We broke bread in the cabin. This was made of logs reinforced by bark. The roof had half caved in. We slept on bench planks softened by sheepskins. There was only an oil lamp and a wood stove. These would go out after four hours, so we would take turns to chop firewood. I never managed to.  

Roman had been hunting the lynx for three weeks. He paced around outside the cabin muttering about the animal, chewing twigs. He had gone as far as the Mongol hieroglyphs on the far mountain snowline but found nothing except confusing circular paw prints.

The oil lamp outlined Fedya's face as he poured the thin gruel boiled on the wood stove. The children had etched a monster's face on to its bent side. Hunters eat what they catch in the forest. But today we had caught nothing. The spoons clanked in the old tin bowls. 

That night the old man told me about his grandparents' time. The news of war reached the valley of the Old Believers late, several weeks after the German invasion in 1941. They thought it was the work of the  Antichrist. The war of Gog and Magog. The End.

There was panic. Then the burnings started. Mothers tied up and gagged their children before setting fire to their homesteads reciting the benedictions. Fathers doused themselves in petrol before lighting themselves in ecstatic prayer. 

Two years later the Red Army entered the valley. The remaining men were rounded up, loaded onto trucks and taken to the front. Most came back. But Tuva was annexed and the valley put under Soviet control.

These were the last self-immolations of the Old Believers. It had happened many times before. In the 17th century almost 10,000 torched themselves in their wooden churches. These were the souls said to live ruled by the white Tsar beyond in Belovode. 

They handed me my gun at dawn. Roman and his sons went along the banks of the Yenesei. We chose to go deeper. The Taiga is a million optical illusions. When you look straight into the distance the countless trees merge until they form one grey sheet, ringing you. You shudder at tree stumps shaped like men. You turn around and it's exactly as it was in front — snow, thickets, birch, fir, pine. A copy-paste landscape of clones.

You can only follow the hunters' trail through frozen swamps, under bent birches and over upturned fir trees. You lose their tracks. Branches slice at your face. Exhausted, you stop. Thirsty, you eat the snow. But the hunters are not worried. You too leave tracks. And you continue, much, much more slowly. For hours the hunters are gone. Then suddenly they are there again, looking at you.