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.