"There Are Wolves Up There!"

My professor friend K and I went for a hike to the mountains around the town of Mestia in Svaneti, the highest region in Georgia. We wanted to see the Koruldi Lakes near the glacier at the foot of the two-peak Ushba mountain of the Greater Caucasus Range separating Georgia and Russia.

The Koruldi are called lakes but in reality they are small and shallow pools of glacier water that freeze in late fall, and you can’t swim in them even in the summer. Their value is in the mirror effect: they give breathtaking views and great photo ops with the mountains’ reflections in them. They are also a sort of a guidepost of how high you are, anywhere between 2,700 to 2,850 meters above the sea level as there’s a couple of them at different heights.

We had limited time as we needed to be back in town for K’s meeting around 4 pm. The hike to the lakes by foot would have taken about three hours going up on a steep mountain slope. So, at about 11 am we found a local driver to take us as high up as possible. I’ll call him J, a fit Svan man of about 60 years of age with a great sense of humor, driving a stick shift Jeep he keeps in a great condition.

J spoke virtually no English, so when I told him I spoke Russian he turned into a chatterbox. I asked K if she wanted me to translate everything he said and she replied, “No, just the gist of it so that I can follow along.” His Russian was excellent, even though he had a more distinct accent than the Georgian one that I’m now used to. He must have learned Russian as a part of his Soviet school education.

As we were crawling up the serpentine extreme adventure dirt mountain road with its many parts hollowed, washed out and carved out by the mountain springs running down, we were awed by his skill and ability to navigate it.

Rocking us in the Jeep like on a roller-coaster (they call it “Georgian massage” here), J also managed to tell us lots of stories. Here are some snippets that I thought were interesting.

Me: J, you speak excellent Russian, but what’s your native language?

J: Svan (in Russian – Svanskiy). Everyone in Mestia speaks Svan. It’s completely different from Georgian and Megrelian.

Author's note: Linguistics forensics and archeological anthropology suggest that Svan was the first to have branched off from the proto-Kartvelian language about 7,600 years ago, in Early Copper Age. Due to the isolation of its speakers in the mountain regions, Svan has preserved the ancient Kartvelian structure and vocabulary better than its two other descendants – Megrelian/Laz and Georgian, that separated from each other much later and were influenced by the languages of various invaders and occupiers of Georgia. All the three languages currently are complete isolates, not inter-intelligible at all. As a state language, Georgian (Kartuli in Georgian) is used as the language of official communication for the entire country and is taught in schools. Svan and Megrelian are mostly spoken only at home.

Me: How far apart are Megrelian and Svan? Do you understand each other?

J: Nah, we have to use Georgian. I have a Megrelian friend, and we speak Georgian to each other. He doesn’t know Svan, I only know ten words in Megrelian, so we have to speak Georgian. He makes fun of me when I try to speak Megrelian, and he always wants to teach me bad words. You can’t trust those Megrelians anyway (laughs).

Me: Oh, those sneaky Megrelians…

J: I’m only joking, of course. I love Megrelian people. I love all people. We are all humans, we need to love and respect each other. Especially us, smaller peoples.

Author's note: There are no exact statistics, but it is estimated that about 30,000 speakers of the Svan language live in Upper and Lower Svaneti regions separated by the Svaneti Range, therefore forming two distinct Svan dialects.

We ride higher up the mountain, and I see a beautiful church on the slope.

Me: J, is the church active? Can we go in there?

J: Nah, there’s no one there right now. It’s too new, no one knows when it works.

I have a feeling that he is reluctant to make a stop, so I just drop the subject.

Some time after, we see two young hikers, a man and a woman, going up the road in the company of two dogs. K and I discuss if we should have stopped to offer them a ride as we paid for the entire car anyway, but we are now too far away from them on the bend.

About 15 minutes later, we make a stop at a beautiful vista point to take pictures with Ushba’s two peaks in the background. J is waiting by his car, smoking, “Take as much time as you need!”

We take pictures, completely in awe of the mountains surrounding us on all sides. We are here during the inter-season, so there’s only one other hiker at this high point, sitting down for a break and scrolling on his phone. Amazingly, the phones work here!

As we drive further up, I notice old fences of what looks like cattle pens. Svans are mostly cattle farmers, but they also grow potatoes, vegetables, wheat, and corn.

Me: J, all these pens on the mountain slopes, are they for the cattle?

J: Yes. Most are old, falling apart. Cows don’t need pens.

Me: So cows are the main cattle here now?

J: Yes. And horses. You’ll see horses here running wild. Some families also raise pigs and goats, but mostly for themselves, for meat and cheese.

Me: What about sheep? When I was growing up, I had these pictures in my mind, from Soviet TV and school textbooks, that people in the Caucasus mountains were tending sheep, taking them to high mountain pastures.

J: They used to. No one wants to raise sheep here anymore.

Me: Really? Why?

J: People have become lazy. No one wants to go to high pastures and herd the sheep.

Me: Ah, I get it! Cows are much smarter, they can graze on their own and find their way home before dusk.

J: Exactly! Sheep need to be watched over all the time. Besides, there are wolves up there (he points at the Ushba mountain foothill, where we are going).

Me: Wolves??? Should we be worried?

J: Nah, they are only dangerous at night, in a pack. Not during the day.

