But I didn’t listen to him much anymore. Memories came flooding back to me in a swarm. I completely moved away from them and immersed myself in that recent time, the beginning of the sixties, when I saw, saw and felt these dreams. How little public life there must now be in the villages of Baturinskaya and in the entire Kuban region compared to what was there at that time? Now this area is cut through by two railway roads. One person says that in the course of three years he started 15 threshing machines, and I recently read that in the Kuban region there were 272 steam threshing machines in 1886, and 317 in 1887. If in the next two years they were added by 50, now there are more than 400 of them! How long ago were threshers and railways here no one understood... But at the same time I remembered the following circumstance quality In et. Arkhangelsk, Kuban region, about 12 years ago, there lived a very old man, who was over 100 years old. When he first saw a railway train at full speed, he turned around and said: “I was lucky enough to live to see a fiery horse ride across our steppe.” When asked what kind of fiery horse this was, he answered that in the late forties, when the Arkhangelsk Stanpa was just settled, there lived a man who often said that “across this very ridge, where the railway road now passes, a fiery horse will run, and everyone will see it.” “This means he is "There is," the old man pointed at the smoking locomotive in the evening: "Only we couldn't understand what that man was talking about, and we thought about the relative value of 1% that is given in fairy tales. At that time, here and there were wonderful horses across this steppe."
Thus, in the early years, I thought in the carriage, the branch walls of the former Black Sea! and, like the prairies of America, were the breeding ground, if not wild, then, without a doubt, feral horses; in the sixties it was a pastoral country, and now it is an agricultural one, completely washed away the words. In the sixties, the wealth of the Black Sea Cossacks was limited solely by the number of heads of cattle. Ifdny himself, a resident of the village, had a cow, several dozen sheep and, of course, a horse, without which a Cossack was unthinkable. The majority of the poor in terms of wealth had only a few dozen heads of cattle, while the well-to-do considered them to be in the hundreds, and the panhandlers - in the thousands. PShoslfdne welfchildren lived on farmsteads along the ravines, in Razetoyan 5-10 and 15 to keep away from their village and from each other. They, besides the horned yokot, also had flocks of sheep and herds of horses. The number of heads in the herd extended to 5-8 hundred and thousand pieces. Yo villages® Baturineka, for example. belonged to rich “Ipan” farmers: Kukharenko, Kotlyarevem, Borzik, the Pisvun brothers, Dulya, etc. The first two had particularly large herds of horses.
As if now I remember this picture: my father and I went to the farm to Lieutenant Colonel Kotlyarevsky for the horse given to my father. The farm stood on the opposite side of Beisug from the village, 7-8 verts away. The big man's house was located not far from the village. Behind the house there was a “cherry orchard”, behind it stretched a mile and two yards of poplar and willow, even further than the size of a plant.
She's 14 EE
reeds and swamps, the inhabitants of which were, in addition to all kinds of game, martens and foxes, also killing pigs, goats and wolves. In the courtyard, 2-3 hundred steps from the main house and further away, on the hill, there are huge pens for cattle. All the buildings were covered with reeds, the walls of the pens were also made of reeds: there was little wood, there were no bricks or roofing. The master had only the main rooms on wooden floors, the rest had clay floors. The father, according to the custom of that time, brought from the Mogarych village to Vid® a quarter of a bucket of “vodka”, which they drank at dinner, and in the meantime the Kalmyk herdsmen drove a “school” of horses of 150-200 head to the farm. After eating lunch, the gentlemen went out to the horses. Otd was given the right to choose any one. While he was at a loss, the old man - the owner, a descendant of a Zaporozhye Cossack, in a long robe, wide Zaporozhye trousers with a long pipe in his teeth, turned to me;
- And you, schoolboy, chose Yaku-sobi?
I pointed to a young gray horse with white spots.