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Updated: June 14, 2025
A Russian yemshick centers his whole duty in driving his team. He gives no thought to the carriage or the persons inside; they must look out for their own interest. Let him come to a hill, rough or smooth, rocky or gravelly, provided there be no actual danger, he descends at his best speed. Sometimes the horses trot, and again they gallop down a long slope.
There was a manifest desire to swindle me at the bogus Hotel de la Poste. Half a dozen attendants carried my baggage to my room, and each demanded a reward. When I gave the yemshick his "na vodka," an officious attendant suggested that the gentleman should be very liberal at the end of his ride.
In mild doses oukhabas are an excellent tonic, but the traveler who takes them in excess may easily imagine himself enjoying a field-day at Donnybrook Fair. An hour before reaching Kansk one of our horses fell dead and brought us to a sudden halt. The yemshick tried various expedients to discover signs of life but to no purpose.
Our yemshick took us to his friend at the first station, and this operation was regularly repeated. Occasionally our two yemshicks had different friends, and our sleighs were separately out-fitted. When this was the case the teams were speedily attached out of a spirit of rivalry.
I could never clearly understand the readiness and ability of the Russians to endure contrasts of heat and cold with utter complacence and without apparent ill effect. I have seen a yemshick roused at midnight from the top of a stove where he was sleeping in a temperature of eighty-five or ninety degrees. He made his toilet by tightening his waist-belt and putting on his boots.
When the smotretal announced that all was ready we proceeded to the river and found it anything but inviting. The Bouriat yemshick pronounced it safe, and as he was a responsible party we deferred to his judgment. While we waited a girl rode a horse through the stream without hesitation. We had four horses harnessed abreast and guided by the yemshick.
They generally contented themselves with the regulation speed, and it was not often that the promise of drink-money affected them. I concluded that money was more easily obtained here than elsewhere on the route. Ten copecks were an important item to a yemshick in Siberia, but of little consequence along the Volga.
Our yemshick took us to the Hotel de Berlin, and, for the first time in eighteen hundred versts, we unloaded our baggage from the sleighs. Breakfast, a bath, and a change of clothes prepared me for the sights of this Uralian city. For sight-seeing, the time of my arrival was unfortunate.
Added to this, he stopped frequently to make pretended arrangements of the harness, where he imagined it out of order. To finish my irritation at his manoeuvres, he proposed to change with a yemshick he met about half way on his route. This would bring each to his own station at the end of the drive, and save a return trip.
It used to look a little out of place to see a yemshick who had shouted chort! and other unrefined expressions to his team, devoutly crossing himself before a holy picture as soon as his beasts were unharnessed. A few versts from Achinsk we crossed the boundary between Eastern and Western Siberia.
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