As we drive up to the higher point with a shepherd hut and a café apparently run by his good friend or cousin (all Svans seem to be distantly related), J launches into the story that has been clearly burdening his mind.

J: Yesterday evening, I took up here a hiker who wanted to go to the lakes. He didn’t speak any Russian, and I don’t speak English. He had all his gear: a tent, poles, water boiler, basic survival stuff. We got here when it was already getting dark. He wanted to go to the lakes and camp out there for the night.

Me: OMG, it must be freezing cold there at night!

J: It’s not even about that, I’m sure he knows how to make fire and keep the tent warm. But he would have been a good meal for the wolves. I managed to explain to him about the wolves, by scowling, howling, and showing claws with gestures. The way I explained it, he may have thought I was warning him about bears (laughs). There are bears here, too, but they are in the woods, not on the glaciers. And they are probably already hibernating for the winter. In any case, I dropped him off here at the hut and he said he’d spend the night here and hike up to the lakes in the morning. He took my number and said he’d call me when he is done, to take him back to town. He never called. If you see him up there, please tell him to come down with you.

We understand his reluctance to go up this road for the second time in one day, so we promise we’ll watch out for the hiker. J drops us off at a small plateau where the road ends, too washed out by the melting snow. And lights another cigarette.

As we start ascending, there’s less and less grass and more and more snow on the slope. We try to walk on the patches of old yellow grass that are still dry as they are more stable. After a couple of ridges, I start huffing and puffing as getting high up is still a challenge for me after a heart attack I had in 2019.

We stop and look around, completely awed by the surrounding beauty. We talk about how it feels, to be literally on top of the world. I’m still trying to catch my breath and tell K to go up without me. She makes sure I am OK and says that she wouldn’t go much higher as the snow was getting deeper and more treacherous.

I stop and take more pictures, including the pic of a large dog paw's print in the cover image.

I steady my breath and heart rate, and decide to follow K as high up as I can. She sees me and yells, “I see a hiker!” and proceeds to go up. I can’t see her anymore over the ridge, but I still go up, slowly but steadily. I finally see them both, looking at the guy’s phone, and K says, “I don’t think it’s our guy, he speaks Russian!”

Me: “Do you speak English?”

Guy: “A little bit.” His English is actually quite good.

Me: “Then it’s definitely not our guy, that one didn’t speak Russian at all, remember?”

K: “That’s right! He says the lakes are over that ridge, but they are frozen. He can show you the pictures. I don’t think we should go there.”

The guy, let’s call him N, shows me the pictures. The lakes are just sheets of ice now. K and I decide that we should just go back as it is already 1:50 pm. We offer N a ride back as his shoes were completely soaked (he said the snow at the lakes was knee-high) and he looked quite cold. N happily agreed as he had been on the mountain, by foot, since 4 am because he wanted to see the sunrise in the mountains. Beautiful pictures, to be posted on his socials later.

We start descending together. My health app later said that I’d climbed the equivalent of 96 floors on that day. Imagine, an NYC skyscraper!

On the way down, we run into the two hikers we saw on the road earlier. They turned out to be French, and quite determined to go all the way up to the lakes. We couldn't talk them out of it, pictures and all. They were wearing t-shirts and a healthy glow on their cheeks, and just looking at them made me feel cold. Oh, the courage of the young! They asked us if we could take the dogs that were following them. The dogs were either stray or just running in the mountains loose and wouldn’t leave them alone. But then they agreed that it might be good to have the dogs' company, especially since our driver also told them about the wolves.

When we reach J, he is slightly disappointed we brought a wrong guy. We ask him to give N the ride back and after some negotiation about 50 lari (N had no cash on him) J says, as I gave him a disapproving look, “It’s alright, you can ride with us for free.”

When we get to the shepherd’s hut and the café again, J stops the car as he sees the café manager chopping the wood. “I need to say hi,” he says and stops the car. “I’ll ask him about the hiker, too.”

We stay in the car while J talks to the café manager and his wife. Apparently, the hiker has not come back yet. J is really worried at this point. “What if he did go up the mountain after I left and got eaten by the wolves,” he says, clearly concerned.

The hut is a new construction in two levels, and J and the café owner go to check it out, climbing to the second level. K gets out of the car to take pictures of horses that came up to see what all the commotion was about. J returns and says, “He is sleeping up there!” K goes to the hut to see what’s going on and calls me several minutes later, “We need help with translation!”

I go there and see K climbing up to talk to the hiker again. Apparently, the hiker was just sleeping there all the time and never went up the mountain. K asked the hiker again if we could give them a ride to town (K thought it was a non-binary person). From the response, the hiker was suspicious of our intentions and sounded groggy and annoyed, affirming that the ride was not needed, and the mountain still needed to be climbed. So we just left them there.

As we were driving down, I talked with N in the back seat and basically got his entire life story, which I don’t feel I can share here without his permission. When we were about 30 minutes away from the town of Mestia, K got a text that she needed to be back for a meeting. Just as luck would have it, moments later we got a flat tire. It took J and N about 20 minutes to change the tire and K and I joked that at least N made himself useful, paying back for the ride with his sweat and labor.

When we got back, K rushed to her meeting and I tagged along for a visit to the museum where the meeting was. J went to take care of his flat tire and N went to his hotel. No wolves or people were harmed.