THE FOKESTS AND SPORT OF SIBERIA. 157 



seldom captured in the fall-traps, but he often renders them useless 

 by walking along the beam and stepping on the lever; he is but rarely 

 a victim to the spring-bow, and he usually leaps over the steel traps 

 in his path. So there is only the rifle left. Only in winter can he be 

 hunted, when the snow betrays his tracks and admits of the use of 

 snow-shoes. The courageous dogs, having sighted their game, drive 

 it with difficulty to a tree or bait it on the ground, but they often 

 suffer cruelly, or may even be killed. The hunter himself runs a 

 risk of being attacked by a furious lynx at bay. 



The wild cat, which the lynx persecutes as pitilessly as the 

 wolf does the fox, is absent from the forest-zone of West Siberia, 

 but now and then the region is visited by the most perfect of all 

 cats, the tiger. Two which were killed in 1838 and 1848 at Baesk 

 and Schlangenberg now stand stuffed in the museum of Barnaul; 

 another, killed in the beginning of the seventies, is preserved in the 

 school museum at Omsk. Towards the end of the sixties a tiger 

 terrified the inhabitants of the Tschelaba district (on the European 

 boundary of the Ural) by attacking, without provocation, a number 

 of peasants, from whom it was only frightened off when one of 

 the men threw his red cap in its face. In the steppe-mountains of 

 Turkestan, and throughout the south of East Siberia, the " king of 

 beasts", as the Daurs call the tiger, is found everywhere and per- 

 manently in suitable localities, and from both sides it may pass, 

 oftener than can be proved, to the western forest-zone, remaining 

 perhaps for some time unobserved and retiring unnoticed. Yet on 

 the whole it occurs so rarely and irregularly that we cannot do 

 more than name it, without reckoning it among the beasts of this 

 region. 



It is far otherwise with the most precious of the furred be'asts, 

 the various species of marten. Their decrease is more lamented 

 than that of all other beasts of the chase, but most of them are 

 still regularly caught, if not everywhere, at any rate in certain parts 

 of the forest region. Only the sable has in the last few decennia 

 become really rare. Old huntsmen of the middle Ural remember 

 having caught sable every winter in the vicinity of Tagilsk; nowa- 

 days, at this latitude of the mountain-land, only an occasional stray 



