The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 16

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…

It’s only that year when I climbed the second highest (and clean completely) peak in the region, the Keers, I had an imitation of a Swiss army knife, a present from Nick Wagner. It had a whole bunch of things in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file. I can’t remember where I misplaced it afterward.

But, however long were I patting myself on the back, the region’s peak number one remains beyond the peacock tail of my vagrant achievements. The front line of the unfinished war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis runs across that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other wouldn’t let me pass up or they’d just bang from both sides synchronously.

The point is that manual breaking of dry branches is not a big deal, and before long I readied up two sizable heaps of fuel for the fire. With the first one burned up, the unpeeled (so is the recipe) potatoes are buried in the hot ashes and the finalizing heap goes in the fire restarted upon them. But not right now, first, I have to put the tent up; the sun already gone behind this wheeling football field of a