(…How come that ‘pioneer’ camp, a make-believe keepsake from the happy Soviet times, occurred in the state whose Minister of Education confessed, in a fit of openness, that his Ministry cannot even buy a football for School 8?

Most likely, there happened a target grant from Diaspora Armenians who end summer would be treated to a yummy account full of genuine brimming glee: “Thanks to the $40,000 of your generous donation, all the schoolchildren of the Stepanakert City, the capital of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, were provided with the unique opportunity to enjoy…”)

The progress of the started report to hypothetical donors from presumed grant-rippers was cut short by the happy tweets of Emma snuggling to my side.

I fondly stroke her straight hair and the narrow back of a preschool child, asked empty questions which she responded and asked me back. “And where’s Ahshaut? D’you know?”

She pointed at the far end of the following table where the light from the lamp dissolved and mingled with the night around. Ahshaut sat there, forgetful of the meal, in gaping admiration at the high school teenagers who towered about him in raucous cackling of their nonstop rookery… I took the package out from the pocket of my summer jacket and passed it to Emma asking to share the sweets with her brother. She wary moseyed off fading in the dark around the hotly racketing diner at the cold iron table…

Then there was a dinner for adults. Camp Caretakers, all of them females recruited from among the city school teachers, decorously drank wine. Gym Teacher, Camp Director, the precinct policeman from a nearby village, and I kept manly guzzling shots of the traditional tutovka hooch. For a snack, we had some small fry, banged in the river with an electric discharge from the power generator borrowed for the purpose from the camp by the precinct policeman earlier in the day. The electrocuted catch was fried then by Cook, aka Paramedic, aka Camp Director’s wife…

A group of teenagers approached the table to petition Shahvarsh for his permission to have some dancing that night to which he graciously decreed a half-hour delay for the lights-out in the camp. Meanwhile, I asked Ruzanna about Ahshaut. She answered that he was already sleeping in the boys' tent and volunteered to fetch him, but I said, “No, don’t disturb.”

The teenagers gathered by the campfire and danced to the music from the loudspeaker box hanging from the tree next to the lamppost Walnut. At first, it seemed rather strange that all of them danced with their backs to the feast of seniors at the sheet-iron table, but then I cracked it: everyone danced with their personal shadow cast off, immense and springy, by the lamplight into the night field. Then Camp Director announced it was enough, switched the generator off, and retired to his royal double tent…

Some of the camping teenagers sneaked, in twos and threes, to squat by the quietly glowing log to tickle each other to uncontrollable grunts, and cackles, and fits of laughter by the invariable jests stuck on top of hit lists since the Stone Age or get scared dead with spooky stories as old as the hills, deep into small hours, under kindly supervision of Caretakers—their school teachers—taking turns in the night shift.

I stayed there till one o’clock before agreeing to go and sleep on a vacant camp-cot in the boys’ tent, leaving Sahtic to do her turn by the fire, because I had to walk away at six in the morning so as to catch the bus to Stepanakert…

Years later, I asked Ahshaut why he never came up to me that night. He answered that about my visit he was told only the following day after I had already left the camp. To my question about the biscuits and candies, he responded with an uninformed shrug… I don’t blame Emma. At the age of six, to nip on the sly a pack of biscuits which turned up amid that camp rations is the most normal manifestation of healthy selfishness. Yet poor Ahshaut! How does it feel to grow up knowing—even though that knowledge since long has been buried away and securely forgotten it still remains there—that your father did not want to come up to you? From all of the family, it’s only you that your father did not want to come up to…

Well, let bygones be bygones or, quoting the byword voiced daily by the latest of my mothers-in-law, Emma Arshakovna, “That’s life, man…”

~ ~ ~

Eeewwwww!. Who let them icky blues creep into this hugely luxurious place for me alone?. To hell all the nostalgic mopey crap! It’s time for a little knock-up exercising legitimate rights of a hooligan in the forest…

Bypassing thickets on the steep slope, I explore the underwood along the field edge, pulling a broken bough here, a dead sapling there onto the desolate cow path. After advancing in that manner some two hundred meters, I turn about and go back picking up the firewood scattered over the path. With an ample armful of fuel, I come back to the former campsite, then re-track to fetch another bundle; and one more. That’s that.

The next step is breaking brushwood for the fire to process “pioneers’ fav’rite food-ood-ood”, as a sometime jolly Soviet song baptized baked potatoes. Which piece of work I had to do by bare hands equipped not even with a knife. At times the fact of my hiking unarmed astounds people, and they start to pour forth their stock of horror stories about hungry wolves and cruel robbers. As it stands, in all my annual escapes to the wilderness, I’ve only seen deer and foxes, and a couple of times bear steps, but no robbers ever bothered to ambush me in the toombs.

The only but ever present inconvenience is getting jumpy at close unidentified shrieks in the night forest, still I’m not sure if the possession of a loaded AK would improve symptoms. Yes, once I got attacked indeed, while spending the night under a bush nearby the Mekdishen village in my sleeping bag additionally wrapped into a piece of blue synthetic burlap. (The shoddy crap drenches thru in the rain before you say “knife”, but that had happened before 2000 when I got this Made-in-China tent.)

It was about midnight, when two wolfhounds, escorting a belated horseman, ran into me nestled under that bush. Damn! What a hell of barking broke loose over my head! Their master arrived at the scene with his flashlight and was stunned by the unseen sight in his native quarters, yet the blue bundle yelled from under the bush that it was a tourist from Stepanakert and let him call back his bloody beasts.

The mujik started the all too familiar hooey about wolves, for which I was not in the mood and just retorted curtly that after his gumprs nothing would ever scare me anymore…

And at the sleepover upon the Dizzuppaht, which is the third highest mountain in Karabakh, half an hour after me there climbed up a party of guys from the Halo Trust. So is named the international organization headquartered in Great Britain, who finance and teach techniques of mine clearance to the natives of hot spots at war all over the globe because different conflicting sides have the same nasty habit of setting up lots of minefields to kill as many people from the opposite side in the conflict as possible. The side effect is genocidal decimation of animal populations—both wild life and domesticated—the poor creatures, as a rule, are fully unaware of the areal political situation. We are responsible for who we housebreak. (…whom?. Hmm… I’m not a Sir Winston Churchill, man…)

Now, the local sappers (instructed by native Britons) climbed the Dizzuppaht on their off-duty time at night closing in after a day in the field to perform a pleading mahtagh, because atop that mountain, from time immemorial, there stood a stone chapel which you should walk around, thrice, for your request to get approved by the authorities of fate.

The Halo Trust guys, naturally, did not come empty-handed, they brought a rooster with them for the sacrificial offering. But because of the somewhat impromptu nature of their mahtagh-doing, they missed to bring a knife along and were expressly disappointed to learn that neither had I… Yet, the resourceful fellas on-the-fly invented a novel technique and chopped the bird’s head off with the piece of a broken bottle collected from the heap of garbage solicitously piled up by all the previous mahtagh-doers…