situation. It’s better not to tell Sasha anything right now to avoid frightening him. In the meantime, we will prepare for our journey and head up Vitim. We need to cover two hundred kilometers to reach the rapids while it’s still daylight. We need to go to the Shaman Stone. According to our ancient legends, it is there that a very old and powerful shaman lives.”
“What if he’s not alive anymore?” Nick asked.
“It’s impossible. Our spirits that they converse with have always lived there, near the Shaman Stone.”
Having brought enough water and seeing my friends hastily preparing to depart, I began to help them. We were all silent and concentrated, putting in all things that could come in handy on the road. Having loaded the backpacks into the boat, we went up the river. Having nothing to do, I picked up the binoculars and started watching the shore that we departed from. Trees and shrubs standing on the banks of the river shone with bashful nakedness tens of meters deep. Spring foliage, not fully developed yet, could hardly cover their trunks. One could see some kind of animal or other interesting things in the thick of the woods. Staring at the opposite side into the binoculars, I saw a pack of wolves running along the shore. The pack was led by the she-wolf already familiar from my dreams. Sensing my gaze, she stopped and, turning its chest toward me, pierced me with her eyes as if with a dagger. A string snapped inside my heart and a lump rolled up my throat that was preventing me from breathing. Seeing the state I was in, Nikita snatched the binoculars from my hands. Having a look, he shouted:
“Wolves! Herman, wolves, about ten of them running right behind us along the shore!”
“Damn them,” – Herman said and accelerated. The forty HP Yamaha rattled heavily on the reinforced transom custom-made for the boat motor of our “Crimea”. Having calmed down and put some clothes on to make myself warm, I fell asleep without noticing. I dreamt of my girlfriend Olya, who was waiting for me in Moscow. We were lying in my Moscow apartment and she was gently kissing my back, whispering to my ear:
“My Sashenka, I love you so much!”
I felt so good and, facing her to give her a kiss, I suddenly saw the fair-haired she-wolf that was licking my back bitten, as I thought then, by gnats. Jumping up abruptly – something that you should not do in a boat with low sides – I lost balance and immediately fell into the water. Half-asleep, I was beating my arms against the surface as strongly as I could, but the heavy clothes and my gumboots were pulling me to the bottom like a stone. Already saying goodbye to life, I felt how someone forcefully pushed me from the depths, supporting me and keeping me on the surface of the river for several minutes, until my friends approached with the boat.
“You rock, Sanya!” they exclaimed and, grabbing me by the arms, dragged me into the boat.
“To the shore,” Herman ordered to Nikita and the latter, like a seasoned captain, turned the wheel and headed off to the shore. “When did he learn to drive a boat?” I thought for a second. And then I started trembling hard, enough to set the teeth on edge. On the shore, taking off all of my clothes and jumping in the wind like a hare, he began to rub himself with vodka. My friends helped me by rubbing on the back.
“Just don’t get sick, Sasha,” Herman kept on saying, rubbing so hard that it seemed that there was a wall in from of him. Having set up a tent, we climbed into our sleeping bags. We could not go any further. The wet clothes in which I swam in the Ugryum River was drying on sticks stuck between the stones. And the last rays of the sun, evaporating moisture from it, went beyond the horizon without completing their work.
“Pity that there were only twenty kilometers left, but Sasha can’t travel naked,” Herman said and we all laughed. Having tied dogs near the boat twenty meters from us, we went to sleep. It was a slight to behold: Nikita was sleeping on the edge, embracing “Saiga” gun, with Herman with a carbine and all optics removed from it so as not to knock down the sights on the other side. And there was I, in the middle of this formidable guard, unarmed and languid from the vodka I drank. After chatting and laughing at each other, we quickly surrendered to sleep. At first, I didn’t dream, then one by one the memories of childhood began to flash through and, without noticing how this happened, I was speeding again inside a wolf pack. I was feeling so excited inside and could only feel my heart pounding heavily in the chest from the intense running. “There is something missing,” I thought. “Where is my girlfriend?” Stopping abruptly and turning on the side, I felt the alluring smell of a female. There was another smell nearby – that of a big male. “Did I really get a rival?” my blood rushed furiously to my head. Having jumped out into a small clearing and seeing my female on a towering hill, covered with soft thick moss, grinning and not letting a huge, almost black, wolf come closer. Overcome by rage, I rushed at him and a deadly fight ensued. I had more chances to win: I was on my territory, and it was my flock and my female, and he was a mere migrant. All this gave me much more strength, and soon the neck of the enemy, which I squeezed with fangs with all my strength, became limp, and he fell dead. Satisfied with the victory, I calmed down and licked the she-wolf in the head playfully. She began to lick me in response. Reaching the tongue to my nose, she suddenly stopped. “What a dry and hot nose you have, you must have gotten sick,” I heard her thoughts. “Lie here, I will be back soon,” and my girlfriend disappeared in the darkness. I don’t know how much time passed but, emerging from the night as suddenly as it disappeared, the she-wolf brought in her teeth some small roots, which she placed next to me. Intuitively understanding what they served for, I began to chew these roots. “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself. “How do I know the taste?” and woke up immediately! My snoring friends were lying next to me on either side. Closing my eyes and trying to get back to sleep, I failed. Moreover, moving away from sleep and feeling the bitterness of ginseng in my mouth, I remembered a night's dream. Passing my tongue inside my mouth, I felt bits of root and wool on my teeth, apparently, from the opponent I had killed. I was scared as never before! Getting up quickly and taking the rifle from Nikita’s hands, overcome by some strange desire, I wandered in thought along the shore. All of a sudden, a she-wolf blocked by way. Throwing up a gun from surprise, I could not pull the trigger, and we looked at each other for several minutes. In her eyes, I saw myself, clad in a wolf skin. The earth started spinning and the ground started crumbling under my feet.
Waking up from Herman’s slaps on my cheeks and opening my eyes, the first thing I saw was his face.
“I said you were going to get sick, here you are, and who's running half-naked in this cold? We’ll get you back on track in half an hour.” Saying this, they stuck a Dimedrol injection mixed with Analgin in my ass cheek. Some time passed, the fever disappeared, and I started to regain clarity of mind.
“Alright, that’s it, get yourself together,” Hera said to me, holding out my stuff that had dried in the wind. An hour later, our "Crimea" was approaching the shore, where right near the water stood the Shaman Stone. It was a huge megalith that dominated the surrounding nature. It towered and radiated powerful energy.
“Do you feel the force and energy emanating from it?” I asked Nikita. He started at me and said nothing. Without waiting for the boat to land, I jumped right into the water that reached the edge of my boots. So I threw myself at the stone with all my strength, hugging it, pressing my body against it, hot from the fever that was rising again. I suddenly felt such a relief and unearthly bliss. Closing my eyes, I started talking to the stone. Or, rather, the stone, invisibly to me, began singing an ancient shamanic song to me. “I am shaman, the stone spirit, standing before the sick! More than this, I can’t do! I always do the shaman thing around the world! The animal I ride is Manchirian elk! I travel far and I travel close, doing the shaman thing! I always see the creations of Higher Lords (the stars)! I always see the Higher Lord (the sky)! Who lives the shamanism, who lives the victories – here is my wide tambourine! Tonight, until the dawn begins, there is no thing I don’t see or know! Sick or wounded, there is enough strength to some, Hold me tight, and your illness disappears.” With every word of the song, my body parted with the sickness, filling with strength and energy instead. It seemed to me that we had become one with the stone, and I could stand there for a long time just enjoying the sense of euphoria that gripped my body if Herman had not grabbed my arm and dragged me away from the stone with force!
“You can’t hold on to the stone for a long