It is the 14th of January 2024 today, -40°F, an utterly grey day and it is only 41°F in our apartment. Our rowdy neighbors below have been quarreling all night again, which they do every 3 or 4 days, but since they knocked on our door yesterday and gave us four frozen fish (schirr) to make straganina out of, we ain´t complaining!

“What we miss more than anything?” the babuschka wondered thoughtfully, “well, probably the nature. Being able to live outdoors in the free all day, fishing and hunting. This is what we miss more than anything else.”

Her husband nodded in agreement.

“I wasn’t only a reindeer herder” ,he added, “I was also a hunter. I hunted moose, sobel, hare and even bear. But that was some years ago. I’m to old today. We’re retired now.”

“But” ,I asked, “if you miss that life so much, why then, did you move to live here in Srednekolymsk?”

“The grandchildren” , they answered, whispering, almost simultaneously, “but we will return to the village this summer, with all our grandchildren, and we will all fish. We look forward to this, since we haven’t been back there for over two years. We’ve missed the village.”

The husband had been a reindeer herder all his life. Mainly employed by the Soviet authorities in a kolschoz, a collective state owned enterprise, where the all the reindeers belonged to the state. But he had also had his own reindeers.

“Everything was much better during the Soviets” , the old man pointed out, “the transport system was working, we got our wages in time and our pension was sufficient to survive on. Now, we wouldn’t survive, if my wife didn’t make untys for sale.”

His wife, dressed in a spectacular traditional dress, was responsible for making all her families reindeer boots called untys. As is the case with all native babushkas (grandmother’s). It is a very important job, since a high quality boot is a must if one is to survive in these low temperatures.

“Since we were very poor” ,the babuschka enlightened us, “and I had the knack how to make good untys, I started early to sell to others. And things have gone well.”

The couple belong to one of Northern Siberia’s last true native people, the Even or the Lamut as they’re also called. There’s not many Evens left along the Kolyma. They can be found mainly in some small isolated villages, like Urudan, which we passed on skis, and Berezovka, where this humble couple have lived most of their long life. The Even are a true people of the reindeer, and still are. Like the Scandinavian Sámi. This couple knew about the Finnish Sámi people, but they had no idea that there lived Sámi in both Norway and Sweden and in the Russian part of Karelia.

“Do they mark their reindeer with cutting their ears still today?” the old man wanted to know and he looked content when I explained at least the Sámi of my own region in Sweden still do. The Idre Sámi.

“My son’s herd reindeer with snowmobiles today” , he continued, “but when I was young we did it by foot and hand. We were stronger and more patient in those days. Everything has to be so easy today, with as little effort as possible.”

“What part of the reindeer do you make untys from?” I asked.

“The lower part of the hind legs” , the babuschka told us, “first we have to find the perfect reindeer with a thick fur. Then I cut the best part out, take a piece of reindeer liver and rub this into the back of the skin until it is nice and smooth. After that, I take a specially made skinning knife and skin this piece until I feel content that it is good enough. Than I work it with my hands to perfection. When good enough, I sew this piece together with other pieces I’ve worked the same. Putting the boot together takes about 4 hours, but the full job, well, that takes many days of hard work.”

When we tell the couple of our Expedition, they, like all other true people of nature we’ve come across, don’t seem surprised. On the contrary. They can well understand why we travel and the suffering in freezing in a tent. If you, like they, have lived most of their lives in a big tent, a traditional cot, and had a changing nature as a TV, it is of course a certainty, that you understand how overwhelmingly rich that life is.

“If I were young again” ,the babuschka said, “I would do exactly what you do.”