There are a hundred different types of silence in Siberia. The atmosphere becomes part of you. You can sometimes see bare white silver birches in the depth of winter hung with stars on a clear night. In the mesmerising vast forests, dusk in January begins at 2 pm. By then everything is in its hole or nest—or nearly everything.
On a cold, still night, I pull my cart that doubles as a sled, deep into the forest and find some smooth snow among the trees. I put up the tent, collect a bowl of fresh snow to take inside with me to melt on the tiny primus stove for drinks and cooking; it’s the nearest thing I have to a kitchen. I have even gathered some icy tree bark from the fallen branches to make tea. The Siberian people have taught me this. It’s not quite PG Tips but it’s nourishing and tastes fine. Need is a great teacher. I also boil up a few handfuls of buckwheat grain to make a kind of porridge. It’s a measure of the power of the silence that even a light footstep outside can make your heart stop. Something is out there.
The night birds—maybe they are jays—suddenly start screeching and chattering. Alert. Out from their hiding places. Gone is their silent vigil. They are harsh calls of warning. Then I hear the howling.
Moments later the wolf has stuck his head right into the tent. My first impression isn’t one of danger or fear but of his absolute beauty. He is a great big timber wolf. His tawny head and long front legs with giant-looking furry paws are covered with drops of half-frozen snow that gleam like diamonds on his thick fur. He has a good look around, as though I should have been expecting his visit. Maybe I am. After all, this is his world.
My heart is thundering. Yet my strongest instinct is that he’s not going to attack me. I have learned to trust my instinct. It’s all I have. I stay quiet, but the wolf knows I’m shaken. You can’t pretend to animals. They always know how you feel. Then he backs away and he’s gone.
I have to go out to repair the ripped tent flap with duct tape. The moon has risen, revealing a pack of wolves waiting like grey shadows among the trees.
The next morning they have left but they come back again at the end of the day when I set up camp. I am on a desolate road that stretches for miles through the forest. I’ve only observed one or two vehicles over the last few days travelling to the mines in the far east of Russia. There are no houses for hundreds of miles and I wonder if these wolves have seen a human before. Perhaps I’m just part of the wildlife.
Over the next few days they disappear at daylight and reappear when I stop for the night. They never come close to the tent again or harm me. It is as if they are running with me. They always gather for the night quite a distance away. I’m uneasy—yet at the same time their presence comforts me in a way I don’t quite understand. After about a week they vanish. I believe it’s because I’ve left their terrain; I have crossed an invisible border.
These beautiful wolves with their ancient, strange ways gave me courage to think of the painful memories of why my run had begun.
On 12 June 2002 my husband Clive died in my arms of prostate cancer. I knew with a passionate conviction that I had to do something. To tell people, to remind them to please go for health checks. If Clive and I had thought about him going to the doctor earlier—perhaps he would be with me now. I had to find a way to make others listen, especially men and women who hate going to the doctor and discussing intimate things. There is no social status with cancer. I’m only an ordinary woman, but if I just stayed home doing the weeding in my backyard, nobody would have taken any notice—that’s why I am running around the world, and sleeping in the cold in the forests with wolves.
If my message saves even one life—it will all have been worthwhile.
Tenby, Wales, 2002
We thought he could beat it, just as Clive had always conquered everything. Years ago, he sailed practically everywhere in the world, delivering yachts. He sailed boats no one else could manage. He escaped from pirates on the high seas, weathered all storms. He had always been fit, and very full of life and laughter.
Clive had twinkling blue eyes in an inquisitive and happy face; you could stop to chat to him for a moment—and still be talking hours later. I met him in 1982, when I had been at a low point, struggling to get an old and ramshackle 17ft sailing boat ready to sail solo across the Atlantic. Although he was a businessman in Pembrokeshire, he couldn’t stay away from the sea, and was helping out at Kelpie’s Boatyard in Pembroke Dock, where he rigged my little boat. Clive had been married before like me and had two deeply loved grown-up children, Jayne and Nigel. I was also very close to Eve and James, my children from my first marriage.
After I completed my solo voyage, we had a simple wedding and nearly twenty extremely happy years together. We would walk or run down to the sea and look at the sunrise, making a golden path of light across the sea from the harbour and North Beach in Tenby where we lived.
‘I think heaven isn’t later,’ he often said. ‘Heaven’s right here on this earth.’
Half-jokingly, he called doctors ‘vets’ as a compliment. He loved animals and admired vets who have to look after patients of all sizes, including strange animals. I had already run the Sahara Marathon. Clive had made a film about it and about working animals. We had visited a donkey clinic in Marrakesh after the race; my feet were blistered and Clive, worried because no doctor was available, asked their head vet to treat them. The vet had done a terrific job on his first two-legged donkey, applying soothing green cream smelling of aloe vera, normally used for girth galls, he said, while his other patients had eehowed, looking on sympathetically. The blisters healed perfectly.
All these carefree times suddenly ended. Our world changed in a way sadly known by millions but shatteringly new to us. We were unaware of cancer—not of the fearful loss, pain and grief it caused to so many, but that it can happen so easily to anybody. It seems unbelievable now.
On 26 June 2000 Clive went to see Dr Griffiths, his ‘vet’, at Tenby Surgery, because he had begun to have discomfort when he peed. We were shocked, devastated when the tests showed that Clive had prostate cancer.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Dr Griffiths tried to reassure us. ‘It’s often one of the easiest cancers to treat. You can have prostate cancer and live to ninety—and then get run over by a bus.’
The next test, the scan, revealed it had already spread into Clive’s bones. I prayed for a miracle that night; I would have done anything to have had the cancer instead of him, but Clive just said, ‘I can cope with this.’
For the next year, life went on almost as normal. He responded very well to the medication and I couldn’t get over his strong will. He began running on the beach, which he had actually never done before—he was not a runner. It was so hard because for a long time he wanted to keep the fact that he was ill between us and his doctors.
One day I saw he wasn’t really able to jog on the beach any more but was trying to hide it. Then he stopped and put his arm around me.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘or you’ll make me cry too. Be strong.’
He was well enough to go camping in Ireland in the autumn as he had longed to do. It was lovely. The Irish side of my family kept saying how well Clive looked, which made me proud but also tore me apart as I couldn’t say what had been happening. Whatever he chose to do was the way to do it.
I remember our tent beside the misty dunes, reeds and grasses in the early morning near Rosslare Harbour, before catching the ferry back. We had such fun. Time generously stopped its bitter headlong race; and stood still, just for a little while. It was time’s gift that meant everything. Things last for ever, not in years, but in the moments in which they happen.
Clive was as full of dreams and ideas as ever. He eventually told his daughter and son, and a few more people about the cancer, and we carried