Russian Life To-day

by Bp. Herbert Bury

Inside a Kirghiz Uerta.

Tolstoi’s Master and Man gives a very clear and convincing account of what a snowstorm may mean for even experienced travellers. There the scene is laid in Russia, and between one village and another in a country often traversed; but the vast spaces of Siberia in that long, gloomy winter must be specially fraught with dangers and terrors during those swiftly rising and deadly boirams, as the wind-storms are called, which completely obliterate all landmarks while they last, and which are not to be met with anywhere else in the inhabited parts of the world. At Spassky they told me of a Kirghiz horseman who had been found one morning, during the preceding winter, just outside his home, horse and rider rigid in the snow and frozen stiff, both of them dead for hours. They had struggled against the boiram as long as they could, the man probably urging on his horse to the last, and both giving up the struggle together as the awful frost took possession of them, so swiftly that there was no falling off for the one nor sinking down for the other. And, if they had only known it, or the blinding storm had permitted them to see, they were at the very door of their home and within reach of warmth and food and shelter.

I remember once saying to friends that I supposed when travelling in winter they could make themselves very comfortable by packing themselves in with “hot-water foot-warmers.” “Hot-water foot-warmers!” they exclaimed. “Why, the frost would have them and destroy them completely almost before we had left the door.”

Then the wolves are there also! Siberia has not changed in that respect from the weird land of which we have read as long as we can remember, and is still the haunt of the most fierce and untiring enemies which man and beast alike have to fear when they are the hunters and not the hunted. The fair Siberia of the glorious summer knows no wolves. Then there is food enough and to spare always within reach, and there are homes and family life even for wolves to think of and be happy about. There is no need then, though they are gregarious by nature, for them to join together. Each can fend for himself, and have enough for all his family and to spare. Not a wolf is to be seen except very rarely, and the traveller never even thinks of them with fear as, singly, sleek, and well fed, they slink away immediately as soon as seen. It is altogether different when winter comes, and hunger, even famine, gets a grip upon them because so many other creatures are hibernating. Then the quarry must be of different character, and nothing is too strong or big for a huge pack well led. Once they have been driven by stern necessity to combine together and choose their leader they will stick at nothing and attempt almost anything.

A friend of mine, born in Petrograd, tells us of an old travelling carriage of his father’s, in which he and his brothers and sisters, when children, used to play.

“It was raised very high from the ground,” he says, “only to be reached by a small ladder, so as to be out of the reach of wolves.”

Just the same stories are told after every winter as those of which we have so often read in prose and verse; and, out of the many told me as happening quite recently, I select the following:—

Three winters ago a wedding party went from their village, in the Altai, where the ceremony had taken place in the morning at the home of the bride, to the village where the bridegroom lived, and to which he was now taking back his newly-wedded wife. They were a hundred and twenty in number, and made a large party, with their horses and sledges, and were not afraid; but an unusually large pack of wolves was out that afternoon, and, soon scenting them, gave chase. Party after party were overtaken, pulled down, and, with horses as well, devoured. The bride and bridegroom and best man were in the front sledge with good horses, and kept ahead till they were quite close to the village, when they too were overtaken by a few of the strongest and swiftest of their pursuers. To save themselves the bridegroom and best man threw out the bride, and thus stopped the pursuit for a time sufficiently for them to gain the village. It was a shocking thing to do, but when the villagers began to question and help them out the awful explanation was forthcoming! The two men had gone mad with fright, and had not known what they were really doing. In that terrible hunting down, with the shrieks and despairing cries of their friends, as they were overtaken, ever ringing in their ears as they urged their own terror-stricken horses forward, it is little wonder that their minds gave way.

Let there be no mistake, therefore, about the steppes. The reader may keep the new impression (if it is new) that I have endeavoured to give of a most beautiful, rich, and fertile country; and which I am hoping to be visiting again while this book is being read, finding, I hope, this country of the wolves story rejoicing in all the glow and beauty of summer. But still, for nearly seven months of the year, that Siberia is the old Siberia still, fast bound in the grip of an appalling frost, waging, in its storms, a never-ceasing battle against human enterprise and effort; and the haunt of those insatiable and savage creatures which seem to stand out from all other creatures in being devoid, when in packs, of all fear or dread of man.