In Search of the Zoobr

November Afternoon in Kamenjuki, Belarus

I have indeed, praise be to God, attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the Earth, and I have attained this honour.

                                                                                                            - Ibn Battuta.

…and in the modern world, where lengthy journeys to previously unheard of lands are no longer possible, we lesser travellers have to make do.

In the 4.30 p.m. November twilight, the surface of the Mukhavets, a little river in western Belarus, had become a varnished brown strip of reflection.  Birch, twisted willow and spongy rotting leaves were imaged upon its surface.  I wonder: do you think the great explorers of ages past found a quiet place to partake of contemplation, before their setting out?

Of Europe’s largest mammal I knew little and being in the city of Brest there seemed nothing for it, but to find out.  To the north, I’d read, was the wilderness which straddled the Polish border and in it, in small numbers, was what the locals called the zoobr. 

Ibn Battuta’s first journey in 1325 lasted twenty-one years.  Marco Polo travelled with his father and his uncle for twenty-four years from 1271 and the Muslim Hui navigator Zheng He, from Yunnan, accomplished his seven voyages within twenty-eight years from 1405.  It might be that I had just a day in hand to find the zoobr, but there’d need to be, surely, an expedition.

The river spread its arms around the small green island which might not normally have stood out but it was once the centre of Brest, a bustling trade town dating from around 1000 C.E.  The city’s oldest church is still there, with the rest of the town having been moved in 1838 to allow for the construction of a fort.

It is a place of reverence for Belarusians.  The fort is where two Soviet regiments stood their ground when the Nazis attacked in 1941.  They faced five hundred canons, six hundred bombs and lasted a month before the fort was lost, at the start of an occupation that would claim one in four Belarusian lives.

At the island’s centre an eternal flame burns, surrounded by hundreds of Soviet graves watched over by a massive stone head sculpture called ‘Valour.’  In the south of the island bullet holes in the red brick buildings can still be seen.  It’s in the east of Europe that the scale of sacrifice and devastation that marked the Second World War is most acutely felt. 

Zheng He was well-prepared.  It is said he had over three hundred ships and a crew of almost 30,000.  By contrast, the following day, in search of the zoobr, I would follow the example of Ibn Battuta, who left his Moroccan home, alone.  Do you think the great explorers of ages past went to bed early on the night before their departures?

'Valour', Brest, Belarus

A model Soviet city, Brest had wide, clean boulevards with older painted stone cottages and towering unsightly blocks.  It was in one of the latter I was staying, a monumental hotel of sparse décor.  I found some simple, canteen fare for dinner.

On the morning of the grand expedition the preparations were tiring and endless, or at least they would have been, perhaps, had it been several hundred years earlier.  In the twenty-first century I could not match the magnitude of Marco Polo’s preparations, no doubt, when he set off for China.  But I did pack my things and check out of the hotel, before walking to the bus station wholly unaided.

And just as Marco Polo once met the various tribes of Central Asia so I met a taxi tout who sought a hefty fee for a private voyage to the forest.  Zheng He might have had his fleet but Ibn Battuta went largely under his own steam and that was what I wanted to do.  Yet, the taxi driver could help me.  I was having trouble making the bus ticket seller on the other side of the glass window from understanding my intended destination, the village by the forest called Kamenjuki.  I was able to seize the taxi driver’s enthusiasm for my plan.  He pronounced it for me.  Do you think the great explorers overcame various difficulties with the help of locals?  I’d say they did.

But then, looking at my ticket, I noticed that it said Kamyanyets, in Cyrillic.  It was the second dilemma of the expedition: to hope I was not going somewhere entirely different.  Yet, there was nobody to fill in the gaps on the maps for Zheng He, surely, on his way to Bengal’s Sonargaon.  So I took the bus.

An hour on my imaginarily blistered and sore feet later I burst from the vehicle, spent and flailing: or I would have been, had I rather travelled on foot and by camel.  Indeed it was Kamyanyets but fortunately Kamenjuki was a short bus ride further, about eighteen kilometres.  I could almost smell the zoobr from there, Marco Polo’s China.

