The tarantass-driver, having piled up your impedimenta, excavates from its midst the bag of rye-bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the little bag of _pelmenes_, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the _yurta’s_ flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She brushes out this water on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is the picketed lamb’s especial territory, to which the felt rugs before the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water. “_Boutzela! boutzela!_” she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver over the basin to see by: “it boils.” Into the Mongol’s pot go our _pelmenes_, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant description of Siberian _pelmenes_ was given on the quaintly-worded French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk: “Meat hashed in bullets of dough.” They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day’s drive across the plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our hostess’s big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually thaws the outlying regions of the body. But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the least that she has home-made _pelmenes_ every two or three days--she wants these particular meat-balls. The little mouth begins to pucker and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes the place of the _pelmenes_. We fill a heaping ladleful and André furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied. The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at André, then throws more sticks of the precious firewood on the embers. André has caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our six-foot Siberian hunter.