But Vitus Bering will never return after having sailed the sea that will be called the Bering Sea and identified the Strait that will also be called the Bering Strait, he will not return because his body will lie forever, together with 18 men of his crew, on a remote island in the Arctic Sea that will inevitably be called Bering Island. An Arctic mystery? Maybe yes: it was always believed that Bering and his men had died of scurvy but recently a scientific expedition exhumed the remains, had them analyzed and the tests decreed that Bering and his men were very healthy and that the causes of death remain unspecified. What is certain is that the base built by Bering is today Petropavlosk-Kamchatskij, so called from the name of the two vessels dedicated to Peter and Paul, the capital of Kamchatka, a port city that lies at the foot of the Avacinsky volcano, stretched out on the shore of the large bay. Today it is a gray and sad city, with a decidedly Soviet look: Kutk, the crow god, certainly considers it a sort of disgusting booger that somehow stuck to his lost silky feather. However, if the wind and sun chase away the clouds and reveal the blue of the sky, they also uncover the white cone of the Avacinsky volcano, which seems like a marvelous, fantastic monumental monument placed to protect the city. Yes, this volcano with its immeasurable destructive potential gives you the impression of being an ancestral totem, the gentle giant that protects you and instils security. If you then venture onto the docks of the port, the atmosphere changes again and surprises you, but the surprise is not so surprising because by now you have understood that everything in Kamchatka surprises. An explanatory flashback? The salmon market in the city: an impersonal and aseptic building like a hospital, clean and cold corridors lit by yellowish neon lights that evoke the part of the hospital used as a morgue and yet the metal stalls, so aseptic that you are almost certain that a microbe or a virus would never dare to graze there, host not human cadavers but salmon, whole, sliced, filleted, some fresh, some frozen, some smoked, all wild salmon, noble and less noble because you discover something you didn’t know or had never stopped to think about before and that is that salmon are not all the same, they are not just salmon, there are various types, families and species, each well catalogued for gourmet value, in the sense of taste and the quality of the meat that also determines its commercial value and the consequent price for buyers. So impeccable men and women in caps and gloves, elegant in dark blue jackets and trousers or aprons of the same shade are not nurses but those who manage the counters and serve the customers. You are curious because it is the first time you have seen something like this and you are surprised to discover the various shades of color that characterize the different species of salmon, certainly not all the same as in the packages in our supermarkets but variants in different shades that go from pale pink to bright red. The only intruders are herrings that no Russian will ever give up just as we would never give up spaghetti or pizza. Outside – and a smile comes to your face – country women sell vegetables, onions and cabbages, Savoy cabbages and cucumbers, a kind of chicory, leeks and turnips, carrots and large phallic-looking courgettes and even radishes. You wonder how they manage with this climate because even though we are at the same latitude as Great Britain the Kamchatka peninsula is crossed by cold arctic winds that come down from Siberia and the coasts are lapped by a freezing sea current called Oyashio (it is Japanese and would mean something like “father or paternal current”), in short it is really cold and the earth is covered in snow from October to the end of May. Meanwhile an old lady offers you a radish to try, it is pale red with whitish shades but it is juicy, almost thirst-quenching, not as salty as ours but delicately scented.
But let’s go back to the docks of the port: you pass under rusty cranes that look like they haven’t been in use for centuries, among carcasses of trucks and abandoned containers that give you the impression of being the remains of some exodus of refugees, along the docks are docked, one next to the other like in an orderly parking lot where no one returns to get theirs, boats and fishing boats, each rustier than the last, they seem to be ready to be scrapped. Aren’t the junkyards on the ring road of Rome like this? Or is it the catastrophic set of a cemetery of ships burned by who knows what cataclysm? The impression is misleading, these wrecks hold up perfectly to the sea: just cast your eye over the vast bay and you see fishing boats in every way similar to these that you would say are ready to be thrown away, which plough through the waves with confidence as they return from fishing, hauling up the net full of fish one last time. Flocks of seagulls are excitedly racing above the boat that seems patched up but instead doesn’t care about aesthetics, simply this, an old boat from a hundred battles on which the fishermen feel at home and on which the winches and capstans work perfectly, this is what counts and who cares if it doesn’t look the best. The seagulls are enjoying themselves but it can happen that a shadow darkens their sky, a flap of powerful wings disarrays them and they have to leave the field, surrounding the lord like devoted vassals. Now above the fishing boat flies a large bird of prey that is striking for its appearance, so dark that it seems black but white streaks color it, white is the regal forehead, white are the powerful thighs and shoulders and the terminal part of the back or rather the coccyx, even birds have it and it is called a rump, white is the tail like a dusting of snow: it is the Steller’s Sea Eagle.