A good explorer half-hour later I’d arrived in the village of Kamenjuki.  Ibn Battuta once sought assistance in the mountains of Kamaru, from the followers of Shah Jalal, in order to find him in Sylhet.  I asked a girl from the bus where the forest was and she vitally pointed up the road.  After a huge, ten minute trek to the edge of the forest, my expedition started in earnest.

It was icy and cold.  I had to negotiate a snowy bridge over a frozen stream, but I persevered, adjusting my scarf on the way.  If the cold got in, I knew, all might be lost.

I entered the forest, Belavezhskaja Puscha: 1300 square kilometres of primeval, virgin forest, the last such stand in Europe.  Pine and birch, the canopy closed around me. I relied on my natural instincts to hold my direction, watching the sun, feeling the wind, noting the way moss grew on the tree trunks. And following the road.

Suddenly something stirred ahead.  Could it be the ferocious, mysterious zoobrs I had set out for?  I clutched my camera and trod carefully.  The pine needles were damp and quietened my stride.  But no, it was only a family of wild boar. 

It would be another good ten minutes of arduous hiking before the first zoobr set eyes on me.  In fact it was a small herd led by a large male.  He was enormous, easily as big as ten miniature horses, with horns like the devil himself, a rugged woolly brown coat, legs as thick as saplings, and huge flaring nostrils. 

I wonder what Zheng He thought when he reached Africa and saw his first giraffe.  He captured one and took it back to China where it was believed to be an example of the mythical creature called a qilin, evidence of heavenly blessing on the Emperor of the day.  I thought not to capture a zoobr, except on film.

Zheng He too was said to walk like a tiger.  He didn’t stray from violence when he was threatened.  Faced with a zoobr flaring its nostrils, there was nothing to do but flare my nostrils right back.  One shouldn’t let large wild animals sense one’s fear, or so it might be.  The leader of the beasts took four lumbering steps towards me, through the middle of a mud clearing.  We stood eye to eye now, and if he charged, what would have happened?

When Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs he came across a mountain sheep which ultimately took his name:  the Marco Polo sheep was described in 1271.  But the zoobr had its name, in Russian, and in English where it is called the European bison or wisent.

It could have crushed me without a second thought.  But I held my ground, given that I’ve never heard of anyone suffering death by zoobr and am rarely first at anything; and given that the danger was somewhat reduced by the well-constructed wire fence between us.  Well, there was no point randomly scouring the forest when a few zoobrs had been confined to a pen for easy observation.  Okay, so it wasn’t quite like the great explorers but in the twenty-first century, one has to make do.

The zoobr: legs as thick as saplings and huge flaring nostrils

Also in the small zoo were other examples of local wildlife: moose, deer, wolves, bears and wild horses.  The eyes of the Mona Lisa owl followed me as I passed.

The expedition successful, zoobr sighted, I returned late afternoon to the bus station, really more of a bus shed.  I pushed open the old green doors.  The interior was empty apart from three fellow zoobr-hunters sitting on a bench.  Not a pretty sight considering I had to be three hundred kilometres away in Minsk to find my pre-paid hotel bed.

One man asked where I was going.  "Brest," I replied, and then Minsk".  I wanted to see his reaction.  He didn't burst out laughing, that had to be good.  May be it was realistic.

We introduced ourselves.  It’s how I became 'Onjay' for the afternoon.  Still, they did better than me.  All I knew was that one of them had a name that started with G and the other two didn't.  G kept saying "and you have no wars in Australia?" After Brest fortress one could only say no.  Certainly nothing compared to Belarus.

G. and the Not-Gs., Kamenjuki, Belarus

One of the Not-Gs was swearing about the bus timetable, which was nearly a blank A4 sheet of paper.  "This is an extremely dire and frustrating circumstance in which we find ourselves," he was saying using four-letter Russian words.  "Yeah, but the zoobrs were cool," I replied, and they were.  Only 54 zoobrs existed after World War One; by 2002 there were 3200 of them.

