The novel by the famous Siberian prose writer Vladimir Maksimov is a very unusual work. This is a parallel novel, consisting of two almost independent stories, and there are two main characters in it. But thanks to the author’s skill, both of them are imperceptibly combined into a single image, the image of a true Siberian who knows well and loves his native land immensely. Hunter-commercialist Igor Vetrov sets off on a multi-day trek through the taiga. Rafting down the river to the Tatar Strait, he spends the night in a small taiga village. There, while examining an abandoned house, Vetrov finds in the attic an old, tattered diary of a certain Oleg Sanin, his fellow countryman who lived in the 1970s. Vetrov takes the diary with him and reads it during rest stops and overnight stays. Gradually, the extraordinary and dramatic fate of Sanin is reborn before him, which took him to the North Caucasus, thousands of kilometers from his native places and gave him the joy of love for a young Ossetian woman...