Ship's Thicket. The Tsar's Road

Somewhere far in the North, where the two sister rivers Koda and Loda flow, lies the protected Ship's Thicket. There all the pines are straight and tall, standing very close to each other. If one tree is cut down, it... does not fall but leans against the neighbor and stands as if it were alive. But they are not destroyed; they are preserved as a shrine… The forester Vasily Veselkin, wounded on the front, learns in the hospital about the existence of the Ship's Thicket and sets off in search of it… In the dark, remote forests of Karelia live the Old Believers-Pomors. They live their usual, stable way of life. But people from outside come to build a waterway from Lake Onega to the White Sea – where once passed the “Tsar's Road” of Peter the Great, along which military ships were dragged by sledges. Mikhail Prishvin saw its overgrown trace and heard this name during his journey through the North. And in that very place, “in the land of unfrightened birds,” the author had the thought that if everything that happened there throughout history were retold, it would result in a long story with the same name, a fairy tale about what was and what was not – “The Tsar's Road.”