forest—have given to him a self-confidence and a decision of character that make him the natural leader in every convict party. It is the boast of the true brodyág that the ostróg [the prison] is his father and the taigá [the wilderness] his mother; and he often spends his whole life in going from one parent to the other. He rarely escapes from Siberia altogether, although he may reach half a dozen times the valley of the Ob. Sooner or later he is almost always recaptured, or is forced by cold and starvation to give himself up. As an étape officer once said to a brodyág rearrested in Western Siberia, "The Tsar's cow-pasture is large, but you can't get out of it; we find you at last if you are not dead."
The conversation of the brodyágs in the party that we accompanied related chiefly, to their own exploits and adventures at the mines and in the taigá, and it did not seem to be restrained in the least by the presence of the soldiers of the convoy.
The distance from Tomsk to the first polu-étape is twenty-nine versts (nearly twenty miles), and it was almost dark before the tired prisoners caught sight of the serrated palisade within which they were to spend their first night on the road.
A Siberian polu-étape, or half-way station, is a stockaded inclosure about 100 feet long by 50 or 75 feet wide, containing two or three low, one-story log buildings. One of these buildings is occupied by the convoy officer, another by the soldiers, and the third and largest by the convicts. The prisoners' kazárm, which is generally painted a dirty yellow,[1] is long and low, and contains three or four kámeras, each of which is provided with a brick oven and a double row of plank nári, or sleeping-platforms. According to the last official report of the inspector of exile transportation, which is confirmed by my own observation, "all of the étapes and polu-étapes on the road between Tomsk and Áchinsk—with
- ↑ Yellow is the étape color throughout Siberia.
