Yamal: The Nenet Migration

Text from the diary of Nicoletta and Silvano Bergamin and photos by Piero Bosco

Arctic, Nenet, Reindeer Breeders, Nomads, Chum

October 3
We arrive in Salekhard in the evening: about 2000 km north-east of Moscow. We left home yesterday, today we are here in this distant and unknown city, but we have not yet truly entered the world that we are preparing to explore: the world of the Nentsy, reindeer herders scattered across a vast area of ​​the Russian Arctic. We will arrive there tomorrow, when we reach our starting point for this adventure, Yar Sale, an outpost of all the Nentsy of Yamal, where their children study, where many of them, having become temporarily or permanently sedentary, live in modern apartments, equipped with all comforts, but close enough to the tundra to be able to quickly reach, by land or by helicopter, their chums (reindeer skin tents, similar to large teepees) and their reindeer.
October 4
We wake up at dawn: we have to go to the port to board the hydrofoil that will take us to Yar Sale. There are many people but, apart from us, no foreigners; we leave at 7.00 after a hectic boarding, between our luggage and the countless packages that the locals bring with them: the boat is decidedly modern and comfortable and the 5 hours of travel pass relatively quickly, while on the screens a sort of exciting Russian soap opera is shown, of which we miss the ending! Arriving in Yar Sale, the climate is gloomy, but the temperature surprisingly warm: after having visited some public facilities available to the inhabitants (schools and sports center), we are more and more amazed by the level of affluence of these places. It is then explained to us that, being a territory with special status, they can use many more resources locally than in the rest of Russia and, from the little that we can see, they seem well spent. In the evening, dinner at Kyrill’s house, who will be our local guide for the next few days, based on excellent raw fish and pelmeni.
October 5
Still light rain and a bit of sleet. At 9:00 the crawler finally arrives that will take us to the tundra: there are 8 of us packed with our luggage on this kind of tank trailer, while the guides travel in front with the 2 young reporters from Russian television, who will be with us for a few days.
Inside our singular means of transport you can’t see much but the stops, for this very reason, are very frequent, to allow us to literally SEE where we are going: in this way, we are often amazed by what we find in front of us when they come to “liberate” us. In fact, when we come across the first small Nentsy camp of only 2 tents, with a very small child who timidly comes towards us, the feeling is that we have somehow left our planet and ended up we don’t know exactly where: everything is so unreal, the atmosphere, the freezing air, this child who looks happy, but who seems alone in the world, in this polar world!
Then suddenly everything comes to life: first a woman comes out of the chum then, an even more fairy-tale image, two sleds pulled by reindeer appear on the horizon. The introductions are made: they are two of the heads of the families who will welcome us in their camp, where we arrive soon after. We divide ourselves into the 3 tents that will host us in the next few days and we are served the first of the many meals that we will share with these 3 families: almost always they will be simple but excellent soups with some vegetables, mostly carrots, potatoes and cabbage, and reindeer meat that, despite our initial fears, will turn out to be delicious.

