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Updated: June 25, 2025
There are great numbers of bears, wild goats, and wild creatures of all sorts, who spend their time living in the Taiga and eating one another. I spent two days and nights on the shore of Lake Baikal. It was still and hot when I was sailing. Transbaikalia is splendid. It is a mixture of Switzerland, the Don, and Finland. I have driven with horses more than four thousand versts.
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.
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.
From the middle of April onwards the sun begins to be pretty powerful in Yakutsk; in May it hardly leaves the horizon for a few hours and is roasting hot; but as long as the great Lena has not thrown off the shackles of winter, and as long as the huge masses of unmelted snow are lying in the taiga, you can see no trace of spring.
The people on the Amur are original, their life is interesting, unlike ours. They talk of gold, gold, gold, and nothing else. I am in a stupid state, I feel no inclination to write, and I write shortly, piggishly; to-day I sent you four papers about Yenissey and the Taiga, later on I will send you something about Lake Baikal, Transbaikalia, and the Amur.
But everywhere the taiga is the same dreary forest, without grass, birds, or insects, gloomy and lifeless, and noiseless but for the soughing of the wind and crackling of the branches. The most common tree in the taiga is the larch, which best resists the winter frost and summer chills.
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.
In southeastern Urianhai, in Ulan Taiga, I came across a place where black slate was decomposing. All the pieces of this slate were covered with a special white lichen, which formed very complicated designs, reminding me of a Venetian lace pattern or whole pages of mysterious runes. When the slate was wet, these designs disappeared; and then, as they were dried, the patterns came out again.
Of these subdivisions the chief are those of the Ob, Yenisei, Lena, and Amur basins. Beyond the northern tundras and southern Steppes by far the greatest space is occupied by the forest zone. From the Urals to Kamchatka the dense taiga, or woodlands are interrupted only by the streams, a few natural glades and some tracts under cultivation.
His protestation was answered by his transfer to the frozen region of the province of Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia! He passed three years in the midst of the "taiga," the immense virgin forest which covers this country, in a village of nomads whose miserable huts, very low and smoky, were scattered along the shores of the Aldane.
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