The craggy mountains and jagged peaks of Chechnya, deep in the Caucasus, are famous only for war.
Vedeno, a ramshackle village of 6,000, for example, was once the mountain fortress of the revered 19th-century Chechen warrior Imam Shamil.Until his capture in 1859 led them to surrender, local clansmen hid in ravines near here and ambushed Russian cavalry and cannons with daggers and stones.
Today, olive green jeeps and trucks and battered sedans filled with fighters clatter up the mountain, traveling 40 miles from the besieged city of Grozny and back again.
At the fighters' headquarters inside the village, young, bearded men in camouflage fatigues and parkas swagger outdoors in the cold.
They are still armed with daggers, but also with Kalashnikov rifles, grenade launchers and rocket flares.
Ten percent of the men in the Vedeno district have been mobilized to fight in Grozny and travel there in shifts.
The rest are getting ready for the drawn-out guerrilla war that even the most optimistic of Russian military men predict will erupt once Grozny, Chechnya's capital, falls.
The terrain around Vedeno - steep cliffs, deep ravines, dark forests and hidden valleys - is ideal for guerrilla warfare.
"We are always prepared to fight in the mountains," said Shirvani Basayev, 25, the Chechens' military commander of the Vedeno district.
"It is in our blood. Even our 5-year-olds know every mountain path and secret cave by heart," he said.
Chechnya, an oil-rich, mostly Muslim republic, fought off Russian occupation for centuries before finally being subdued in 1864.
It declared its independence in 1991, and after a long standoff, the Kremlin decided last month to send in 40,000 troops to restore Russian law and order.
What Russia's move unleashed instead was an armed resistance that was never really dormant.
Basayev, who fought as a volunteer on the side of the Muslim region of Abkhazia in its war for independence against Georgia in 1992, had a 1971 Soviet military training manual lying on his desk.
A bit sheepishly, he explained, "Sometimes it helps to read such books and refresh your memory on how to fight."
Most training of Chechen rebels has taken place on the job, in Grozny. Among the hundreds of fighters deployed to defend the capital are engineers, farmers and car thieves who dropped everything to pick up Kalashnikovs when the Russian troops arrived on Dec. 11.
Not all of the fighters are novices. The Chechen president, Dzhokar M. Dudayev, who declared the republic's independence in 1991, was once a Soviet air force general. Many Chechens served in the Soviet armed forces and are decorated veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
In Vedeno, there was even a platoon of young Chechen cadets. They were led there from Grozny the night before to attend the funeral of a Vedeno fighter, rest and pick up supplies from their unit commander, Lt. Kazbek Tepsyev.
Now combat veterans, the dozen young fighters were schooled in the art of combat by Tepsyev at a war college in Grozny founded in 1993.
Their commander, a native of Vedeno, said the unit had been mobilized in Grozny to defend a dairy farm on Dec. 24 and had been roaming the city as an independent unit carrying out reconnaissance and commando raids ever since.
Discipline, he said, is the main difference between his students and other self-taught rebels. "When you give them an order, they obey."
Discipline is not a trait often associated with the fierce and ever-feuding clansmen of Chechnya. But warfare is the proudest part of their lineage.
When Basayev goes home to his brick ancestral home outside Vedeno and strips off his flak jacket, armor-plated ammunition carrier and Kalashnikov, he is not getting away from the war but returning to a military shrine.
Basayev's great-great-grandfather was a military aide to Imam Shamil and died in the final battle that led to Imam Shamil's capture in 1859.
Basayev's grandfather fought the Red Army during the 1917 civil war, and like hundreds of thousands of other Chechens was deported by Stalin's troops to Kazakhstan in 1944. His older brother, Shamil Basayev, is a field commander in Grozny.
Russian warplanes have bombed villages not far from Vedeno in an effort to flush out rebels, and 5,000 refugees from Grozny and villages in the lowlands have moved into Vedeno for protection.
Basayev was cagey about divulging military tactics. But one of his men explained that weapons and ammunition were smuggled in from neighboring Dagestan and North Ossetia, on the same winding roads that bring American cigarettes, German chocolate, oranges and soft drinks to roadside stands in every Chechen village.
Basayev did not stint on Chechen hospitality. As the men talked of war and Allah, the women vanished to a basement kitchen to cook huge pots of meat, rice and potatoes. After the electricity went out, as it has regularly since the war opened and bombing raids began hitting power lines, they worked by the light of gas lamps.
The women had little to say about the war that has taken away sons, uncles, cousins and husbands. One young woman finally shrugged. "We are worried, of course, but we are used to it," she murmured.
At midnight, Basayev stood up and began strapping on the layers of armored camouflage, ammunition belts and sidearms that made him look a little like a Chechen GI Joe. He had four grenades hanging from his side, two flares tucked into a pocket and five machine-gun magazines in a pouch.
Strapping on his Kalashnikov, he was evasive about his nighttime rendezvous, saying only that he was loading up two trucks to drive in to Grozny. "It's the time of the wolf," he said with a smile, and walked out into the darkness.