Places and Persons

...A quick exchange—fur for the smuggled goods—and the smuggler heads his team back to the south...

...Their new positions they apparently found to be more comfortable than their old for they remained where they had fallen until morning...

...On the sheltered side of this cabin a great log fire had been built for the purpose of heating to a cherry red the granite boulders that are used to heat the room...

...Our own dogs lay whimpering in the snow, their harness cut and tangled...

...This was welcome news to us and we both resolved not to be too squeamish about the kind of bath-house it should turn out to be...

...First one of the children grabbed it and used it to cut his teeth upon...

...But, actually, the only thing it did was keep out all fresh air and keep in all smoke...

...But the shave proved another matter and despite his good intentions (these were apparent enough) Hall and I quickly saw the danger of having him apply the same method to our faces...

...Then, after a few gulps of very ill-tasting tea and two or three hunks of black rye bread, both of us set out in search of the town barber...

...Such was our welcome to Kigiloff, a Siberian town that had once been one of the czar's great frontier outposts but that was now only a little cluster of log huts nestled snugly among great drifts of snow that had been swirled up from the river...

...And back of the village, as far as one could see, there stretched a sombre ridge of white mountains that ran on and on in one unbroken chain until they reached the Arctic coast...

...At least that was the way it seemed to Hall and to me as we stumbled about among the natives...

...They were wise enough to squat low down on the dirt floor, where the air was clearer...

...In addition to this, corporal punishment was inflicted upon the children with it several times during the course of the meal...

...Imagine, however, our disappointment when the Indians down in the centre of the village told us that the keeper was away on a hunting expedition and was not expected back for at least three days...

...Finally we fell into a sleep that was broken only occasionally by some of the children falling from the shelf and landing on the side of a horse or sheep...

...Their leader was a huge grey brute with sharp, lean ribs and a drab coat that was the color of the dawn...

...We used the utensils of our kit but the natives themselves had nothing to eat with except sharp-pointed sticks and large wooden paddles...

...It cost us a ruble, but in less than an hour we were on our way to the bath-house with half the natives tracking at our heels...

...The result is that the air rings with the shouts of the natives and the remonstrances of the trader until even the patience of a well-seasoned auctioneer would be sorely tried...

...Buckskin towels were given us with instructions to keep our faces covered as we lay in the wooden bunks built into the walls of the room...

...The weather happened to be cold that night and so four Siberian ponies and at least a dozen sheep shared the great room with us...

...There was nothing to relieve the eye in the entire scene except a virgin forest of snow-covered spruce, birch and tamarack that went up to meet the forbidding, white-capped mountains...

...And then to make matters worse, the Yakutsk drops great lumps of bear fat into the mixture before he gulps it...

...Great, gaunt, long-bodied beasts they were, with deep-set eyes and dripping fangs...

...So we descended upon the little town and prepared to accept whatever hospitality it might offer us...

...It was not long before my friend and I had to follow their example...

...At least we knew that we could expect food, shelter, and a chance to rest our dogs...

...Smoke fills the entire room and the great fire in the centre of the floor makes the heat almost unbearable...

...After breakfast we went outside...

...There, the mother arranged all her children in a row and then climbed up herself to spend the next hour in trying to keep the younger ones quiet...

...It was the only thing left us to do because there was no room to spare...

...Neither did we enjoy overmuch the various uses to which the great tea ladle was put from time to time...

...Every living thing that a Yakutsk owns is brought into the cabin at night except his dogs and he would bring them in also if it were not for the fact that they are bred too close to the wolf to make desirable roommates...

...Furthermore, we knew that the next village was at least eighty miles farther east and it would have been impossible to travel even half that distance when our dogs were in the condition they were in at that time...

...It takes place in one of the cabins into which there has been crowded as many of the natives as possible...

...The report did not stop the attack, but it did bring swarming over the river bank a crowd of fur-clad, squatty natives who shouted and clubbed and made the snow fly in every direction until they had driven their pack snarling and whining back toward the village...

...It was a noisy affair: the children rolled and played among the ponies and sheep, the lambs bleated an accompaniment to the dogs who were barking outside and, as we ate, the housewife kept stirring a kettle of tea that was boiling over the fire...

...You can be certain that the little town did not look very inviting to us but it was beastly cold and geologists who have been prospecting for seven months in the Viliusk Mountains are not likely to be any too fastidious about shelter...

...What tea that was...

...He arrives at last and pushes his way through a mob of excited children, unkempt, uncared for, dirty, ragged, but smiling and happy in their anticipation of the sweets they know he will have for them...

...Then one of the lambs would be fed from its deep bowl...

