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Updated: May 4, 2025
His tongue was a little heavy, although he showed no sign of old age. It turned out that my honourable host had just returned from the town, where he had indulged in vodka to warm his feeble frame. 'The Bilaks are good, are all good, he stammered, while he crammed his little pipe with tobacco, 'every Bilak is a clerk, or at least a doctor, or even a smith, as good as a Yakut one.
Perhaps the great sorrow which I imagined had died at the death of the Bilak was still living on quite close to me, in a different shape, but just as great, no less unbearable and fateful to him in whom it now dwelt. Since that day I had often guided my steps in the direction of Kowalski's yurta. No fresh shavings were added to the old ones lying about near the door and the little windows.
You are a good man too, and you must be a good clerk; we all love the Bilaks, a Sacha never forgets that the Bilak is his brother. But will you believe it, brother, it is not long since this is so? I myself was afraid of the Bilaks as of evil spirits until about fifteen years ago, and yet I am so old that the calves have grazed off the meadows seventy times before my eyes.
The Bilak ran about with his gun in his hand, and when he caught sight of anyone he covered him with his gun, and unless the man ran away he would pop at him but not for fun, he didn't mind whom he shot, even if it were a Cossack. What he lived on? The gods of the taiga know! Nobody else did. Every living thing shunned him like the plague.
The old man refreshed himself from the jug and continued: 'Do you see, it was like this. My father was not yet born, my grandfather was a little fellow for whom they were still collecting the "Kalym" when there came to this neighbourhood a Bilak with eyes of ice, a long beard and long moustaches; he settled here, not in the valley but up on yonder mountainside in the taiga.
When I saw a Bilak, I would run like a hare wherever my feet would carry me into the wood or into the bushes, never mind where, so long as I could escape from him. And not only I but everybody dreaded the Bilaks, for, you see, people told each other dreadful things about them, that they had horns and slew everybody, and so on.
That was not taiga, as you see it now, but thick and wild, untouched by any axe. There the Bilak found an empty yurta and settled in it. 'But he had no sooner gone to live there than the taiga became impassable at a distance of ten versts round the cottage.
I ascertained that these fairy-tales had had their origin in the town, and reproached the old man for his credulity, but he bridled up at once. 'Goodness gracious! do you think we believed all that on hearsay? I don't know about other people, but I and all my neighbours believed it because our forefathers knew for certain that every Bilak was terrible and dangerous.
So nobody asks him. I inquired very particularly all the same where Kowalski lived. In my imagination the 'Bilak' of the legend who fled from men and this lonely carpenter were blended into one personality, I could not say why. I felt that there must be a mysterious connexion as between all things repeating themselves in the circle of time.
There was the Bilak on the bed in his furs, all covered with snow, and in his hand he held a cross. The Bilak was dead; perhaps hunger had killed him, perhaps the frost, or maybe the devil had taken him. Now tell me, was there no reason for us to be afraid of the Bilaks? Here was only a single one who drove all the neighbourhood to flight, and now all of a sudden a great many of you arrived?
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