Too Cold For Snow

reindeer-herding people who take their stock back and fore across Siberia. One of their ancient tracks was about to be severed by the creation of an enormous pipeline. Last Migration of the Eveny, as they said in the Radio Times.
    He took the idea seriously and before he went for his interview he gave up the sauce and climbed up Twmbarlwm twice a day until his calf muscles resembled those of a Bolivian gaucho in the Altiplano. He cashed in his Premium bonds, sold his car and exchanged all the money for a lift in an old Soviet helicopter, a deal brokered by some vodka-jowled businessmen who looked as if they got their suits from a boutique called Mafia ‘R’ Us.
    The helicopter took off from a military airfield littered with broken Antonov planes, rusted relics of an Empire that only lasted seventy years. It was a sepia scene from some Cold War film or other, especially as the ice mist smothered everything. The flight took for ever, especially as they had to stop for ‘mail’ every now and then, landing on airstrips that looked no bigger than a cricketing crease where there was never so much as a letter to deliver or to pick up. On the other hand they did drop off cases of booze and picked up animal pelts, but he knew better than to ask a why or a wherefore. The captain had some words of broken English. His breath was a miasma of caries and slivovitz and he stabbed a Cumberland sausage finger to emphasise each triumphant word.
    ‘You…’
    ‘Yes, me…’ said Boz, smiling 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