Who is Steller? He is the German naturalist who first described this large bird of prey from the Accipitridae family. Georg Wilhelm Steller had been part of the Bering expedition and survived to tell the world that the lord of the skies of Kamchatka is a white-striped eagle that swoops down from the sky like a punishment from God and harpoon large fish with powerful talons that he carries away as if they had no weight. For those who are curious about difficult scientific names, the Steller’s Eagle belongs to the genus Haliaeetus and its name is Haliaeetus pelagicus Pallas. Pallas? And now what does this have to do with anything? You’re wondering, I know. Peter Simon Pallas is the German biologist, zoologist and botanist who between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century undertook a series of scientific expeditions in Siberia to hunt for meteorites that had fallen in the taiga and tundra and while he was searching he happened to be the first to discover the remains of a Mammoth. Between one expedition and another he gave his name to a series of species, among which, in addition to the Haliaeetus pelagicus, the Felis manul which would then be the wild cat of the steppes. For more quick curiosity I will say that the Steller’s sea eagle is the largest eagle in the world by body mass and that the female is larger than the male. The coasts of Kamchatka are its natural habitat, here it nests to range over the Bering Sea and the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, here it finds its food resources. Seeing it in flight skimming the waves is a spectacle but you can also see it circling high above the most hidden rock crevices and if you happen to catch it perched on a sharp spire overlooking the sea it seems like a monument to nature and you think that perhaps even Kutkh, the crow god, might be seized by envy. The Steller’s sea eagle has refined tastes and feeds preferably on salmon, its favorite restaurants are the mouths of rivers where salmon gather to swim upstream and go to reproduce but if they are hungry they do not disdain cod and herring and eat crustaceans, crabs and squid, they enjoy catching land animals such as mice and squirrels and if they want to show off their strength and skill they grab minks and marmots with their claws and attack ducks and seagulls in flight with sure success. Its most ardent hunters are photographers, both professionals and amateurs, who try to frame it in the viewfinder in search of the “bingo” photo, the one that captures it in its most beautiful and definitive gesture, when with outstretched wings it extracts from the water the fish harpooned by its claws and it seems suspended motionless, hieratic like an icon.
Attention! Now I’m going to shoot another scientific name: Ursus arctos beringianus.
In truth, this is the favorite actor of documentary filmmakers and nature photographers who hang around Kamchatka, a beast that if it stands up you realize it is just under 3 meters tall and those who know about it say it can weigh up to 700 kilos: it is the Kamchatka Brown Bear, a subspecies of brown bear. In the peninsula there are between 15 thousand and 30 thousand individuals and this has given rise to the imaginative definition of “Bear State”, pertinent because in no other part of the world is there such a dense concentration of bears. I note that the scientific name says beringianus, meaning of Bering: it is likely that the name does not refer so much to the person of the explorer as to the geographical area that is the bear’s habitat but the fact remains that the name Bering permeates this part of the world. Well, having made this useless clarification, it must be said that there is a natural set where our “nice” plantigrade gives the best of himself as an actor: it is a lake where during the spawning period millions of fat and succulent salmon flock. You will surely have attended at least once one of those village festivals that offer tastings of the natural products of the place: well this is “The Kuryl Salmon Festival” where we are not the ones who gorge on fresh salmon but the brown bears of Kamchatka who use their claws as forks. Lake Kuryl can only be reached by helicopter. You take one in Petropavlosk-Kamchatskij and after an hour of flight it will drop you off in the place where for the occasion there is the greatest concentration of brown bears in Kamchatka which in itself is the territory with the greatest concentration of brown bears in the world. No roads means no vehicles, there are two shelters protected by electric barriers, the cell phone has no coverage and there are so many bears that you are only authorized to move accompanied by a ranger armed with a rifle. Your weapon is the camera or the video camera and so off you go hunting for images, it is very likely that you will never have so many bears at your disposal again in your life, natural actors who move as if you were not there, unaware of giving you so many emotions to capture in a shot or in a sequence of frames (but sometimes it seems that they know very well that you are there to photograph them and you would say that they pose with their claws filleting the fish they have just caught or one starts running in the water to catch a salmon in the splashes so that it ends up directly in its jaws; it can even be that two males start fighting each other as if they wanted to be admired for how strong they are and in your lens you capture images so exciting that your hands shake while you take the shot).
