Nina did not go feral or lose her sense of self. She kept a strict routine. She washed in icy water, read poetry, and sometimes talked out loud to the trees just to hear a human voice.
Once, she even crossed paths with a large bear and managed the encounter without panic. While she fought to stay alive, events back in the world she had left behind moved on without her. In the first year after her disappearance, the investigator closed the fabricated case.
A scarf was found on a riverbank, and Nina was officially declared drowned. A symbolic grave with her photograph soon appeared in the cemetery. Her sister, Tamara, who lived in a large city, refused to believe it.
She kept writing letters to authorities and gathering scraps of information about the day Nina vanished. Four years later, justice finally began to catch up with the people responsible—thanks, of all things, to drunken loose talk.
Dremov bragged about the stabbing in front of a prosecutor’s employee. A full review followed, and the local web of corruption began to unravel. The frightened nurse tearfully told outside investigators the truth about the staged theft.
Before long, the officials and investigators involved were removed from their posts. Nina was fully exonerated for lack of evidence—but only on paper, and only after she had already been declared dead.
Free of the false charges without knowing it, she continued hiding in the forest for another seven years. Then, in 1991, the sound of a helicopter broke the silence of her hollow. Pilot Ryabtsev returned, this time with the medic and the local deputy.
When Nina saw other people again, she did not feel joy so much as deep confusion. The deputy took off his cap and explained, as gently as he could, why they had come. Nina, frightened and out of practice with human contact, began trying to explain herself, thinking they had come to arrest her.
When they told her the charges had long since been dropped, she could barely take it in. But when she heard that her sister was alive, the wall inside her finally gave way. She sank to the ground and wept soundlessly, releasing twelve years of fear.
The rescuers were astonished by the order and care inside her underground home. They left food and a portable radio and promised to return in a week. Nina needed time to say goodbye to the place that had kept her alive.
Returning to the modern world turned out to be its own kind of ordeal. Medical examinations showed that, remarkably, her health was excellent. Doctors were amazed that she had maintained such strength without modern medicine….
