I recently went fishing for the first time in nearly two decades.  In order to get to the desired fishing spot along a wide local creek in the area, three friends and I had to traverse a well worn path etched into the hillside.  While the path was wide enough for a single person to walk without brushing by much vegetation, one had to be careful as to where they took their next step.  Jagged rocks dotted the trail in erratic intervals, carving out dips and valleys into the footpath and should you not look down, you could find yourself with a twisted ankle, a broken bone, or as the victim of a nasty fall at the very least.  While I was lucky enough to escape unharmed, I did end up accidentally submerging my leg into a mud puddle that was ankle deep.  And I didn’t catch any fish. Although I had my suspicions before this, it was then that I had concluded that I am not an outdoors person.

While this trek was taking place, I couldn’t help but think about the book that I was reading at the time given the location that I was in.  That book is Vasily Peskov’s Lost in the Taiga.  Lost in the Taiga is written by a Russian scientist who came across a family of four deep in the Siberian “taiga”, which is a dense, swampy forest that makes up much of northern Russia.

The Lykov family are “Old Believers” – traditional Orthodox Christians who eschew many of the religious reforms that have taken place within the Russian Orthodox Church.  Old Believers faced persecution from the Russian government under the Stalin regime, and many Old Believers were forced from cities near the Siberian hinterlands either into larger cities or deeper into Siberia.  Faced with this dilemma, patriarch Karp Lykov decided to move his family deep into the wilderness to avoid government scrutiny.

What follows is a classic and brutal narrative of “Man Vs. Nature”