Survival

Pop! Pop!

Zelensky's first two shots kick up spurts of water. He keeps firing, leading the buoys with his aim.

Pop! Pop!

A monstrous shadow rises from the milky green depths. Barnacles, sea lice and scars from past combat with killer whales glow white against the gray skin of the giant.

Pop! Pop!

The whale cuts the surface like a torpedo. He is now within 30 feet of the boat.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

Three bullets slam into the whale's head and neck, erupting blood. He dives, then surfaces beneath the boat, his back and tail jacking the rear of the craft into the air at a sick angle. Bodies, backpacks and weapons tumble the length of the deck, ricocheting off bulwarks and railings. After a terrible moment, gravity makes a correction, and the upended boat slams down with a spine-crunching splash.

Soaring on adrenaline, Zelensky snaps a fresh clip into his Kalishnikov and bellows at the men in the cabin to get the damned motor going. Out in the water, directly behind the boat this time, the buoys are again coming around. Finally, the men in the cabin yank the slumped-over pilot clear of the engine. One of them punches the throttle, cueing the sweet song of the motor's roar.

The trawler makes a slow getaway. Designed to drag fishing nets, the powerful but ponderous craft's primary purpose in whale hunting is to haul dead whales back to shore. This seems a bit ironic -- not to mention presumptuous -- given that the injured whale is now chasing it. And gaining.

"More! More!" Zelensky yells. The driver redlines the engine. The fishing boat lunges forward. The whale falls back but keeps coming.

Zelensky barks orders into a CB radio, calling in a diversion, which arrives within seconds. The pilots of two tiny one-man boats the hunters call "mosquitoes" bravely zigzag their paddleboat-size crafts in front of the whale. It works. The whale breaks off his pursuit of the larger boat to charge one of the mosquitoes. Then he hesitates, changes direction, and goes after the other. Engines whining, the mosquitoes zip off to either side and out of range.

Winded, the whale rests on the surface, exhaling in labored bursts through his dual blowholes. He can't see the two skiffs creeping up behind him. In a scene repeated thousands of times over thousands of years in these icy waters, the hunters standing in their bows raise harpoons and prepare to strike.

At daybreak, hours before they would join the whale in a fight to the death, the hunters were beckoned from their beds by the ghostly light of a cold dawn in Lavrentiya, a village of 1,700 on the coast of Chukotka, the former Soviet Union's most brutal and far-flung frontier.

Garbed in a bizarre amalgam of reindeer and seal skin hunting suits, military surplus camouflage, and Nike windbreakers over counterfeit Calvin Klein sweatshirts, the two dozen hunters gathered in Lavrentiya's central square beneath a crumbling bust of Lenin.

The obsolete icon is a malignant memento. Under communism, the people of Chukotka were centralized and subsidized, forced to work on state-run fox farms and reeducated to live on what they were provided instead of what they provided themselves. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they were suddenly cut off the supply lines, 10,000 people, casualties of the Cold War, abandoned in one of the least merciful environments on Earth.

A peninsula of arctic badlands at the extreme northeastern tip of Siberia, Chukotka reaches toward the West like a dying man's hand. Point blank off its coast, the Arctic and Pacific oceans collide, spinning storms that rip through the land like shrapnel. Frostbite amputees are now so common in Chukotka that the region's new millionaire governor, Roman Abramovich, personally paid earlier this month to fly more than 200 of them by helicopter and 747 to a hospital in Khabarovsk, the closest major city, to be fitted with prosthetic hands and feet. Considered a savior by his constituents, Abramovich also funded emergency shipments of flour and heating oil that arrived by tanker this summer in even the most remote villages on Chukotka's coast. Heir to the largest oil fortune in Russia, Abramovich has assigned himself the protector of a destitute nether region.

Chukotka is a place where it is possible in the winter to slowly starve to death while watching Dukes of Hazzard reruns dubbed in Russian and broadcast from Moscow, 3,700 miles away. It is a place where vodka is cheaper and more available than canned food, and where Eskimo children missing arms use bleached whalebones as ramps for their Hot Wheels cars. It is where substandard Soviet construction typified by tarpaper and tin shacks offers scant protection from the winter gales that shriek up the steep cliffs and over the frozen tundra, whipping the snow into cyclones that peel the paint from buildings and flash-freeze exposed skin in five seconds or less. The last three winters in Chukotka have been freakishly cold, frequently shoving the wind-chill factor to triple digits below zero. Hundreds perished. The prevailing sense among the people now is that if they can just hold on through one more winter, Abramovich will somehow make everything better. But their young governor's millions can't buy off the cycling of the seasons.