Right, the russian wolf ice axing.
I was in the 9th grade back then, which equates roughly to the freshman year in american terms, and one of the higher-ups in charge of education apparently had a blowjob from the good idea fairy, as our school was spontaneously ordered to take its students on a field trip "at least 75 km away from civilisation", in the middle of a winter, on a Saturday. So it's fair to say we were pretty angry before this trip even began.
Of course, our parents and teachers viewed this idea as the utter idiocy it was, but such is the power of government officials in provincial Russia that confronting him about it would've just injured his bloated pride and led to him using his authority make life very uncomfortable for everyone involved in the forseeable future, so we were stuck with having to go on a trip to literally nowhere on a weekend in a dingy bus. And calling that thing a "bus" gives it too much credit, frankly! You see, like most schools in Russia, our school had a vehicle of its own - a reliable, tough snub-nosed beast of soviet manufacturing that plowed through all the snow and grime on the roads with the determination of a tank, could take the worst quality fuel mankind has ever created with barely a sputtering and was perfectly happy with having jury-rigged parts in its engine that came out of a tractor. It was the absolute paragon of utility, requiring so little money for upkeep that it ran perfectly well even when the driver had a daughter born and started stealing from the repair budget so that he could feed her. The only problem with that rhinoceros of a machine was that it was obviously not designed to carry passengers. The inside of it was dark, cramped, devoid of fresh air and reeking of stale sweat, the seats had their pleather stretched over a frame of metal so angular and poorly designed that sitting hurt no matter what you shoved under your ass, the luggage compartments overhead were small enough to have bags falling out of them every fifteen of so minutes but big enough to make whoever was sitting under them bend his head and the entire thing constantly rocked back and forth while moving so that we had to hold onto each other for dear life or fall to the floor.
And so we were all stuffed into that "bus" in our most uncomfortable, multilayered winter outfits that were actually needed to keep us warm but made us sweat buckets in the already warm vehicle. The trip was largely uneventful as tortures go, but it lasted about three hours and by the time we came out of the vehicle in a mountaneous area near the lake Chistoe (meaning "clear") we were all staring in front of ourselves blankly and percieving reality as if trough a clouded lens, due to, in equal parts, heat exhaustion people invariably suffer when you put them in three puffer coats at once and then in a confined, warm space and the constant assault on our vestibular apparati that riding along unkempt russian countryside roads in a bus that already rocks violently by itself involves. According to the plan of our trip, we were supposed to have an organised hike across some hills while the teachers who were in charge of us told us about the geography and nature of the region, but what we actually did looked more like
this, except instad of the ship we had backpacks stuffed with various survival gear we had no idea how to use due to not paying attention during the OBZh classes that were supposed to teach us that sort of thing and food for the day, which consisted mostly of chocolate and cookies our moms gave us.
At some point during this shambling migration I and three more guys whose names I never cared to remember became lost. When we looked around and noticed that it was just the four of us among the trees, we tried doing the most sensible thing and calling the group leader, but at it turned out, my and one other guy's mobile phones were out of charge, and the other two forgot to even pack theirs. We were genuinely stranded. We then decided to do the second most sensible thing and build a bonfire. Now, when I say we had no idea how to use survival gear, I mean the fancy stuff like medkits and chemical torches - every province-born russian knows perfectly well how to make a fire with just a box of matches and an axe. We looked at who was carrying what, as different people were assigned different pieces of equipment, and as it turned out, the blond guy had a small hatchet and yours truly had a supply of dry fuel pellets and a very large gasoline lighter. The only problem we had was a lack of things to burn. We were in a forest, yes, but we all knew that it's very unlikely that a living, moisture-filled tree would catch fire from anything we had. We needed a dead and dry tree to burn first. And so I, being the shortest and least intimidating of us all and thus the easiest to force into performing manual labor, got the job of finding said tree and bringing chunks of it back. The blond guy gave me his hatchet and off I went, periodically shouting to let the guys know my location and getting shouts from them back. A suitable tree was found fairly quickly - an old fir uprooted by a hurricane - and I went to work chopping off its limbs.
And that's where the wolves came in. It was already dark and I worked by the light of a head-mounted flashlight when something caught my attention – a growl. Slowly, with my heart racing, I turned and found myself confronted by a wolf. It was, in retrospective, of average size and quite old, but in the light of my head-torch back then I saw the beast as gigantic and bound with muscles. I don’t know why this wolf was alone and growling at me, because usually they move in packs and avoid contact with humans, but perhaps this was a desperate, hungry outcaste. Acting on fear instead of reason, I threw my hatchet at the animal and it flew far and wide, causing the wolf to fidget a bit but not relent in the slightest. Without a weapon now, I fumbled desperately about myself in hopes of finding something heavy and realized that I, in fact, have a perfectly good ice axe hanging at my waist. The thing was quite heavy, made of steel instead of aluminum, and absolutely superfluous on out trip, as there were no steep slopes to climb, but our group leader insisted that we carry it on us at all times “just in case”, and so I strapped it to my coat (the outer one, it had a very nice set of adjustable loops) and eventually forgotten all about it. The wolf growled some more and moved closer. Exhaling, I took the heavy thing out and charged the animal with a battle cry that sounded, according to one of the guys, “like a cat being showed into a wood chipper, ass-first”, but the animal was nevertheless surprised by the ferocity of my onslaught and I struck the wolf in the head with my steel ice axe, tearing apart the muscle, shattering the skull and tearing apart the brain! The sharp point of the tool entered the beast’s head slightly above its right eye, causing the animal to expire instantly. After building the bonfire and promptly getting found, we took the animal’s carcass with us and my dad had it eventually made into a rug.
And that’s pretty much it.
EDIT: Kaijyuu, hoverboards might still come around, don't worry. Just because science says it's impossible right now doesn't mean it'll be impossible in 30 years or so. Radars were also once thought to be completely impossible. One of the funny things about groundbreaking inventions and discoveries is that you usually have no idea what they are until they actually occur, so antigravity might be fully possible, if unknown today.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3764790 times)