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My first close-up sight of the tundra was of a land bursting with life. It was early September and the bushes were a dazzling palette of scarlet, orange, russet, blue and green. Clustered among the turning leaves were bilberries, cranberries, bog whortleberries, cloudberries and a dozen others, edible and poisonous. On the ground, in the copses of birch, alder and dwarf Siberian pine, grew fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), deadly but used as a hallucinogen, and many other species of fungi, such as Boletus edulis, which the French call ceps.

It was 1992, communism had collapsed and, for the first time for 70 years, it had become theoretically possible to visit Russia’s remotest corners. Geographically, the place we British should be most interested in is Kamchatka. The peninsula is about the same size as the British Isles and lies between the same latitudes. Moreover, it is almost exactly on the opposite side of the globe to us, being only a few degrees off longitude 180, the continuation of the Greenwich Meridian. What makes it very different is that it lacks the benefit of the Gulf Stream, so the temperature drops to Minus 60 in the winter and the permafrost never melts more than a foot or so below the surface.

My reasons for wanting to go to Kamchatka were not geographical. Most of my travels having been to hot places, I was daunted at the prospect of such cold - but the invitation was irresistible. The two main groups of tribal peoples living there, the Koryaks and the Itel’mens, had written asking for help in putting their case across and this, with help from the Russian Academy of Sciences, was all that was needed to get a permit. Twenty-one years before, I had undertaken Survival International’s first field trip, visiting thirty-three tribes in Brazil and writing a report that helped to bring their plight to the world’s attention. I now learned that there are more indigenous people in Siberia than there are in Brazil and, under communism, they have endured many of the same abuses. With 1993 about to become the UN Year of Indigenous Peoples, the opportunity to help open up a whole new front was too good to be missed.

The tribal people who had not crossed the land bridge to Alaska and colonised the Americas had lives perfectly adapted to the harsh conditions of the frozen north. They herded reindeer, which provided meat and skins, caught and preserved the great shoals of salmon which surged up the summer rivers, and hunted the bears, foxes and sable, whose furs helped them to survive the cold. In spite of pre-Revolutionary exploitation and subsequent collectivisation, many still practice traditional lifestyles and there is a strong feeling of cultural identity.

I stayed in a reindeer camp with Andrei Kavavtagin, the first independent leader of a co-operative owning 4,000 deer. As a deer farmer myself in Cornwall I was made especially welcome, and the warmth of the friendship and the fireside in a skin yurt high in the Kamchatkan mountains echoed that of so many other tribal hosts in other parts of the world.

Andrei was very aware of the problems facing his people but full of energy and enthusiasm to overcome them. “If only Gorbachev had not allowed foreign trawlers into the Sea of Okhotsk!” he said. “Salmon catches in the rivers have crashed and now the bears are attacking the deer instead of working the estuaries to fatten themselves up for the winter.” There were about 8,000 bears in Kamchatka in 1992. Since then, I have heard that as many as three quarters have been slaughtered by foreign hunters coming in and shooting them with high powered rifles from helicopters. I saw one of the first groups setting out from Palana, the regional capital. They were Mexicans, elegant in their designer safari gear. While there is nothing wrong in earning desperately needed revenue by letting people pay to take part in a necessary cull, anything that endangers a species’ survival cannot be called sport.

Sitting beside a fast flowing river watching a Koryak woman deftly filleting two dozen salmon of between five and ten pounds, it was hard to believe in the threats to their economy. I had helped her husband pull in his net with its writhing load, and I had exclaimed at the ease with which he had caught so many fish. “This is nothing,” he had said. In the early summer they are twice as big and there are many, many more. Or at least, there used to be...” With a smooth, apparently effortless movement of her sharp knife, his wife cleaned each fish - putting the guts in a bucket, the luscious red caviar on fresh rushes and the heads in a pile. Then she removed each side, leaving the spine with its attendant bones and flesh. This was the staple food of the husky dogs used for herding the deer and dragging sledges; the fillets were for people. All were hung on racks above the river to be dried before being stored for the long winter.

The greatest threat to Kamchatka, as to the rest of Siberia, is the rapacious interest now being taken in this last great wilderness by those eager to exploit its mineral wealth while the pickings are still easy and corruption and chaos reign. At a remote and seldom visited airstrip I was astonished to see a private chartered plane fly in. Out climbed eleven very large Americans with their attendant interpreters: guests of the government on their way to look at a gold mine that the regional administration wanted to open near the headwaters of one of the largest rivers in the region. The Koryaks were opposed to this plan, as they believed it was likely to destroy the salmon. I had not felt much reassured by the Russian mining engineer in charge of the scheme, who had assured me that gold mining actually increased the number of fish in the river. Believe that and you will believe anything! The Americans were bluff and friendly. They asked me what I was doing. When I told them that I was interested in the welfare of the native people, one asked me with a chuckle: “Have they started asking for their land back yet?”

I replied that it was theirs already and they were well aware of it. The only safe economy for the tundra is the tried and true system based on exploiting the great natural riches sustainably. The value of the richest salmon rivers of the world far exceeds the short-term benefits of both drift netting and mining.

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