No, indeed, we don't sleep through our Siberian winters, nor do we coddle ourselves hanging around a fire,--not we Cossack[1] children.
I was brought up in Eastern Siberia, in a Russian settlement, on the Ussuri River, about fifty or sixty miles from where it joins the Amur. These settlements, you ought to know, were first established in the year 1857, in order to show the neighboring Manchus where Russian boundaries ended. The first were along the Amur, the later along the Ussuri River. No doubt I owe much of my hardiness to the fact that my ancestors were among the involuntary pioneers sent here by our government.[2]
The source of the Ussuri is so far south that in the early spring there is always danger of a sudden breaking of the ice near its mouth and a consequent overflow. Now it is strange, but whenever we children were forbidden to go on the river something would tempt us to do it.
"You mustn't go on the ice, Vanka," father said to me one day as he left for Habarovsk, the nearest big city.
I remembered the command all right until I met my chum Peter. He had a fine new sled to show me. It could go so swiftly that when he proposed that we cross to the Manchurian side, I said quite readily, "Whee! That'll be grand; it isn't far, and we can get back in no time!"
Peter was on the sled which I was pulling, when we neared the low Chinese banks of the forbidden river. They were not as near as they had seemed. It had taken us a full half hour to cross, although we ran all the way, taking turns on the sled. Suddenly Peter called out in a strange tone of voice: "Stop, Vanka, stop! We must run. Look! Hongoose!"[3]
I stopped so suddenly as almost to throw Peter off of the sled, and saw three Manchurians on the bank. They were standing near their horses who had huge bundles slung across their backs.
"Why," I said slowly, resolved not to be frightened, "those are merchants."
"No," said Peter, his lips trembling; "they have rifles."
"Ye-es," I reluctantly admitted; "but see their big bundles. They are certainly traders."
"We had better run--" began Peter stubbornly, turning from me.
[Illustration: "RODE AT FULL GALLOP TOWARDS US"]
"You're nothing but a _baba_ (old woman)," I said contemptuously, a tingle of shame covering my cheeks at the mere thought of me, a Cossack boy, running from a Chinaman. What would my father say, or my grandfather? Whoever heard of their doing such a thing? Yet, to my great surprise, my knees trembled as I recalled a scene of two years ago, when the brave Cossack Kontuska was found two miles from our village with his head smashed open, and it had been decided that he had been murdered by the Hongoose. Then, with a certain feeling of being protected, there also flashed through my mind a picture of the revenge expedition that the Cossacks had organized, and even of the Chinese horse that had been brought later, as one of the spoils, to my own home.