But the time has come to get on the boat, a solid and spartan boat painted in blue called Kathleen, which flies the Russian flag and also waves the Italian tricolor out of courtesy. Because Kamchatka is a peninsula and there are its coasts to discover. They are whipped and sculpted by a sea that is often gray and sparkling and becomes intense blue when the sun shines. Then the steep rocks are reflected in the water and colored red, brown, yellow, green, gray-blue by the emerging minerals: a palette that seems ready for an impressionist painter who is preparing to paint. The same rugged rocks made of sharp promontories and pinnacles and cracks and ravines and organ pipes on which the sea breaks when it is restless and breaks furious waves that foam with anger. From this sea rise obelisks, rocky monoliths that seem like relics from antediluvian times and instead you realize that they are inhabited skyscrapers: the wind and the weather have sculpted the rock creating small ravines like burial niches, each niche a kennel where a seagull lives, a Kamchatka Seagull of course. They are real condominiums of birds where the guano looks like snow that softens the black lava rock. Some of these stacks are so familiar to the landscape and to sailors that they are almost considered people, for example the so-called “Three Brothers”, tri brata in Russian, who act as sentries in the Avacinskaja bay and are a bit reminiscent of three standing bears. The bays open suddenly between the sheer rock walls on top of which are green carpets of thick, short grass as if the gardener had just passed by, doors that open to let you enjoy the view of the volcanoes in the full splendor of a panorama that has no equal. The bays are also safe natural harbors where you can anchor for the night and the next morning go on forays in a dinghy to explore the ravines where sea otters swim and spotted seals stretch lazily in the heat of a single ray of sunlight that penetrates the rocks, highlighting the irregular dark, almost black spots that speckle the entire light gray, almost white body, and in short it is almost inevitable to jokingly call them polka-dotted seals. On a magma of shiny, black lava rocks, the sea lions slyly observe who you are and what the hell you do with your dinghy and if you get too close they dive into the sea snorting with an air of saying but you really had to come and bother me and they swim around you, looking askance with big eyes and when they realize that you have no bad intentions they climb back up with sullen effort onto the rocks and there they stretch out, offering themselves with disdainful nonchalance to the shots of the cameras. Mystery hovers in the caves dug by the waves and you enter them by dinghy with the secret hope of finally being able to glimpse the Giant Kamchatka Crab, its dark red carapace, the 5 appendages that can be over a meter and a half long, the strange fan-shaped tail, the two enormous claws and perhaps your mouth is watering because you know that the monster hides delicious white meat that has a 5 Michelin star rating.
The dinghy slides out of the cave following the light, you find the intensely blue sea and in that blue floats what looks like a children’s toy, a Puffin: Fratercula its scientific name that sounds catchy. It spends the winter at sea but nests on land in burrows that it preferably steals from some rodent and if it really can’t find anything better it digs itself using its strong triangular beak that appears flat when seen from the side and instead refined when seen from the front; you know this because you’ve read it but now you have to find out what kind of Puffin this is… because there are two species of these birds that populate Kamchatka. So let’s see, a red beak that stands out on a white face that looks like white lead where the eyes seem to be made up of dark eye shadow, on the forehead a black line that goes from the eyes to the nape of the neck and down the neck until it flows into the rest of the body that is also all black, on the side of the black line two white tufts start that look like a hairdresser’s hairdo, so here it is identified: it is a Tufted Puffin, Fratercula cirrhata, it was catalogued by the same Pallas who catalogued the Steller’s Sea Eagle, under the blue of the sea the red legs that row slowly stand out. Well, you are satisfied for having been able to recognise it, now you have to see, sooner or later, the other Puffin that lives in these seas and these coasts, the Horned Puffin. The black one above, white below, with a yellow and red beak and a small black horn above the eyes, Fratercula corniculata was catalogued by Johann Friederich Naumann, a German considered the father of scientific ornithology in Europe. Puffins with short wings swim underwater hunting for small fish and zooplankton, when they resurface and want to take off from the surface of the sea they have to flap their wings so fast that they reach about 400 beats per minute. Needless to say, the lenses of the cameras frame them more than willingly.
