The story is based on genuine events, but the author’s features are given to the images of both young naturalists. A. N. Formozov went to capercaillie currents in the Volga region not as a boy, but as a young man in 1921 and 1922, once with his father, and the other with his friend Georgy Dmitrievich Shaposhnikov (1902-1963), later an engineer in the aviation industry. It is curious that in the archives of A. N. Formozov there is a clipping from the newspaper "Nizhny Novgorod Commune" with the article "Foresters are murderers." It describes approximately the same thing that the heroes of the story experienced. This happened after the revolution, but in the same Trans-Volga forests where A. N. Formozov hunted during his high school years. Source: