Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/231

Rh at that stage of development known as "in the velvet," are believed by the Chinese to have peculiar medicinal properties, and are very highly prized. Chinese traders go in search of them to the remotest parts of the Altái and sometimes offer for them as much as four dollars a pound, or a hundred dollars for a single pair of large antlers. Bielaüsof had succeeded in capturing fifteen or twenty of these deer, and had shut them up in an extensive park, made by putting a nine-foot fence around a whole mountain so as to inclose a range almost as extensive as the animals would have had in a state of freedom. From the sale of the horns of the stags he derived every year an income of six or eight hundred dollars, which, with the proceeds of his farm, enabled him to live in more than ordinary comfort.

We spent in Berél only one night. Before we went to bed Tuesday evening we had engaged one of Bielaüsof's nephews to accompany us in the capacity of guide, had hired a second man to assist him in making camp, had procured the necessary number of horses, and were virtually ready to start. Wednesday morning at nine o'clock the whole population of Berél—about fifty souls—assembled in front of Bielaüsof's house to see the cavalcade get under way. Mikháiel, the guide, a stout, chubby-faced young fellow, with tangled masses of yellow hair falling over his shoulders, had arrayed himself in a traveling suit of extraordinary chromatic brilliancy, and was the admired of all beholders. His cotton shirt, which he wore outside his breeches like a tunic, was of a gory crimson, whose suggestions of bloodshed were relieved to some extent by a pattern of big yellow harps; his loose buckskin trousers were embroidered with bouquets of scarlet roses and huge orange sunflowers, and the brim of his antiquated chimney-pot hat had been turned up in piratical fashion on one side and fastened to the crown with round buttons of colored glass. His assistant, Nikolái, had on yellow buckskin trousers embroidered with Patagonian cactuses and a 14