Aksel Bakunts: Dark Valley

Aksel Bakunts (Alexander Stepani Tevosyan) was born in Goris, in Russian Armenia, on June 13, 1899.

After secondary school, Bakunts studied agriculture in the Ukraine and became an agronomist traveling through the provinces of Armenia and providing help and knowledge to farmers and villagers. Around the same time, he also worked as a free-lance journalist, reporting events in cities and villages, and as a teacher in village schools.

Bakunts started writing short stories in his teens, but it was only in his twenties that he began to take his craft more seriously. His first bundle of short stories appeared in 1927 under the title Mtnadzor (Dark Valley). In these stories, Bakunts chronicled life in rural Armenia just before and right after the Communist revolution. One of the greater themes running through most of the stories is that of the hapless villager caught between powers beyond his or her control. In these stories, Bakunts is critical not only of old traditions that make unnecessary victims, but also of politics, Czarist and Soviet, for brutally altering the lives of people who had, until then, a very naïve and protected experience of life and the world around them.

Bakunts wrote prolifically between 1926 and 1937, mostly essays, short stories, and novellas. In 1937 he was arrested by the Stalinist regime on charges including nationalism and estrangement of socialist values. He was executed by firing squad after a twenty-five-minute trial. His works were banned in Soviet Armenia until the 1960s. In 1976, the first of four volumes of Bakunts’ body of work was published in Soviet Armenia. The other three rapidly followed suit. Besides Mtnadzor, they contain the following collections: Sev Tseleri Sermnatsane [The Sower of the Black Earth], Yeghbairutian Enkuzeninere [The Walnut Trees of Brotherhood], etc. He also wrote unfinished novels: Khachatur Abovian and Karmrakar [Red Stone]. Bakunts is now considered a canonical writer in Armenian literature.

Dark Valley

The only path leading to Dark Valley closes off with the first snowfall–no one sets foot in its forests until spring. However, even now there are dense forests in Dark Valley where no one has ever been. Trees fall and decay. In their fallen places new ones grow. Bears dance and whistle like shepherds; wolves howl, pointing their snouts to the moon; boars dig the black earth with their tusks, gathering autumn’s rotten acorns.

Dark Valley is a peculiar place: virginal and wild, at the very least. It resembles one of those forgotten places from an era when mankind did not exist and the fossilized dinosaur felt as free as the bear does in our days. Perhaps the world was like that in those days, when immense layers of coal came into existence, and the imprints of plants and reptiles long since become extinct remained on those layers.

Now, in Dark Valley, there are lizards with dark green skins that have never seen a human face and are not afraid of people. They lie on rocks in the sun; for hours on end, you can watch how the skin of their belly beats and, like a weak vein, you can catch them. The lizards of Dark Valley do not flee from human beings.

The mountains of Dark Valley are high, and it is because of them that even during the long summer months the sun provides a few hours of light to the forests of Dark Valley. And when the sun begins to turn toward the west on the distant horizon, the shadows of Dark Valley rise and impenetrable darkness sets in under the foliage. The bears come out to hunt, the boars descend to drink water, the eager wolf howls from its lair with its yowl echoing a thousandfold through Dark Valley.

When night falls, the natives of Dark Valley go hunting. The bears eat pears, paw each other, roll about on the dry leaves, and take cover when they hear the wild boars approach. The bear knows the strength of the wild boar’s tusks, so it will not attack at once. If a weak boar straggles behind the rest, the bear will slice its soft throat with one blow of the paw, devour a few bites, cover the carcass with wood and dry leaves, place a rock on the pile, and turn away grunting, until the carcass begins to decompose.

If, by chance, the boars hear the squeals of the strayed boar, their tusks will shine like sharp swords, and all the bear can do is awkwardly clamber up an oak tree. Like raging horses, the boars will neigh, plow beneath the oak tree with their tusks, and bash the tree trunk. The elderly forest ranger of Dark Valley saw the skeleton of a boar one spring, its tusk driven to its root into the trunk of the tree, and in the hollow of a branch, a dead bear cub.

