If for the third member of your personal suite you can get an old-time servant to keep the guns clean, build the camp-fires when midday tea is to be taken out of doors, bring in the baggage and rally the best resources of each halting-place, you are doubly lucky. You will be sedulously tended, and be treated partly as a prince, partly as a helpless baby. Of this order is Jacov Titoff. Not the smallest personal service that he can render will you be permitted to do for yourself. The telling of unpleasant truths will be carefully avoided, however certain the ultimate revelation. Though honest beyond question, he pays you the naïve compliment of relying upon your generosity in all the little matters that concern provisions and petty luxuries. He will open the package which he is carrying back from the _torgovlia_ to extract matches and cigarettes for his own delectation, and will rifle unstintingly the reserve of canned _sardinki_. He cheerfully freezes himself waiting for deer, and stumbles up miles of snowy mountain in the beats. He is always in good humor, and without complaint for whatever comes. He is ready anywhere, at any time, to sleep or drink vodka. Thus outfitted and manned, take your place, muffled in furs, and seated on the felt sleeping-blankets. Guns are at your side, the bag of provisions is in front, your own little ponies paw the snow. They start off now, trotting and galloping beneath the _duga_. The air is frosty, clear, and thrilling as wine; the snow is feathery and uncrusted, as when it fell months back; bells are jingling, and the driver is crying his alternate endearments and curses upon the shaggy ponies. Down the long rock-flanked river valleys, amid birch and pine forests, you will skim, by unwonted paths, through out-of-the-world villages, to see in their own homes the red-bloused peasants, the women spinning at the wheel, the peddlers and priests, the traveling Mohammedan doctors, the rough Buriats, miners and merchants, along the white way. The smooth main road is left now for newly broken sledge-trails across fields and over snow-covered marshland. Every available river is utilized as a highway, for along its winding length the path, smooth and level, is marked like a boulevard by the evergreen saplings planted by villagers to guide the winter traveler. One can pierce the districts flanking the Chickoya’s gorges, reachable at other seasons only by breakneck climbs. And one can see the real Siberia.