Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/154

 112 lying between the agricultural zone of the steppes and the dense conifer jungle which lay along the Mongolian frontier. This zone of pine forest stretched in endless undulations of forested hill and vale for hundreds of miles, from the Altai Mountains to Lake Baikal. Here and there we came across open glades where the forest had been cleared by man or by a natural fire, while in the valley bottoms torrential streams bounded away to the great rivers which swept in a mighty flood from the frontier mountains north-westward to join the Yenisei. By the sides of these streams were little marshes studded with alder and willow copse, just as in rural England, but here it was all wild, without a sign of any human being except an occasional fur hunter's winter trail. Large flocks of duck and teal rise as one approaches the marshes, and in half-an-hour one can shoot enough to satisfy the demands of the larder and even one's love of sport, for the latter becomes quickly satisfied when there is superfluity of game. The peasants who came with me were true children of the forests. They knew the woodland tracks, the fords across the streams, the feeding places of the duck; they could recognise the call of the great black woodpecker, they knew the habits of the wood-mice, the haunts of the bear, the shoals where the fish abounded, and they could fell the largest pine or carve a dug-out boat from a poplar log.

It is worth some little digression to describe the Siberian spring, as indeed it is worth a journey of many thousands of miles to experience it, for there is no period of the year at which Southern Siberia is more beautiful. The snow was just melting when