When you realize that the daylight is about to fade and the sun’s rays are still only on the upper part of the volcanic cones, drawing even violent glares from the snows of ice that crown the craters, it is time for Kathleen, your boat, to seek shelter in the welcoming arms of a quiet bay. And what bay is more suitable than one where a small garrison of the Red Army is stationed? The garrison is really small… it is made up of two soldiers, a non-commissioned officer and a non-commissioned officer. Alone in their solitude, they are in contact with the world thanks to the radio-transmitter that works perfectly. The garrison is here to control a copious spring that has time to become a stream in the few meters that remain to pour into the waters of the bay. It is an important reference point in the inhospitable and almost always impervious coasts for boats, vessels and ships, even of considerable size, since the bay is deep, that need to refuel. The outlet of the spring to the sea is protected by a reddish metal bulkhead of rustproofing, peeling like the open side of a ship that has become a wreck on the pebbly beach. The spring water flows freely but a sluice, put into operation when needed, channels it into a large hose that is hooked to the mouth of the tank of the thirsty ship and gives it something to drink by filling its belly with the purest spring water.
In the barracks, which is a hut overheated by a stove, they don’t drink water but “acquetta,” that is, vodka. The commanding non-commissioned officer, bearded like a kulak straight out of a page of Toltstoy, is just waiting to have guests to break the monotony of his service. The monotony dissolves with bottles of vodka emptied at a pace that to call it very fast still doesn’t quite convey the idea, and with buckets of raw shrimp. Buckets, I said it that way and it’s the right term: the shrimp fill buckets that the officer brings out from a refrigerator closet along with bottles of vodka, a reserve that seems to have no end. The shrimp are delicious, they melt in the mouth and the vodka cleans the tongue, sliding softly over the palate. While you are still lucid you have time to think that a dinner like this, based on very fresh delicate shrimp ad libitum and vodka ad libitum too, would cost a lot of money in any restaurant in Rome or Milan… meanwhile the petty officer talks and talks, in Russian of course, you don’t understand a thing and the interpreter, intent like everyone else on eating shrimp and drinking vodka, has little desire to translate. Soon the Russian in which the petty officer tells who knows what, perhaps past adventures or memories of love, sounds like music punctuated by continuous toasts, the shrimp fill your mouth with flavor and the vodka goes down like a digestive to make room for more shrimp. You have taken the serene path of drunkenness but the stove and the “little water” that circulates in your veins have developed a heat that you can no longer stand and you have to leave the hut to get some fresh Kamchatka air. You find the bay magical, suffused with moonlight, a thousand stars in the sky, the outline of the volcano that closes the bay seems drawn with a marker, the snow-capped peak sparkles, what volcano is this? Let’s say you’re pretty brain-numbing and they’ve told you the names of a lot of volcanoes, all complicated Russian names, so let’s see… this volcano here must be, must be… the Vilucinskij volcano, yes it is, I bet! You cast your eye over the silver bay, two large sharp fins travel almost parallel, one slightly ahead of the other, they plough through the silver water, then a black body streaked with white arches, emerges and sinuously submerges. The other body does the same, the top of the head is white, the back is black, the companion: two killer whales, the same ones, perhaps, that for hours during the day, we saw evolving in front of and behind Kathleen as if they were playing a game that amused them quite a bit. Now they are swimming in the bay, their fins out seem to wave like flags and although you are certainly not lucid you realize that they are going up and down the bay, back and forth, as if they were in their pool, back and forth, one pool after another as if they were training for who knows what competition. Your head is spinning a little, you look up at the moon, a black bird, perhaps out of the crater of the volcano, flies following the movement of the killer whales’ fins, it can’t be a sea eagle, it’s too small. But it could be… yes, a crow, why not? It could… in fact it is a crow, it is THE CROW! Him? Kutkh, the god who lost a pen and the pen became Kamchatka? You are not lucid and everything could be in the magical night, high on vodka. You stagger and sit down, you don’t even know what, you close your eyes and wait for your head to stop spinning.