Eventually the bus did come.  The four of us: Onjay, G and the Not-Gs, made it safely back to Brest; and me to Minsk.  I didn’t take back the riches that Marco Polo and Zheng He did, from their journeys, or even the spiritual fulfilment and new wisdom that Ibn Battuta must’ve found, but it had been a nice day.

And at the least I didn’t suffer Marco Polo’s fate.  Upon his return he found Venice at war with Genoa.  He was captured and narrated the tales of his journey to a fellow inmate, in jail.  But I have the luxury of writing this on a laptop, at home.

Zoobrs

Detail from Brest Fort monument

The Eternal Flame, Brest Fort

From Belarus it's not impossible to head south to Kyiv or to take a bus to Riga to meet a secretary to a scientist.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: In Search of the Zoobr

Welcome to Vilnius

Photos: Ragnar Scheen

You can look, but while you might find seasons in the politics you won’t find politics in the seasons.

Autumn: the tracks appeared to trace a stream below, or several but as the train meandered along hillsides direction was difficult to contemplate.  The morning was reluctant and the wooded valleys were almost drained of colour.  In the yellow of the last leaves and the low grasses was a sense of farewell to the year; and while the white of the birch trunks had momentarily gained prominence and the first snow must’ve fallen by then, winter’s renovation remained awaited.  Primarily it was a landscape descending into brown, into the darkness of pine and wooden Belarusian villages.  It was the story of a border lost somewhere too in the season.

It was rather in the speed of the train, in the slowing, the pausing and the chugging along a little further that the border was at first suggested, as though there might be a schedule to the crossing.  Only when it seemed that the wood and the hillside might stretch beyond the autumn did other evidence appear.  It came in the unlikely form of low concrete posts, set among the trees in pairs, like statues of a long ago out-of-love couple meeting in the forest for old time’s sake, or perhaps to collect wood for the fire of their old age.  In each pair the nearer was painted red and green, for Belarus, while its mate was white with the feature of stripes in yellow, green and red: the stripes of Lithuania.  That old couple came near and withdrew: like the train the border held no steady course.

And it is possible to try to protect the blessings of the past from the uncertainties of the future.  And it is possible to try to safeguard the future from the ravages of the past.

In a pause in the forest the Belarusian guards boarded, to see that the passenger had all he papers they could wish for, including hotel receipts to account for every night in the country.  Beyond the post-couple the Lithuanians boarded, but for them the passport checking felt more as an afterthought, a ‘suppose we should know who is coming into the country.’  Perhaps their preference might more naturally have been to sleep longer, under the blanket away from autumn.

But a passport with a kangaroo on its cover was as the yellow leaves in the woods, it brought a slight energy with it, surprised as they were to see it.  Enquiries were made, assurances came that no visa was required.  Somebody official must’ve checked a nationality list.

The Vilnius station, not an hour from the border, sits upon a hill with the centre of the old town in the cobblestone capital in a small valley below.  There are about 500,000 people in Vilnius, 3 million in Lithuania.

I trailed the other passengers moving down into damp streets.  While for many, they must’ve been coming home; while for others, they must’ve been there a thousand times before: I was busy not knowing where I was going, taking in the charms of history as recorded in the buildings as I followed a random road.  Church spires multiplied as the valley city took over.

Too, I was busy contemplating the need for a scientist, how to, in a new place, locate a pathologist in a diagnostic centre.  It’s not that I’d befallen any illness, fortunately.  I required no tests and indeed it wasn’t just any pathologist that would do.  I needed one called Rita.

Lithuania has a long history.  They say its language is of the Baltic branch and related to Latvian, and that it’s the most conservative language in Europe, the one that’s evolved the least from the Sanskrit roots of the Indo-European language family.  They say there’s a village in Lithuania’s north called Indija, where local linguistic peculiarities have some commonality with languages still spoken in Pakistan’s Baltistan.

