After leaving Kolya's cabin, I visit the remote village of Krasny Yar on the River Bikin. This is one of just a handful of settlements in this vast region still partly inhabited by indigenous hunter tribes — the Udege and Nanai. The original Dersu tribe — whose eponymous member traveled with czarist Russian mapmaker and naturalist Vladimir Arsen'ev through this wilderness, and later figured in the title of Akira Kurosawa's 1975 film, "Dersu Uzala," about those explorations — was closely related to the Udege. Many so-called Northern Peoples were killed or deported during the years of repression under Josef Stalin. The Udege now number only 2,000.
In Krasny Yar an ambitious World Wildlife Fund project aimed at protecting the protecting the Bikin River basin, is already nine months into a three-year plan. The Bikin, also known as the Amazon of the East, contains some of the Northern Hemisphere's largest and richest old-growth forest holding some 176 million tons of carbon.
The project, worth some ¥300 million, is helping local people establish forms of income from non timber-derived products such as Korean pine nuts, lemon vine berries, Siberian ginseng and hunting as well as eco-tourism and traditional textiles.