In 1936 a Russian family walked into the Siberian taiga to live on what they could grow, and for the next 42 years the garden tried to kill them. Karp Lykov was an Old Believer, from a sect of Orthodox Christians that had been dodging the Russian state since Peter the Great. When a Communist patrol shot his brother dead at the edge of their village, Karp gathered his wife Akulina and their two children and kept walking until there was nobody left to shoot at them. Two more children were born out there. The nearest village ended up some 150 miles away. They had no guns. They grew potatoes, rye and hemp, wove their clothes from the hemp and cut their galoshes from birch bark. By any modern definition they were the most local, seasonal, plant-based household in the world, with zero food miles and no supply chain to blame. They ate plants for the plainest reason there is: a potato stays where you put it. They lived on the edge of famine for a quarter of a century. As the family later told it: "Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed." One year the snow came in June and a frost killed everything in the garden. Through the winter that followed they ate their shoes. They ate bark. Akulina made sure whatever food there was went to the children, and in 1961 she starved to death. What saved the rest was a single grain of rye that came up in the pea patch. They fenced it and guarded it day and night against the mice and squirrels. At harvest it gave them 18 grains, and from those 18 grains they rebuilt the crop. The rye grain is the part of the Lykov story everybody tells. The part that gets left in the forest is Dmitry. From the late 1950s, once he was grown, the family had begun eating animals. With no gun and no bow there was only one way to do it, and it is the oldest one we have. Dmitry dug pit traps, and when the traps failed he ran the animal down across the mountains until it collapsed. He hunted barefoot in winter. He would be gone for days, sleep out in 40 degrees of frost, and come home to the hut with a young elk across his shoulders. That is persistence hunting, the hunt Kalahari trackers were still running into this century, done by a young man who had never met a human being outside his own family. The body that could do it was the most useful thing the clearing ever grew. Geologists spotted the clearing from a helicopter in 1978, and the Lykovs became the most famous hermits in the Soviet Union. In 1981 three of the four children died within days of each other. Dmitry of pneumonia. Savin and Natalia of kidney failure, the bill for four decades of that diet. Karp died in his sleep in 1988. Agafia, the youngest, is still out there past 80, the last of them. The grow-your-own books all stop at the potatoes. The Lykovs ran the experiment to the end, and the end of it was a barefoot boy running an elk into the ground.