One of the Kamchatka Peninsula's estimated 20,000 bears, a brown bear cub, sits in a tree at the Kurilskoye Lake natural reserve in Russia, Aug. 20, 2019. Famous for its exceptional flora and fauna and farther east than Japan, the peninsula does not resemble anyplace else in Russia, and for many Russians represents a distant otherworld of majestic, magnetic wilderness. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)