Bypassing thickets on the steep slope, I explore the underwood along the field edge, pulling a broken bough here, a dead sapling there onto the desolate cow path. After advancing in that manner some two hundred meters, I turn about and go back picking up the firewood scattered over the path. With an ample armful of fuel, I come back to the former campsite, then re-track to fetch another bundle; and one more. Thats that.
The next step is breaking brushwood for the fire to process pioneers favrite 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, Ive 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 Im 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 populationsboth wild life and domesticatedthe poor creatures, as a rule, are fully unaware of the areal political situation. We are responsible for who we housebreak. (whom?. Hmm Im 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 mahtagh, because atop that mountain, from time immemorial, there stood a stone chapel which you should walk around, thrice, for your request to get approved by the authorities of fate.
The Halo Trust guys, naturally, did not come empty-handed, they brought a rooster with them for the sacrificial offering. But because of the somewhat impromptu nature of their mahtagh-doing, they missed to bring a knife along and were expressly disappointed to learn that neither had I Yet, the resourceful fellas on-the-fly invented a novel technique and chopped the birds head off with the piece of a broken bottle collected from the heap of garbage solicitously piled up by all the previous mahtagh-doers
Its only that year when I climbed the second highest (and clean completely) peak in the region, the Keers, I had an imitation of a Swiss army knife, a present from Nick Wagner. It had a whole bunch of things in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file. I cant remember where I misplaced it afterward.
But, however long were I patting myself on the back, the regions peak number one remains beyond the peacock tail of my vagrant achievements. The front line of the unfinished war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis runs across that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other wouldnt let me pass up or theyd just bang from both sides synchronously.
The point is that manual breaking of dry branches is not a big deal, and before long I readied up two sizable heaps of fuel for the fire. With the first one burned up, the unpeeled (so is the recipe) potatoes are buried in the hot ashes and the finalizing heap goes in the fire restarted upon them. But not right now, first, I have to put the tent up; the sun already gone behind this wheeling football field of a toomb, the dusk begins to slowly creep in from over the river
(in every human there sits a pyromaniac
and then the pyromaniacs partook of pies with Pirosmani
Looks like a half-baked jaw-breaker, eh?then, gradually, a creepy disjunctive question crawls in: was Pirosmani among the banqueters or, after all, inside the pies, turned into toothsome filling?.)