I recalled what a Siberian traveller named Hans Jakob Fries had written about this problem more than two centuries ago. Tending to necessities while under insect attack was a real experience. Because our campsites were just places along the road, the bathroom arrangements had to be of the walk-off-into-the-bushes variety. The mosquitoes kept tabs on us vigilantly everywhere we moved, indoors as well as out. Sometimes in the evenings, I imagined I could hear the great insect totality tuning up all around, a continent-wide humming. The sheer volume of mosquitoes might cause an observer not to mention the gnats, flies, and tiny biting insects (known as “no-see-’ums” in America) there are plenty of all those as well. Members of a tribe called the Tungus carried smoke pots with them wherever they went, while another native people, the Voguls, retreated into smoke-filled huts for the summer months and became dormant, doing most of their hunting and travelling in the wintertime. In past times, native peoples and Russians wove fine netting of the long hairs in a horse’s tail and wore the nets throughout the summer. Thick smoke can be effective, but you have to stand right in it. Strong repellent with DEET is disagreeable to them, but they work around it. Nothing short of a good breeze keeps Siberian mosquitoes down. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emit a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the indrawn breath of air.

The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth-part of a larger psyops strategy, maybe. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. Then, you have your specialists-your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes. Those are your general-practitioner mosquitoes, or G.P.s. 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.

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