We stood there for two or three hours watching the ice blocks, many of them three or four feet thick and hundreds of feet long, pushed out on the shore by their neighbors, to be in their turn broken by new masses of blocks. When the sun arose the picture instead of mysterious became magnificent. As far as one could see there was a moving field of blocks of ice, gleaming in rainbow colors, apparently changing shapes at every moment. Those nearest to us rushed with the greatest velocity, the middle blocks moved more slowly, and those toward the low Chinese shore seemed merely a moving stretch of snow. I had just noted that the river which I was accustomed to see far below our high bank, now almost rose to its level, when I heard quick, excited exclamations around me: "Deer! Deer!" I turned to where the hands were pointing and saw a strange sight. Several of the small deer that we Siberians called _koza_, were sailing on a big block of ice in the middle of the stream. A moment after every person was in motion, even the women running home for rifles. I remained with only a few old men who muttered: "The fools! How could they get them so far away, even if they should happen to shoot them?" But the hunter instinct, or perhaps the strong desire to get this particular kind of food, made every one reject the apparent impossibility of getting the booty from this terrible roaring river, carrying everything so swiftly away. The animals approached nearer and nearer. We could see their occasional desperate efforts to jump from one block to another, always to return to the big block which quietly and majestically flowed among hundreds of smaller ones, which pushed around it, now breaking their edges, now leaving a part of themselves on its surface. In a short time the deer were directly opposite us. There were five of them, a big stag and four does. Suddenly there was a rapid succession of shots around me from the men who had returned. The stag fell, killed, I afterwards learned, by my uncle who had aimed at it as being the most precious. Two of the does also fell, but the two remaining started on a wild race for the Chinese shore. One of them was obviously wounded, for after two or three slow bounds she was caught by the moving mass of ice and disappeared under the water. I followed the other with a certain amount of sympathy until it was nothing but a tiny dot, and then turned my attention to what was going on around me. There was great excitement. An old Cossack named Skorin, was trying to stop his nineteen-year-old son and two others from the mad attempt to push a boat on to the stream, in order to go after the slain animals. These had been pushed gradually nearer us by the ice, and Young Skorin argued that it would be easy to get them.