Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/384

362 the old, battered, mud-splashed tárantás, which we were beginning to dread as a once-tortured criminal dreads the rack; and crossing the Yeniséi on a pendulum ferry-boat, resumed our journey to Irkútsk. The weather was once more pleasant and sunshiny, but the changing colors of the dying leaves showed that fall was at hand. Many of the poplars had already turned a deep brilliant red, and nearly half of the birches were solid masses of canary yellow, which, when seen against the dark background of the somber evergreens, suggested foliage in a state of incandescence. The vast fields of wheat in the valley of the Yeniséi and on the lower slopes of the hills in the neighborhood of Krasnoyársk were apparently dead ripe, and hundreds of men and women with horse-hair mosquito-protectors over their heads were reaping the grain with sickles, binding it into sheaves, and stacking the sheaves by fives in long rows.

We traveled without rest Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, but on Wednesday morning, at the station of Kamishétskaya, about 350 miles from Irkútsk, we were forced to stop in order to have repairs made to our tárantás. We found the village blacksmith in a little shop near the post-station, where, with the aid of his daughter, a robust young woman eighteen or twenty years of age, he was engaged in shoeing a horse. One might infer, from the elaborate precautions taken to prevent the animal from injuring himself or anybody else while being shod, that Siberian horses were more than usually fractious, or Siberian blacksmiths more than usually careless in driving nails. The poor beast had been hoisted into the air by means of two broad belly-bands, and suspended from a stout frame so that he could not touch the ground; three of his legs had then been lashed to an equal number of posts so that he could neither kick nor struggle, and the daring blacksmith was fearlessly putting a shoe on the only hoof that the wretched and humiliated animal could move. We learned, upon inquiry, that Siberian horses are always shod in this way, and we concluded