There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. Usually mosquitoes cluster in a cloud around their targets, but as Volodya made dinner I observed a thick and proximate cloud surrounding him head to toe, and then a whole other sort of candidate swarm around that inner swarm, and then more in all directions, minutely enlivening the sky. On calm and sultry evenings as we busied ourselves around the camp, mosquitoes came at us as if shot from a fire hose. I have been in mosquito swarms in beaver meadows in northern Michigan, in boreal wetlands in Canada, and near Alaska’s Yukon River.

The way you could tell you were in the swamp was, first, that the ground became impassably soggy if you walked at all far in any direction and, second, by the mosquitoes. There were wide rivers and reedy places, but also birch groves and hills and yellow fields. The country’s swampiness did not manifest itself in great expanses of water with reeds and trees in it, like the Florida Everglades. When he was satisfied with his find, he would pronounce it a “ khoroshoe mesto”-a good place. He wanted ground that was dry, not too low, not too many trash heaps, near water if possible, away from the road but not too difficult to get to. Sergei sometimes spent an hour or more in the evenings looking-stopping, getting out, walking around, then trying somewhere else. In a country without fences or “No Trespassing” signs, we had an abundance of places to camp, but each one required a certain amount of searching nonetheless. It was the summer of 2001, and we were driving across Siberia in a converted Renault step van that had formerly delivered eggs and sour cream and sometimes didn’t start. Petersburg, Sergei Lunev, Volodya Chumak, and I were well into the swampy flatlands of western Siberia.

Baikal films summer camp