The forest ranger, Panin, resembled a wild boar. He was a monster dressed in the garb of a forest ranger with a cockscomb hat. He would appear in the forest without warning, stand near the lumberjack, and watch how fast he axed the tree. Suddenly he would come out of his hiding place and roar so loudly that even the bears would wake from their sleep and grumble in their dens. All the terrified lumberjack could do was either flee or contort like a snake under the blows of Panin’s whip.

Panin was a hunter. He had six dogs, one fiercer than the other. He would go hunting with them in the depths of Dark Valley. On moonlit winter nights, when no one would come near Dark Valley out of fear, Panin’s dogs would wrestle with the bears in the forest clearing or chase startled wild goats. Panin would run after the dogs, shrieking with delight. The nighttime hunt was a familiar pursuit for him.

Come daybreak, spurts of blood would appear on the snow; here and there jumbled traces, the carcass of a strangled wolf, skin in shreds. Panin would sit by the hollow of a tree until the dogs finished eating their quarry.

He would not touch any killed animal, and after the dogs had had their fill, he would return home. On his way home, if he caught someone carrying stolen firewood, Panin’s dogs would attack him and make him run until the sweaty, bloody man found cover.

This is how Panin was. His terror had spread far and wide, and stories were told about him by word of mouth. No one knew either his nationality, or his religion and ancestry. They said that he had been an officer, that he had killed people, done time, and then gone to the forests. In one of the northern forests, he had supposedly killed his wife on a night out hunting or, more precisely, he had ordered his dogs to maul his wife.

Such were the stories that were told about the forest ranger Panin.

* * *

Avi had a good reputation as a hunter in the village. He would gather part of the food for his household table from the depths of Dark Valley. He hunted pheasant in the forest clearings, and partridge and quail near the fields. He set up traps for foxes, and sometimes he went into the depths of Dark Valley and sat on the butt of a rock for hours until the boars approached the water.

Avi would aim accurately, and the bullet of his rifle would gash the Boar’s fat flank. The boar would tumble, dig its tusks into the ground in pain, tear up roots, and fall to the ground, grunting.

And when he was not afraid of Panin, or when he knew that Panin was not in Dark Valley, he would lift a bundle of firewood on his back and hide it somewhere, to take home in the evening.

On this particular day also, Avi had gone hunting. There were fresh tracks in the snow. Avi followed one of the tracks, and just as he ascended the top of a hillock, he saw two foxes. However, by the time he was ready to shoot, they fled. That was a bad sign for Avi: it meant that the hunt was not going to be successful. He walked a little more, saw the tracks of a wild goat, looked around, but could not find it. And because on that day Panin was not meant to come to the forest (he had heard that the forest ranger was ill), Avi judged it a good time to take home a bundle of firewood.

Evening was closing in when Avi laid the firewood on a rock and sat on a stump to catch his breath.

A hunting dog appeared, sniffed Avi, and moved on. Avi’s breath was cut short.

A second dog appeared, then a third, and behind the dogs, Panin, as if he had grown out of the ground.

The snout of one of the dogs was as coarse as canvas. The snout of another was as red as a beet. Panin sputtered like one of the bears in Dark Valley, and when he raised his whip, Avi hunched over and covered his head with his hands. It seemed to Avi as if Panin’s hand had turned to stone and the whip had frozen in the winter evening’s cold air. Panin pulled back his whip, and when Avi raised his head, it seemed to him as if a demon were cackling in Dark Valley.

Avi was dumbstruck by the choice. He was either to pay a twenty-ruble fine for stealing wood from the forest or kill one of the bears of Dark Valley. After Panin repeated his proposal one more time, he pulled back his lips and let loose with a deafening laugh. Avi jumped up, left behind the bundle of firewood, and retraced the road by which he had come to Dark Valley. Not a single bear in the forest matched the fee of Panin’s fine.

