In Kirov Region, everyone is obsessed with hunting. There are so many hunters here you could raise an army and march to war on Udmurtia (a neighboring Russian republic). I still haven’t met a single man here who hasn’t gone hunting at least once. There’s plenty of game, too. In terms of bear population density—"bear population density" does sound great—Kirov Region is second only to Kamchatka. And then there are moose by the thousands, wild boar by the hundreds of thousands, squirrels by the billions, and so on. Everyone is constantly talking about hunting, telling tall tales, showing off their guns. There is also some endless, ferocious infighting and uproar over the allocation of hunting grounds. And this despite the fact that hunting, as a business, brings in no money. Or almost none. As for me, I’m actually a rather dubious hunter: despite formally having been one since 1995, I had only been hunting once. I was never especially drawn to it, and I felt sorry for the animals. Maybe age has made me mean and cruel, or maybe I got swept up in all this hunting mania, but the moment I found myself on the Vyatka (the historical name/area associated with Kirov Region), I suddenly wanted to go. But you can’t. In Kirov, hunting is like the Yellow Boots in the film Green Van (a Soviet movie reference): a glaring giveaway for anyone in any leadership position. The moment you make use of it, a scandal starts. Half of the local kompromat-style articles are about the indecencies allegedly committed by officials who went hunting. Whether those indecencies actually happened is unclear, but they are described magnificently and with real relish. I’ve read pieces myself along the lines of: "At an improper time, before the season had even opened, So-and-so decided to amuse himself by killing a bear... the wounded she-bear howled, and So-and-so, aroused by the sight of fresh blood, ordered the dogs set on her... the cubs, those little fluffy balls, tried to run, but So-and-so, laughing..." And then there are the current federal scandals too: argali sheep and the like. So for all the "newcomers," an unwritten rule was established: do not go hunting, no matter how insistently you’re invited. That rule was observed religiously for more than half a year. The day before yesterday it was broken: hunting season was opening, and ignoring the event would simply have looked strange. We went duck hunting. Near Kirovo-Chepetsk there is a system of ponds. Boats move through the reeds and flush out the ducks, which fly from pond to pond, while the hunters standing on the narrow strips of land between them shoot at the ducks. It was announced that there were thousands of birds there. I had a new semi-automatic shotgun, so on the way there I was thinking: should I really kill more than ten, wouldn’t that be a crime against nature and common sense, since you couldn’t eat that many anyway? It turned out to be nothing of the sort. A duck is not a clay target at a shooting range. It appears suddenly, darts around at unimaginable speed along an unimaginable trajectory. I hit four times, but only two were retrieved from the water. And I wasn’t the worst shot there. The only one of us—there were about ten people—who managed to bring down a flying pair with a double shot was belyh; I have no idea how he did it. There were no indecencies. A pity. I didn’t bring my camera with me, so I can’t delight readers with pictures of bird carcasses. Just some cellphone shots. The above-mentioned shooting champion.