From Siberia, with love for the outdoors

Years ago after a Saturday morning goose hunt with Wendell Diller and the late Don (Duckman) Helmeke, we were picking up decoys when Duckman asked one of my sons, then perhaps 8 years old, what he planned to do when he got home.

"Hang out, I guess," the boy said. "How about you?"

"Cruise the Internet for Russian babes," Duckman said.

The subject arises because early Thursday morning, these many years later, I hunted geese with Wendell and his Russian wife, Galina, late of Siberia. A great pair, these two, united on capitalist soil now for about 30 months, and proof anew that mutually beneficial international relations are possible.

Careful readers will recall that Wendell is the inventor of the "Quiet Gun," which measures some 7 feet long, butt to muzzle. Its advantage to urban wingshooters is that it is virtually silent, and therefore of no bother to gunfire-sensitive city dwellers.

Not long after sunup Thursday, for example, Wendell and Galina's long guns whispered poofs nearly in tandem -- dropping our first honker of the day.

"A young bird," Wendell said. "Came right in."

A chemist by training, holding the Russian equivalent of a master's degree, Galina, 55, has long been a nature lover. Her first husband was killed in a car accident a dozen years ago or so, and thereafter, she said, she was barely able to survive on the approximately $300 (U.S. equivalent) a month she made working for the government.

"Mushrooms and my garden helped my daughter and I live," she said. "I knew a place in the woods where I could gather mushrooms, and I canned and froze them. I never used my money to buy vegetables, only chicken or meat."

Wendell, 66, works for a company that produces high-end speakers, the kind audiophiles pay thousands of dollars for. Thus his interest in sound (or lack thereof), which, combined with his love of bird hunting and his penchant for inventiveness, led to development of his obscenely long shotguns.

"The barrels are ported," he said. "That, in combination with the length of the barrels and the subsonic shells I shoot, reduces the sound."

After a divorce some years ago, Wendell moved in with his friend Duckman. When the two weren't hunting, or talking about hunting, they logged onto websites featuring Russian women looking for husbands.

"Don was the first to suggest it," Wendell said. "My search, once I started it, was very methodical."

Statistically, Wendell said, widows and widowers who had happy first marriages are more likely to have successful second marriages. So he dismissed outright the many young single Russian women who advertise themselves on the Internet, and sorted instead only for those who previously were married but whose husbands had died.

Galina, meanwhile, had uploaded her profile onto the Internet because she wanted, she said, to find love again, and wanted a better life. Available Russian men her age who were interested in marriage were few, she said. Available Russian sober men her age fewer, still. Besides, her interests were in outdoor activities, and she knew no men who shared that interest.

"I hunted some, mostly killing rabbits to eat," she said. "But I also liked walking and observing and being in the woods, collecting mushrooms."

"We courted over the Internet," Wendell said. "One day she opened 22 e-mails from me." Attached to many of these were snapshots of Wendell with his long guns, or holding a felled goose, or kneeling beside a whitetail -- all real turn-ons to Galina.

"Where I lived, there were laws protecting wildlife, but they were ignored," she said. "If it could be eaten, it was shot, probably illegally. Similarly, people couldn't, or couldn't afford to, care about ecology. Garbage there is often just thrown out the windows of vehicles."

On the bright side, many young Russians are well educated, she said, ambitious and poised to re-create the country. "The young people today are very bright," she said.

As Galina spoke, she attempted to "flag" geese toward us Thursday morning by waving a large piece of black cloth attached to a stick -- a makeshift replica of a flying honker.

"I flog them," she said.

"Flag," I said.

"Flog."

"OK."

A slight accent aside, Galina in fact speaks excellent English. Some she learned in college here, some over the Internet. She's also in college essentially relearning everything she knows about chemistry, only in English.

"I love America," she said.

Then she flogged some more geese, and the birds soon appeared over our decoys. Flogging, it seemed, worked better than flagging.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com