Old man and boy talked about bears. The 15-year-old had seen one on the way to school. Fedya had killed seven in his time and reminisced. His grandson listened carefully. Like every boy I met in Erjei he wanted to be a hunter. His future lay in the Taiga and not in the classroom. But we were not hunting bears this time. We wanted a lynx. We dreamed of that golden fur. We wanted to catch the most cunning animal in the forest. 

The hunters call those three months in the Taiga "the season". Their catch varies but is usually about three lynx, 40 sables and 300 squirrels. If they are lucky these furs fetch up to £10,000. They give £5,000 to their wives for the home. The rest is spent stocking up on rifles and cartridges for the next season. This is why they wanted lynx — there are Chinese who will pay up to £300 a pelt. 

Twenty kilometres on and the track stopped. We travelled the next 20 kilometres by boat. The rivers are the motorways of Siberia. In the winter hunters' jeeps belt up and down them. But the water had not yet frozen. Icebergs floated past us as the old man kicked the engine of his wooden dinghy into action. 

There it is — the Taiga. But you feel you have seen this landscape a million times before. In a sense you have — from American action movies, Windows screensavers and advertisements to visit Canada. The mountains looked like giant white rocks covered in a grey lichen. Monotonous white skeletal trees shone with feeble sun along the Yenesei. 

The Taiga looks like a land before time. But not to the Old Believers. Fedya explained that every family from the four villages has its own allotment. Each plot is roughly 25 sq km. This is what a hunter prowls all winter. 

The Taiga nearest to the villages was thinning out, which is why the hunters now travel further and further down the Yenesei. They have parcelled up the Taiga all the way to the Mongolian border 200 km away. Younger men now leave the valley altogether. They risk the Tuvan forests.

Listening to Fedya explain this process of fur-driven expansion was like listening to the 17th century. This is how the Russian empire was built. Cossacks hunting sable raced ever farther east to the Pacific. Only then did the Tsar lay claim to it. 

The hunter's cabin was on the water's edge. Roman was there with his sons skinning four squirrels. All he old man's family used the cabin and Roman was his nephew, a fierce red-bearded man with three little children and a sick baby. He shook my hand. There was dark blood under broken fingernails. 

Roman was one of those unlucky boys in what Russians call the "wild Nineties". Those were the years when they cut almost all public services to the valley and cancelled state support for hunting. The Old Believers were on their own again. Schooling broke down: Tuvan horsemen fired warning shots and Roman dropped out of school. He was about 12 and needed at home.