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with all the fake encouragement he could muster, realising that this was the man entrusted with his life once the rotors turned. And that he’d had more than a drop of booze.
    ‘You, you like?’
    ‘Yes, very much.’
    ‘What you like?’
    ‘Very fine helicopter. Sturdy and solidly built. And you, well you are an expert captain. All those birches to avoid. And you do so, effortlessly.’
    ‘What sign?’
    ‘What sign?’
    ‘What sign you?’
    ‘What sign?’
    ‘I, Capricorn.’
    ‘Oh star sign, you mean? Me, Virgo.’
    ‘Is good luck?’
    ‘I believe so?’
    ‘You need it where you go.’
    With that the captain took his ursine frame up to the front end, whatever that was called in a chopper, leaving Boz to digest the frozen puddle of fear which had settled in the pit of his stomach. Was Capricorn meant to get on with Virgo? Could the Captain see that they only managed to clear the tree canopy by the breadth of a squirrel tail?
    Boz had known better trips. In fact he’d rather cross Hades with his ex-wife than hear the grinding of the rotors, which sounded as if they were, well, rusty, though now oiled in a ghastly way. Yes, he’d rather run through hell in a gasoline suit, swear to God. He thought of his mother, a woman he had learned to love very late – strong, impossibly talkative and proud of him whatever he did. Love he was leaving behind.
    It took another eighteen hours and two vertiginous landings before they reached the rendezvous point. It was pitch black, a quality of blackness that Boz had only experienced once before in his life when his grandmother had locked him into the cupboard under the stairs to punish him for stealing ginger beer.
    The Siberian stars were obscured and the moon was all darkside. As they bundled him and his bags outside he felt certain that they would wait until morning before taking off, but with an alacrity that would have taken his breath away were it not for the fact that the cold had already done just that, the chopper and its crew left him there, the captain’s face a demonic green glow in the reflected light from the instrument panels. They had dumped him off in the middle of Siberia, with only a thermos to keep him warm.
    But with a snuffling sound they had come, the ten families and their hundreds of animals, with not a word of Russian or English between them, just gentle words of Eveny, a language that sounded as if it were made of moss. The Eveny. Whose time was almost over. As he filmed their four mile trudge each day, their breaths leaving a skein of mist hanging in the air, Boz realised that this was history in the making, a nomadic pathway about to be severed. He remembered the time he had seen grey whales heading north to Alaska, following ancient tracks in the sea with no other impulse other than to cleave the waters with their bulk, hoovering up plankton and jellyfish as they went, and with only the skittering auklets to keep them company.
    Reindeer meat, dried like pemmican, was the staple food. But there was reindeer milk, and in the night fermented reindeer milk, served from sacks that must have been intestines at one time. Although this strange beer was tainted with hairs and passed from lips that had never known a toothbrush, there was something effortlessly comforting about the slow effect of the alcohol and the accompanying susurration of beasts encamped outside their tents, and the occasional smile of the children who were wrapped in so many layers of fur that glimpsing so much as an eye was an achievement.
    At each camp you fed the fire with vodka to placate the evil spirits. One evil spirit for another, thought Boz. They burned mountain rhododendron which gave off a sublime smell. And in a new tent, with fresh larch branches on the floor and reindeer hides weighted with stones around the back and sides of the tent, the mingling of heavy aromas was enough to wrestle you to the ground. The reindeer bells made Boz think of yachts as they warned off