54 A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 



where I heard the willow- wren in song, but the chifF- 

 chaflfs ranged as far north as Breokoffsky. An oddly- 

 assorted pair were hawking over the foreshore. One 

 was a pomatorhine skua, the first that I saw on the 

 Yenesei, and the other was a small hirundine of some 

 kind — probably the Siberian house-martin (Chelidon 

 lagopoda). There was a regular colony of common snipe 

 here, and among them were some pintail snipe. The 

 latter rise much more slowly than our nimble bird. In 

 fact, when they flipped up out of the willows, they 

 looked as big and dark as woodcock. I shot a male, and 

 managed to secure him before my self- constituted 

 retrievers could reach the spot. Then the Oryol began 

 to whistle, and the retrievers and I had to run back 

 through the swamp. However, there was some hitch 

 about sending off" a boat, and my friends, who had been 

 visiting some chooms in the neighbourhood, sat down on 

 the sand to wait. Presently the owner of the principal 

 hut in the place came out and asked us to take a cup of 

 tea with his family. We entered the house by a dark, 

 covered passage, which served both as a storeroom and 

 to keep the living-room warm in winter. Inside the 

 kitchen was clean and well furnished. There were 

 actually pots of flowers on the window-sill, and an arm- 

 chair. We sat on the big square bed in the corner while 

 our kindly brown-faced hostess plied us with tea and 

 excellent _pzVo(7. The latter is a kind of pasty or turn- 

 over made with fish, meat, or sauerkraut. These 

 people were Tatars from the south, and like most of their 

 hardy, frugal race in this part of the world, they seemed 

 to be more prosperous than their Russian neighbours. 