Once, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, with territory stretching to the Black Sea.  And in 1991 the country made its mark on history again, as the first Soviet republic to declare independence, a move that cost the lives of 14 Lithuanians when the Soviet Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower.  But the movement had history’s blessing.  The Soviet break-up started in Lithuania.

In a way it was that transition that paved the way for my need of a pathologist.  When the borders opened, a Norwegian friend of mine Ragnar was sent to the country on business.  As that business over the years developed so did his passion for Lithuania.  He took the country into his heart or maybe it captured him.  But beyond business he contributed in various ways, to promote modernity and development.  He’d taken an apartment in Vilnius and although he wasn’t arriving until the following day I was lucky, because a pathologist called Rita held for me the keys.

I kept in mind my general luck too in finding new addresses in unknown cities.  I kept my eyes on the works of art that were the buildings of the old town.  I took in the signs of each snaking alleyway just as the signs of autumn had taken in me.  There were Northern European style shops playing American background music.  I saw proper supermarkets with metal poles outside to tie your pet dog to.  There were large bookstores, music stores and cafés. 

Although I missed Ukraine already, where I’d been living that year; although I enjoyed Belarus, memories stirred.  It was as though in Vilnius I’d arrived back into a happy Northern European past.  All the same, should a chimney sweep have passed by on the street it wouldn’t have seemed altogether out of place.

There may have been queries with people on the street but I found the alleyway I needed.  Soon I was sitting opposite Rita-in-a-white-lab-coat and drinking a cup of coffee.  There was a book open on the desk between us with multicoloured microscope pictures on its pages.  I wondered how to diagnose my being there: I doubt there are multicoloured microscope pictures that can do that.  Perhaps it was simply the autumn that had taken me in that direction.  Rita picked up the phone and dialled Norway.

When she was able to, she whisked me across the city by car, to Ragnar’s apartment: open-plan, modern and with that wooden, pine-type smell that can easily remind one of Oslo.  It had a peaked wooden roof with no ceiling and on the table was a note, in Norwegian, to me.  ‘Welcome to Vilnius,’ it read, ‘Try the beer in the fridge.  Lithuanian beer is good.’  In retrospect I’d say it was probably the most modern accommodation I’d had for the best part of a year.

The apartment was an art gallery: a fish swimming from a rafter, wooden angels over there and of course, candles everywhere.  I surveyed the room and found again that smile that had been with me since I’d left Belarus, the re-finding of a different Northern European dimension to life.

Ragnar arrived from Oslo the next day.  It was the first time we’d met in five and a half years.  We spoke English, then Norwegian once again, and the hardest part was the ‘yes’, the rediscovering an automatic Norwegian ‘ja, ja, ja’ to replace the Russian ‘da, da, da’ I’d picked up in East Ukraine, although I was never skilled at Russian.

We found a restaurant some floors below street level, in a ‘mind your head’ type of cellar.  They served sausages by the half-metre and beer in tall glasses, by the metre.  We walked around the castle and up the hill to the historic three white crosses that were destroyed in the Soviet era but were rebuilt when the politics turned.

And in the evening we walked to the end of the street to find a forest overlooking a river.  It was a landscape descending into brown, at that time of the year.

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“Look! From the glowing west, forceful and angry winds

Are eastward moving with ferocious, headlong haste,

And bringing biting frosts to our Lithuania dear.

My friends, let’s to the house and build a glowing blaze.”[1]

-         From the poem Metai, or The Seasons, by Kristijonas Donelaitis.  This epic poem from about 1765 is considered the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language.  From the third part of the poem, ‘Autumn Boon’.

Stay Happily Baltic, with Latvia or Estonia!

Retire eastwards back to Belarus.

Or go for the tropics in Trinidad!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Welcome to Vilnius

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[1] English translation of the poem is here: http://members.efn.org/~valdas/autumn.html