Avi looked for cartridges in his rifle, tucked the woolen flaps of his overcoat under his belt, and tightly drew his shepherd’s hat onto his head. He walked as lightly on the snow as a bear does on dry leaves.

Avi looked back once; neither Panin was in sight, nor his dogs. The moon looked like a big snowball and its light was reflected in the snow crystals. Avi could clearly see the tree trunks, the road he was on, and the big fallen boughs.

He went down the valley and heard water gurgling under a sheet of ice. The sound of the water reminded him of a boiling cauldron, of home, and of a lit fireplace. His family was probably already waiting for him.

He heard the sound of a twig breaking behind him. It sounded as if it had snapped under the heavy weight of the snow. On his way up, Avi felt as if someone were following him. He turned around and saw a bear the size of a man standing a little farther back with a branch resembling a shepherd’s crook on its shoulders.

Avi aimed his rifle, and when the bear, foaming at the mouth, flung aside the branch it had been carrying and fell on all fours, the rifle thundered, the valleys echoed the sound of the shot, and snow fell from the tree branches. The bear bellowed. Through the smoke of his rifle, Avi saw the bear bound as it extended its paws toward the barrel of the rifle.

An unequal fight between man and beast began in Dark Valley. The bear punched with its paws, trying to push the man to the ground. Avi was trying to protect himself with one hand from the bear’s blows, and with the other to push the barrel into the bear’s jaw to fire one more time.

The bear leaped to its hind legs, kicked the snow, fell down, and got up again. Suddenly it put the barrel in its mouth and began to chew it. Avi’s hand glided along the rifle and pulled the trigger blindly, making it thunder one more time. The bear bellowed louder than before as it fell on its back and rolled down like a snapped bough. When it reached the ice sheet, it got to its feet and tried to climb back up.

Avi fired a third time. The bullet hit the snow and fizzed like glowing red tongs on a cold anvil. The third time was also the last time the rifle thundered. Avi could not understand why the fourth bullet would not fire.

The bear bellowed and leaped to its feet once more. Avi felt the warm breath of the injured beast very close to him. He bent over, and when the bear sank into the snow, Avi ran back, staggering in the thick snow and climbing up. The bear was after him. Avi was running and jumping over thick boughs. Twigs scratched his face like sharp talons, and he slipped and scrambled up again. To Avi it seemed as if all of the beasts of Dark Valley were after him.

At one point, his shepherd’s hat got torn off by the thorns on one of the branches. At that same instant he also felt a heavy blow to his back as a hirsute paw dug its claws into the skin of his nape. Someone fired a gun, but Avi felt nothing.

Panin was laughing demonically as he stood with one foot on the bear’s carcass.

* * *

Avi lives to this day.

Cringing back, you can see him sitting in a corner, making leather shoes for different people, hidden from the rush of the street.

Avi wears a woolen overcoat and leather shoes. He has an average body with healthy hands that dexterously punch holes in leather and make knots from its strands. But on his average body, instead of a head, he has a skull, wholly peeled, without hair, without skin.

With one blow of the paw, the bear had dug its sharp claws into the soft skin of the nape and, with all the wrath of an injured bear, it had pulled off the skin of the skull, and with the skin, the hair on the head, the brows, the eyes, and the nose.

Avi does not have lips. You can see his teeth through the cracks in his bones. His nasal cavities are bare, and when Avi speaks like a mute, his breath also comes out of the cavities. In his eye sockets there are bits of dried flesh that look like withered apricots hanging from a tree.

His ears are all that have remained intact on his skull. You can look, but you won’t be able to tell whether Avi is young or old, where his voice comes from, whether he is even human and not a scarecrow, and whether there is perhaps nothing other than a skeleton, without flesh and body, underneath his woolen overcoat.

Only his hands have flesh and skin. His fingers move skillfully, and if you mention Dark Valley, you’ll see him stick out his teeth even more and utter crackling sounds from his throat.

And you will never know whether the old hunter is getting angry or whether he is smiling.

Published in 1926