October 6
The first night, with some difficulty, passed: it is not easy to sleep practically on the ground, especially for those who are more sensitive to the cold. In reality, perhaps we could organize ourselves a little better: for the next night we will try to improve the accommodation, also because outside it is biting cold and, every now and then, it starts to snow. In the meantime, after lunch, the Nentsy arrange their sleds in a semicircle and join them together with ropes and a very long net, similar to a large fishing net. The dogs begin to bark convulsively, while the men go to get the reindeer, which begin to run around the camp. Since the herd is composed partly of practically wild reindeer and partly of partially domesticated reindeer, the latter gradually begin to enter the sort of enclosure formed by the sleds and which is controlled by the women, while the men try to capture the other reindeer with a sort of lasso. When they have a sufficient number of reindeer, they usually tie four to each sled. In the meantime, the sleds have been loaded with all the furnishings and the tents themselves, dismantled: each of the three families hosting us loads 3 or 4 sleds, then we set off. Some on the crawler, some on the sleds, some others follow on foot: the terrain is not exactly easy to travel, there are also small fords to cross, but it is definitely worth it, because … yes, it seems incredible, but we are following nomadic reindeer herders, who move their camp by moving on wooden sleds pulled by reindeer. Let’s think for a moment, one might say, we are in 2014 … no, it simply cannot be: we are living a dream, an adventure probably dreamed many times as children, it cannot be reality! It must be the snow, or this very particular light, or maybe the cold: there is something that is not easy to understand, much less explain, but that takes hold of you in an inescapable way. There is nothing truly BEAUTIFUL, according to the classic canons of beauty, and yet you feel overwhelmed by such purity: yes, you feel the strong sensation of something PURE.
October 7
The second night was much more comfortable, in the tent reassembled and, this time, already prepared for the winter, with a double layer of reindeer skins. Our sleeping bag is also spread over other reindeer skins, and we all sleep together: the four of us line up in a row, then the head of the family, Gennady, then little Tanja, 4 years old, daughter of one of his 8 children; finally Nadja, Gennady’s wife, before lying down in the place closest to the entrance (and therefore potentially the coldest) creates a bit of privacy, lowering a light sheet from above that separates us, all 7 of us fraternally lying together, from the rest of the tent. Someone has the courage, or the urgency, to get up in the middle of the night and go out: the wind is freezing, but in the lake in front of which we camped the moon shines, magically. In the morning there is excitement at the camp: today they will have to capture and slaughter 3 reindeer! The semicircle is reconstituted with the sleds and the net, the dogs are even more agitated than yesterday and their yelps are almost scary: they seem more like a pack of wolves, even if in reality they are rather small dogs compared to the Siberian Huskies that we would have expected to find. The men have gone to gather the reindeer that, as usual, were grazing not far from the camp: they start making them run in circles. The domesticated reindeer, we know by now, will enter the enclosure prepared for them sooner or later; the others will have to go around several times until some are lassoed and, this time, killed. Another dive into our most ancestral part: there is no room, here and now, for our rationality! Here we return to prehistory, here we have the opportunity, I would say the fortune, to observe how people live, or rather survive, in this part of the world that so much resembles a time, the ice age, that even the Mediterranean world, our world, had to experience: we can’t make too much of a fuss, we just have to watch! Of course, it’s not an everyday thing to see that beautiful reindeer that was running next to you yesterday being skinned and butchered; and then the Nentsy who drink their blood with gusto, or eat their flesh left to soak for a few minutes in slightly salted blood! But then seeing them all: men, women and children, with those red lips that seem painted with the brightest lipstick, makes you smile again and you feel enriched by a new, hard but grand, experience.
October 8
It’s snowing this morning and the lakes all around are now completely frozen. We have lunch very early (with the excellent reindeer meat from yesterday …), because then we have to dismantle the camp again: the preparations are repeated the same way, but by now the two parties have become close and someone is even able to actively lend a hand. The new camp is not very far from the previous one: when we arrive, the tents are quickly set up, the wood is split into very small pieces for the stoves that are in the center of each chum and, while Nadja prepares dinner and Gennady thinks about the reindeer, we have time to wander around nearby, venture up to the edge of the trees, where there is always some stream that, for the moment, is not yet frozen: there are birches and larches, surrounded by bushes and shrubs, which then go to stretch out on the carpet of the tundra. Some still bring berries, so tasty in this world so cold that it seems lifeless; there are countless varieties of leaves, twigs, mosses, lichens, pebbles, all arranged in the most varied interweavings, that you could spend hours looking at and photographing, without looking up from the ground, in this world that was previously unknown. This is another peculiarity of a journey that apparently seems to take you nowhere, but that at every moment instead shows you a new aspect, gives you a new sensation, reveals a new world to you. Even the evening will be a new discovery: Piero and Konstantin, our guides and interpreters, are having dinner with us this evening and helping us to talk to the family that is hosting us. We press each other with a barrage of questions that are sometimes very simple, other times very profound: in the end you can perceive a sort of greater harmony, almost a friendship that was expressed well even before, only through smiles and a few gestures. In this way, we end up staying up late: this evening we don’t go to sleep at 8:00 pm, as usual, but almost at 10:00 pm!
October 9
After a clear night of full moon, this morning the tundra gave us the vision of a group of partridges in winter plumage. After lunch the reindeer gather again: this time it is for a sleigh ride. The Nentsy want to show us a place sacred to them, which is located a few kilometers from the camp: it is certainly not a grandiose temple, but a simple pile of reindeer antlers and skulls, intertwined between vodka bottles, pieces of cloth, other unidentified objects and coins that we also throw, as a good luck gesture. The simplicity of this place, the caravan of sleighs that winds along the path, a very white arctic fox that we glimpse from afar: everything contributes to creating once again a particular magic, a leap not only into a place, but also into a time different from our own.
October 10
Today is our last day at the camp: in these few days, we have witnessed the transition from autumn to winter. The temperatures have dropped by at least ten degrees, the colors are changing all around and the water in the lakes is now frozen: before filling the buckets to take to the tents, we need to break the ice. The time has come to say goodbye, to leave these people who welcomed us so friendly, but the idea of ​​a night in a well-heated hotel room is too tempting!
October 11
Back in Yar Sale, we finally managed to take a shower and sleep in a warm bed but, let’s face it, it’s all so predictable, so banal, everything so terribly hot: how much better it was to be in the tundra, pretending to know how to live like the Nentsy for a few days! How nice it was not to have to be well dressed, presentable, clean, but simply well protected from the cold, happy and … full of reindeer hair everywhere! Unfortunately, bad weather prevents us from returning to Salekhard by helicopter: it would have been fantastic to say goodbye from above to this apparently inhospitable land. We have to retrace our steps along the immense delta of the Ob River, whose vastness we cannot even perceive: among other things, this will also be the last race of the season, because even the water of the river is starting to freeze, while the snow is now falling abundantly. Arriving in Salekhard, even in a decidedly wintry climate and thousands of kilometers from home, still means leaving something important behind: you have the sensation of not having simply taken a trip, it was not even an adventure, there is something indescribable that remains inside, the idea of ​​a very close contact with nature, which was reawakening our most ancestral part, dormant for millennia. Perhaps in a little while it will be easier to express all this, or perhaps this sense of the inexpressible will remain forever; the memory of an EXTRAORDINARY experience will remain, however, very strong.