarozhi, and bear bile, and ginseng, which is in the Red Book ”... The Chinese pay hunters from collapsed state farms for a kabaroga navel from 60 to 80 dollars - quite good money for a resident of the Altai or Far Eastern outback . It is easy to get musk deer. You don't even need to drive and shoot her. “It is enough to put a loop of telephone wire on the path, she herself will come and strangle herself. The beast is archaic, stupid,” Weissman explains, but his rudeness towards a stupid musk deer voluntarily sticking his head into a noose is tinged with affection: this is how a beloved dog is called a fool.

“Our estimate of the illegal export of musk musk to China is half a ton,” he again switches to the language of the report. “That's twenty thousand males. Despite the fact that the official production quota is three and a half thousand. The officially permitted method of hunting musk deer is to shoot from under the dogs. No one shoots females, they don’t have musky glands. But in the loops they all choke. What came, then strangled. Males make up 25-30% of the population. And it is clear that for one harvested male there are three or four females or young animals, which are simply thrown away. Therefore, 20,000 males taken means at least 60,000 poached animals.”

“It looks like this in Altai,” he suddenly sighs deeply and falls silent. I'm waiting. “It puts pressure on the psyche,” he explains to me. - There poachers make so-called ludya, artificial fences, in the passages of which loops are placed. And these fences stretch for kilometers over mountains and valleys. This is not an ordinary fence or wattle fence, a spruce falls like a chainsaw there, the next one falls nearby, a row of fallen trees comes out. The rubble stretches from ridge to ridge. When the season ends, no one goes to shoot the loops, and hares, and foxes, and anyone else die in them.

- And you saw it? I ask.

“Yes, yes,” he confirms with a tone of hopelessness. - When we kept records of musk deer, we removed five thousand loops. Poachers.

I don’t ask him what it is like to walk through the dense primeval forests, through the resilient untrodden grass, under the beautiful sky of Altai and take out from the loops the corpses of innocent hares who died a death that God did not provide for them, but was invented by man.