THE FORESTS AND SPORT OF SIBERIA. 131 



above it; they are turnpikes in the most unpleasant sense of the 

 word. Sometimes it is possible to climb over them or to creep 

 under them; but equally often neither is possible, and one is forced 

 to make a circuit, which is the more unwelcome, since, without con- 

 stant reference to the compass, it is only too easy to stray from the 

 intended direction. Real clearings are met with but rarely, and if 

 one tries to walk across them, deep holes and pools full of mud and 

 decayed debris soon show that here also the greatest caution is 

 necessary. If the traveller trusts to one of the many cattle-tracks, 

 which, in the south of the forest-zone, lead from every village to the 

 forest, and penetrate into it for some distance, even then sooner or 

 later he finds himself at fault. It is impossible to tell, or even to 

 guess, whither such a path leads, for it intersects hundreds of others, 

 and runs through tangled brushwood, through tall grass concealing 

 unpleasant debris of trees, through moss and marsh; in short, they 

 are not paths for human foot. Thus, though there are not every- 

 where insuperable obstacles, one meets everywhere and continuously 

 with hindrances so numerous and so vexatious, that even where the 

 plague of mosquitoes is not intolerable, the traveller is apt to return 

 much sooner than he had intended. Only in winter, when hard 

 frost has covered all the pools, bogs, and swamps with a trustworthy 

 crust, when deep snow has smoothed off most of the roughnesses, 

 and is itself coated with a hard layer of ice, only then are the 

 forests accessible to the hunter equipped with snow-shoes, and 

 accompanied by weather-hardened dogs; only then can even the 

 natives think of making long expeditions. 



Siberian forests are dumb and dead, "dead to the point of 

 starvation", as Middendorf most justly says. The silence which 

 reigns within them is a positive torture. When the pairing of the 

 black-cock is past one may hear the song of the fieldfare and the 

 black-throated thrush, the warbling of the white-throat, the linnet, 

 and the pine grosbeak, the melody of the wood- wren, and the call of 

 the cuckoo, but hardly ever all these voices at once. The trilling call 

 of the greenshank and redshank becomes a song, the chattering of 

 the magpie gains a new charm, even the cawing of the hooded crow 

 and the raven seem cheerful, and the call of a woodpecker or a 



