with pain
and anger and stood up on his hind legs. As the second bullet broke
one of these, he squatted down but immediately, dragging the leg and
endeavoring to stand upright, moved to attack me. Only the third bullet
in his breast stopped him. He weighed about two hundred to two hundred
fifty pounds, as near as I could guess, and was very tasty. He appeared
at his best in cutlets but only a little less wonderful in the Hamburg
steaks which I rolled and roasted on hot stones, watching them swell out
into great balls that were as light as the finest souffle omelettes we
used to have at the "Medved" in Petrograd. On this welcome addition to
my larder I lived from then until the ground dried out and the stream
ran down enough so that I could travel down along the river to the
country whither Ivan had directed me.

Ever traveling with the greatest precautions I made the journey down
along the river on foot, carrying from my winter quarters all my
household furniture and goods, wrapped up in the deerskin bag which I
formed by tying the legs together in an awkward knot; and thus laden
fording the small streams and wading through the swamps that lay across
my path. After fifty odd miles of this I came to the country called
Sifkova, where I found the cabin of a peasant named Tropoff, located
closest to the forest that came to be my natural environment. With him I
lived for a time.

* * * * *

Now in these unimaginable surroundings of safety and peace, summing up
the total of my experience in the Siberian taiga, I make the following
deductions. In every healthy spiritual individual of our times,
occasions of necessity resurrect the traits of primitive man, hunter and
warrior, and help him in the struggle with nature. It is the prerogative
of the man with the trained mind and spirit over the untrained, who does
not possess sufficient science and will power to carry him through. But
the price that the cultured man must pay is that for him there exists
nothing more awful than absolute solitude and the knowledge of complete
isolation from human society and the life of moral and aesthetic
culture. One step, one moment of weakness and dark madness will seize
a man and carry him to inevitable destruction. I spent awful days of
struggle with the cold and hunger but I passed more terrible days in
the struggle of the will to kill weakening destructive thoughts. The
memories of these days freeze my heart and mind and even now, as I
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