Over the years, however, the Canadians' relations with the boss would sour, though it began with promise.Nothing, and no one, on Kamchatka is black-and-white. Conservationists are hunting guides, and local bosses are among the community's most generous benefactors. Kovalenkov, in addition to his business holdings, was known for his civic ventures, funding scientific research, aiding the region's decimated native peoples, and, at one point, launching a local television station."If you get him involved from the beginning, he likes that. For his part, Russell at first thought he could work with Kovalenkov.
Grigorian spent months last year writing a management plan for Kamchatka's protected areas. With considerable dexterity, he explained the tangled relationship between Krechet and the Kronotsky Reserve. "In the 1990s, all the reserves in Russia faced the same terrible problem: no money. Not for science, not for protection, and certainly not for any kind of ecotourism infrastructure.'' Kronotsky got into ecotourism for one reason: poverty Tourism filled the reserve's budget.
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But much of the money, Grigorian said, "went to the side, under the table and into the pockets of local businessmen". As they touched down beside a cabin, the men crunched into the hard snow.They probably had little trouble accomplishing their mission. After all, the bears of Kambalnoye had lived in close quarters with two North American researchers for seven years. One or two, expecting a familiar face, may have even run up to greet their killers.That's how wildlife researcher Charlie Russell imagined it, anyway. But all he really knew was this: in a well-orchestrated operation that amounted to mass murder in the wild, as many as 20 Kamchatkan brown bears - or grizzlies, as the species Ursus arctos is known in North America - were shot in the area around his cabin on Kambalnoye Lake, in the 500,000-acre South Kamchatka Sanctuary, a state-run preserve that is home to the densest population of brown bears on the planet. The old chopper, an MI-8 with the carcass and portholes of a rusting tanker, eased out over the tundra as the peninsula narrowed, flying low as it headed toward the southernmost tip of the land. It was early in the long Kamchatkan winter - November 2002, according to the best guesses that came later.
