Chapter 13 of 29
Fishing and Hunting
We got together for a winter fishing trip to Lake Karaketken, five hours south of Tyuratam by train. The group was made up of men of roughly the same age and with much the same fondness for drink. To be honest, a few words should be said about the importance of that detail. Experience of picnics and shared fishing trips shows that the most pleasant memories of the outdoors come from fairly evenly matched groups, without any reckless boozers…
Around midnight we boarded a train that did not normally stop there, the Tashkent train, I think. It was a compartment coach, heated to a swelter. The conductor, an elderly Kazakh or Uzbek, took a ruble from each of us, led us into a compartment where a fat man was asleep, and promised to wake us before Karaketken. We settled in, took off our outer clothes, traded jokes, and laughed at the snorer. He did not merely snore; he shouted in snores. Eventually we quietened down and fell asleep. We awoke to the conductor’s frantic cry: “Karaketken! Karaketken!!”
But the train was already gathering speed. According to the timetable it had stopped at that little halt for all of two minutes. We grabbed our tackle and clothes and jumped off into the night while the train was moving at a fair pace. The last carriage clattered away, leaving us alone with the deep, dark night and drifting snow. We sheltered behind the trackman’s solitary hut—there were no other buildings to be seen. Only then, behind the hut, did I discover that there was no hat on my head. Fine business… It had gone off to Tashkent with the snorer. I quickly undressed, pulled off my pale-blue undershirt, dressed again, and wound those long-johns around my head in a woman’s fashion, like a Frenchman at the Berezina or a German at Stalingrad. We waited for dawn and set off in search of lakes with perch. We found them. The lakes were very beautiful, small in diameter, always ringed with reeds, and covered with perfectly clear, snowless ice. They were no more than two metres deep. The fish were biting abominably. You could lie on the ice and see the striped fellows form a tight circle around your jig, but not one came within 10 cm of it. They stared stupidly at the jig but were in no hurry to strike. What could we do? We drank a little spirits in the shelter of the reeds and headed back to our halt to catch a passing train in the right direction. To curious people I explained my masquerade by saying I had traded my hat for fish.
A couple of times Sasha Pershukov and I went duck hunting downstream on the Syr Darya, about three kilometres from Leninsk. In our parts the banks of the Darya were low, steep clay-and-sand bluffs up to 4 metres high, with sparse grass and small saxaul bushes above. In a little cave Sasha had hidden a fairly large reed mat held together with wire. We carried the mat to a tiny island about six metres across, set it up as a ring, and sat inside the blind on hardware crates we had brought with us, after placing about five rubber decoys in the shallows. We had no cover overhead, but that did not trouble the innocent birds at all, and ducks began landing beside our decoys almost at once. We fired, then took turns running to the rubber “boat” left about fifty metres downstream—a ZIL inner tube with a bottom glued to it—to collect the birds. The current was fast, and a wounded duck naturally tried to get away. That was where the fun began. The tube was round and the paddles were table-tennis bats. If all you had to do was move along, it was tolerable once you got used to it. But trying to swing a shotgun in such a craft was hopeless. You moved the barrels to the right and the “boat” turned left by exactly the same angle, and vice versa… A couple of times, while taking aim, I twisted my body through 180 degrees, perhaps even more. Terrifying! We had to abandon the livelier wounded birds, or we might have floated all the way to the Aral Sea.