Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/130

 94 to another. The long winter's fast had made them hungry and lean, and they seemed to be begging for food. A rough-looking mongrel elk-hound lay at the door of each courtyard, while the long-legged Siberian pig rooted about in the streets and on the rubbish-heaps.

It was on such a scene as this that I entered after two days of travelling in a tarantass south-eastward from the town of Minusinsk toward the Mongolian frontier. This was the last village on the edge of the great and almost impenetrable forests which lay on the north side of the Sajansk Mountains dividing the Russian from the Chinese empires. "Kooda! Raz Pashol!" My "Yemshchik" cracked his whip, as the troikas of three Siberian ponies galloped furiously into the little village assailed on all sides by barking dogs and stared at by groups of hairy, fur-clad Siberian peasants. There was no hospitable post station at this place, where, by Government orders, a room and samovar of tea and bread must be provided at a special tariff for all travellers. This was far from any post road, and the last post town had been left some forty miles behind. I therefore had to look about and find some well-disposed Siberian peasant in this isolated spot to have compassion on me and take me in.

That morning there had been a service in the church, but all was now quiet. A few of the men were working leisurely in the yards at the back of the house, shifting hay and setting hemp to dry, but no one was working in the field that day, except the common grazier. A regular village institution in Siberia, he had taken the sheep of the village to nibble the dry remains of last year's grass on the