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Updated: July 23, 2025
Scattered over the soil were the yourtes of the Yakoutas, while cattle and horses crowded together in vast flocks. Ivan, who knew the place well, rode straight to a yourte or cabin apart from the rest, where usually dwelt Sakalar.
"How?" asked Maria a little curiously, for the mere mention of wealth was to her like powder to the war-horse. "Being almost the only Russian who has lived among the Yakoutas, I know the secret of getting furs cheaper and easier than any one else. Beside, if I chose to take a long journey, I could find ivory in vast heaps.
But when his furs and teeth were changed into tea, tobacco, brandy, cloth, &c., he did not feel a whit happier. Ivan longed for the arid hills, and lofty mountains, and pellucid lakes for the exciting hunt and the night bivouac, when gray-headed Yakoutas would, with their ganzis the Irish duddeen in their mouths, tell terrible and wonderful stories of ancient days.
These traders are the Russian inhabitants, the native Yakoutas being the only artisans. In this distant colony of the human race, the new-born child of a Russian is given to a Yakouta woman to nurse, and when old enough, learns to read and write, after which he is brought up to the fur trade, and his education is finished. Ivan Ivanovitch was a young man born and bred at Yakoutsk.
This was really needful, for the Yakoutas, a pastoral people of Tartar origin, are singularly dirty, and even somewhat coarse and unintellectual like all savage nations, in fact, when judged by any one but the poet or the poetic philosopher, who, on examination, will find that ignorance, poverty, misery, and want of civilization, produce similar results in the prairies of America and the wilds of Siberia, in an Irish cabin, and in the wynds and closes of our populous cities.
During his wandering evenings, a noted hunter named Sakalar, claiming descent from the supposed Tartar founder of the Yakoutas, had often narrated his perilous journey on sledges across the Frozen Sea, his discovery of an ivory mine that is, a vast deposit of mammoths' tusks, generally found at considerable depth in the earth, but here open to the grasp of all.
It is away, away in the Frozen Sea, and requires courage and enduring energy to find. Two Yakoutas once discovered it. One was killed by the natives; the other escaped, and is now an old man." "If you could find that," said Maria, "you would be the first man in Siberia, and the Czar himself would honor you." "And you?" asked Ivan humbly.
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