That day the men were preparing to depart for the Taiga. I prepared to leave with long-bearded Fedya. They called him the old man. He was 58. His two brushes with the state had left him horrified about anything outside the valley. The first was when he was conscripted in 1973 and sent to Kamchatka. "Prison camps...even the bears were in prison camps." 

His second was in 2007. Pulling his jeep round a mountain bend he found himself arrested for "terrorism". Traffic policemen flung open his boot to uncover an arsenal of unlicensed shotguns. They locked him in a cell for several weeks with six alcoholics he did not get along with.  

I was not the first stranger to go hunting with the Old Believers. Three years ago a Belgian with a shiny wristwatch had turned up with a pretty wife and his translator. He wanted to kill a bear. The Old Believers were nervous. The bears were sleeping. To get to the nearest cave  would require a week's tracking at least, with four hunters and three sleighs. Not to mention the dogs. The Belgian grinned: "Fine. I'll pay."

It was a small cave. The hunters fired warning shots and sent the dogs inside. They tried to pull back the Belgian's wife, who was wearing sunglasses. "My wife is not afraid," he barked. She took photos of him as he fired four times into the horrified bear. That night in the village they frolicked and drank a bottle of champagne. The Belgians did not offer the Old Believers any. But the villagers kept the bottle, as a candlestick.  

Fedya had taken a foreigner into the Taiga the previous year and had mixed feelings about that experience. The man in question was a professional Finnish gold prospector from some multinational mining enterprise. But once they reached the Taiga he suffered several weeklong bouts of paralytic depression. He refused to talk and eventually even to eat. 

Fedya was thrown into a panic that the Finn might die before he ordered an about-turn to Erjei. To apologise, he gave the old man a copy of the company's confidential gold prospects map. But it was in Finnish. Not for want of trying, Fedya had not found a single person in Tuva who spoke Finnish.  

Our UAZ was filled for the hunt. We threw in rifles, shotguns, bullets, traps and a sack of dried old bread crusts, not to mention two dogs and the old man's grandson. We drove along the Yenesei. Every turn was a swerve and every bump was a jolt. These were tracks they dug for themselves.