KOLGUEV AND THE NAVIGATORS xxvii 
a loser. We coastmen know well how to sail: every child understands 
how to manage an oar, and every woman—beings inferior to men in 
every respect—would know how to direct a rudder.’ And, further on 
in the same account :— 
‘It is true that 130 years ago Barmine, a merchant in Archangel, 
a Raskolnik,! settled in Kolguev at his own expense forty men and 
forty women who desired to found a hermitage, and all but four died 
during the first year of their settlement; but they were all old people, 
and belonged to a very strict sect which allowed during some months 
to take food only once a week.’ This version differs from Saweljew’s. 
In view of my own experience at the goose-catching, this good priest’s 
account is well worth quoting. He does not himself appear to have 
witnessed it, but quotes an informant from Mezen. 
‘It takes us two or three days to arrive to Kolguev ; and there birds 
are come a great multitude and variety—and what a noise they make! 
The goose gaggles, the eider-duck lets hear its voice, and the drake 
does not remain behind, and the seagull. 
‘We begin to shoot it, and during May and June shoot a great deal 
of it. The dead bird lies in heaps and sometimes begins to stink— 
but we do not mind it. In the beginning of July the barren geese 
begins to lose their feather. On the 8th of July a laziness overcomes 
them. The lazy goose cannot fly,—he has few feathers upon him, and 
all his down is gone as if some one has plucked him. Such goose sits 
like an insulted one; he is silent and sad as if hiding himself and 
ashamed of his nakedness. Now as soon as these geese occupy the 
small lake, leaving the big one to go there for food, we put our guns 
aside and took to snares. We spread the snares on every passage from 
the small lake into the large one for birds to enter in. At the gate we 
arrange out of the swamp the entrance ; sloping towards the lake and 
very steep in the centre that the goose might not go back after having 
once gotten into the snare. Having finished this arrangement (which 
scarcely takes us an hour), we let dogs loose and we ourselves begin to 
make a noise and to bark in unison with the dogs, showing thus to the 
geese that they must move from the small lake into the large one. 
1 The Raskolniks or ‘ Old Believers’ seceded from the Greek Church in the days 
of St. Philip of Solovetsk. They now live chiefly in the villages of the Petchora. 
