The local government unexpectedly sent Volodya, a park ranger, along on my organization’s trail-building project near Lake Baikal in Siberia — not the first last-minute surprise they’d sprung on us.

With Volodya came his taped-together double-barreled shotgun and four mangy dogs. Before knowing his name, we referred to this dark, gaunt and bestubbled man in fatigues as our “minder.” As the local representative of a government that at times seemed to treat us more like Gulag inmates than volunteers, Volodya had a fair amount of distrust directed at him. One of our crew leaders, trying to be upbeat about it, said, “He should at least add some color to camp.”

And he did.

Volodya, approximately in his 40s, spoke only a few words of English. As the project’s official translator and one of the few Russian speakers in the crew, I had the most opportunity to get to know him. Opportunity is not success, however, and Volodya’s ready and unabashed ability to contradict himself in successive sentences meant that the more I talked to him, the less I understood.

Our Russian colleague Dima could always be found on the deck of the riverboat, watching Siberia pass by.

Volodya was born in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic north of Iran. However, he considers himself Russian, despite his olive skin. (In Russia, the word “Russian” has a racial and ethnic — not geographical or political — meaning.)

He left Azerbaijan as a teenager and has not been back in a long time, having only one remaining relative there.

After leaving home, he served in the army for a dozen years. His last army assignment was to a small team that cemented over the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown. Of his 15-man crew, only four are still alive. He attributes his survival to two years of heavy vodka drinking afterward.

After his wife died, Volodya sent his son and daughter to live with his sister in Krasnoyarsk. He grew unusually quiet whenever the subject of his wife came up. Krasnoyarsk is a day’s train ride away, and I have no idea how often he sees his children. A man who spends his summers deep in the wilderness cannot easily raise kids, and I cannot imagine him visiting a city, much less living in one.

Volodya is a consummate outdoorsman. A couple friends and I went on an overnight camping trip with him. He didn’t bring a sleeping bag or tent, even though the balmy summer temperatures in that part of Siberia regularly drop to freezing during the night. “What do I need those for?” he asked. “I’ll build a fire, cover myself in moss. What more do I need?”

As grizzled as he was, as much a wild man as he was, he was also an incorrigible flirt, an occupation in which he had a good deal of success. Both the women on our project seemed to find him surprisingly adorable.

At first, I did not spend a great deal of time with Volodya. Perhaps even more than the others, I viewed him with not a little suspicion, not really knowing why he was with us, and not trusting his employers. It was only during the overnight camping trip toward the end of the project that I had time to really get to know him. I was surprised about what I learned.

The first surprise was that Volodya was in full favor of our organization’s goals, which is to bring more tourists to Baikal. I had not expected a man used to living alone in the wilds to want more tourists trampling through his backyard. “Maybe there will be lots of tourists near Irkutsk and Listvyanka,” he explained. “But Baikal is big. There will always be plenty of empty space.”