this country and so they built their houses in these wild frontier spots, often on the Chinese side of the frontier. Here they live with their wives and families, and a few horses and cattle which they drive through the forest, and only return to their old villages once or twice a year to renew their supplies and dispose of their furs.
During my journeys in the Upper Yenisei plateau in 1910, I had many opportunities of studying the Siberian frontier fur trader. While wandering in this country my companions and I often had occasion to visit their trading posts; we made our camps beside their log-houses and partook of rough meals with them and their families; we even accepted their hospitable offers to sleep under their roof, and more than once I stretched myself out on the rude wooden floor of a Siberian trader's log-house or in the out-house across the yard, where the stores and skins were kept. I remember staying with one in particular, who was a Cossack, originally from the Trans-Baikal country. He had come into the country with his wife and family some years before, after serving his time in the Far East. He was a rough but genial man, and his knowledge, in fact, was far greater than that of any Siberian peasant I had met, although his opportunities for learning had been no greater. He had never been out of Siberia and Mongolia, but he knew his map of Europe well. He could ask intelligent questions about England, and he had a general idea of the position and character of India; but, like all the rest of his kind, he was obsessed by the fear of the awakening of the yellow races. It was in his little log-house at the junction of two rivers, on the Upper Yenisei, that we
