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I arrived here
last Tuesday at the Ubsk Primate Recovery Centre near Pomsk and
not so very far from Bobinsk. This is where the bluetails
from the uranium mine come to be rehabilitated after being down
in the eternal cold and dark of five hundred feet underground. This
is also where Dr. Fyodor Butynski has for the past twelve years
been directing the Ubsk-Karchinksy Bluetail Artificial Burrow Project
to determine whether African bluetails can be trained to mine for
dangerous minerals. The punishing 12-hour train ride in hard
class from Pomsk to Ubsk, during which every one of my suitcases
burst open, was of such a violent nature that it caused me for the
first time to wonder just what the hell I thought I was doing with
these Reports. I mean, who am I kidding? Does
anybody really read them? I lost consciousness somewhere between
the fifth and sixth hour, being thus mercifully released from the
necessity of remembering the latter half of the journey. And
when I finally got to Ubsk, all there was there was the uranium
mine, a reindeer rendering plant, a store that usually only sells
cabbage and used batteries, the railroad station, a nightclub called
the Fox and Lemming, and a prison.
I had to walk down a long, muddy
and heavily-rutted road to reach Dr. Butynski's office, while a
couple of aging politicals slaved obsequiously over my luggage,
cursing under their breath in some obscure Uzbek dialect. I was
assigned a room and given a bowl of watery potatoes. The lights
went off at four-thirty, and as a Siberian wind howled outside, I
was left to wonder about the reputation of Dr. Butynski. Just
who was this famous primatologist, and why had he come here of all
places? I was desperate to know, and the mystery of it ate at my
innards like clorox. I felt sure I would have some answers
before eating another bowl of boiled potatoes.
The next morning, Dr. Butynski
was not in, and his one-eyed assistant told me curtly that I would
have to wait. I waited all day Wednesday and Thursday with nothing
to read except a couple of well-thumbed copies of the Journal of
the Mad Monk Society, going back only at night to my tiny and almost
unheated cubicle in the visitor's barracks. On Friday, Dr. Butynski
was called away, and I wandered around Ubsk soaking up the local
color, gray. Saturday and Sunday the Project was shut down and everyone
went to Pomsk, and Monday was Seal Day, a Siberian holiday. Tuesday's
was the last train of the month out of Ubsk, and I felt that I had
to be on it in order to post my "Report" and meet my next
assignment, whoever that might be.
That's about it for this issue.
Dr. Butynski will have to remain just a bit mysterious until
someone else can venture out there to interview him. And to
that person, we here at the Nooz can only say, Good
luck! Next time, next issue, we might be fighting off
strangler figs on Sumatra, trying to stay on our feet in shaky Gorgonzola, or detoxifying gobo roots in the ancient, ant-strewn Amazon.
Well, we might. So until then, I'll just say
So long. |
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