...One thing those traders can be sure of, that the best furs are never brought out for their inspection at all but are stored away against the coming of the smuggler from Mongolia who will stealthily drop into the village in the dead of some night...

...His sleigh will have no bells and he will glide into the town to unload as quickly as possible his store of tawdry jewelry, silk and opium...

...One by one the natives gave a low grunt and then squatted down very solemnly around a great copper cooking pot which had been set in the middle of the floor and which was filled with a curious stew of meat flavored with a very strong onion...

...That evening we sat down to supper with a family of sixteen, who lived together in this large, oneJune 4, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 129 roomed cabin...

...We were awakened very early by the housewife and her daughters who were getting the young lambs out of the oven below us where they had been placed the night before for warmth and safety...

...My companion fired his revolver into the air...

...He did this, of course, by removing most of the hair...

...And when I last saw it, it was on the snow where the dogs were fighting over choice bits of food that had stuck to its sides...

...As it was we lay there for a very long time listening to the regular breathing of the natives and looking up through the hole in the roof at the clear night sky...

...As far as the hair-cuts were concerned, he proved artist enough, for he managed to relieve us of the generous supply of spruce gum that had become entangled in our heads...

...To attend one of those trading sessions is an ordeal...

...We were just in time to watch the approach of a traveling trader who was coming to visit the village...

...Ashes that had been clinging to the slabs now flew all over the room and made us realize only too well why we had been told to keep our faces covered with the towels...

...It is hard to say who knows the most about furs: the native who attempts to pass off his unprime pelts for first-grade skins, or the trader who has spent his life watching natives trying to do just that sort of thing...

...My companion and I were taken by the swarm of natives first to the home of the native trapper with whom we were to stay during our visit in the village...

...One successful trip without any interference from the Russian soldiers, and this outlaw will live the rest of his life in the peace of some Chinese village...

...There was nothing to do about the matter except try to bribe some of the other natives to make the place ready for us...

...That ended the bath...

...The town lay almost buried in this snow—in great hills of it that reached up and almost hid even the spirals of smoke mounting from every chimney and curling into the clear sky...

...The whipsaw which he was filing (it had been hauled 500 miles over the snow from Irkutsk) was laid aside and, while his assistant sat drinking vodka, the native cut our hair...

...His razor had been made from an old saw-file and having him scrape our faces with it proved so torturous that we prevailed upon him to let us finish the job ourselves...

...It was at least warm up there and we might have spent the night in comfort if the rough bricks had not bit into our ribs so...

...The heat from those rocks was terrific, breathing was difficult, and I was just beginning to think that I could stand it no longer when suddenly, bucket after bucket of ice cold water was thrown on the hot slabs...

...Then we all went in to breakfast...

...When they had finally become red hot they were shoveled onto the dirt floor of the cabin...

...They use a very poor grade in the first place, but after the huge mattress-like sacks of it have been used for beds by drivers and camels in some caravan, after the same sacks have been stored in musty warehouses in Siberia, and have finally been shipped north by boat and then hauled over the snow by sled—after all this you can be quite certain that all semblance of the tea flavor has been lost...

...But he is taking his life in his hands for if he should be caught with the smuggled goods in his possession, he will be executed immediately...

...Captain Hall and I were the guests and so they gave us the privilege of sleeping by ourselves on top of the large adobe oven...

...This worthy happened to be also the owner of the local saw mill but fifty kopeks proved enough to make him abandon the lumber industry of the little hamlet...

...Then, too, there was always the chance that we might hear of mineral deposits which would interest us...

...So Hall and I climbed down from the top of the thing and strode outside of the cabin where we greatly amused the Indians by washing our faces and hands in the snow...

...The natives look forward to it for days and when, finally, they hear through the clear, frosty air the jingle of his sleigh bells, the largest cabin has already been prepared for his reception...

...After the shave, the "barber" told us that the town boasted of a bath-house, a relic of the more halcyon days when the little village had flourished under the czar as a distributing point for exiles...

...Ventilation was furnished by a hole in the roof and this same hole was also supposed to serve as a window and as a chimney...

...As a trader comes to the towns in those mountains but once a month, his coming is the biggest event in the life of the community...

...They actually seemed to snap and crack like the breaking of machinery...

...The chief awaits the trader in his den and after the usual present of vodka, the trading begins...

...After the air had settled a bit we were given a very generous rubbing, first with lather and later with alcohol...

...With the coming of bedtime, the family crawled up on the sleeping shelves which served as beds...

...As long as it held out even remotely the possibility of a white man's cleanliness—that was all we asked...