Introduction
How melancholy it is in our Tukhlia today! True, the rivers Strey and Opir still wash its rocky, birch-rimmed shores; grass and flowers cover its vales in the spring, and in its clear azure skies, as in ancient times, still glides and circles overhead the giant eagle “berkut”. But everything else, how it has changed, the forests, villages and especially the people!
The dense jungle growth of forests which covered almost its entire expanse to the edges of the rivers, except for the upland downs, now has become sparse, diminished, melted away like snow under the heat of the sun; here and there it has completely disappeared leaving behind bald spots of barren areas. In some places all that is left is charred remains of stumps among which grow forlorn spruce or the even more wretched maple saplings.
Where long ago peace reigned supreme broken only now and again by the mournful sound of a shepherd’s “trembita” floating down from some far off upland, or perhaps the roar of a bison or a moose from the murky tangled thickets, now upon the downs shout the cattle herdsmen and in the ravines and gullies halloo the woodcutters, sawers and shingle-makers, ceaselessly, like deathless worms eating and cutting away the beauty of the Tukholian mountain region, the centuries-old spruces, pines and evergreens, either guiding them down stream, cut into lengths, to the new steam-powered sawmills or sawing them on the spot into boards and shingles.
But the people have changed most of all. At first glance it would seem they have become more civilized, but in reality all that has happened is that there has been an increase in the population. There are more villages and hamlets and more
