The third long northern winter was passed in the little town of Tchingis, near the modern city of Tioumen. The Tartar inhabitants of this place had amassed a considerable store of grain, and possessed besides, flocks of sheep and cattle, so that for the Cossacks the winter passed pleasantly enough. Spring found them descending the swollen Toura (seeking to gain the course of a stream now recognized as the Tobol, whose waters were reported to be navigable) and here Yermak and his followers encoimtered for the first time an army formidable in numbers and equipment. No less than six confederated Tartar chieftains gathering their subject Vogul and Ostiak tribesmen, awaited the coming of the Cossacks in an easily defendable pass. Fortunately the latter were now able to build and launch upon the lower Toura the "long boats" which many of their number had learned to manoeuATe with skill among the rocks and rapids of the Dneiper.
The forces of the enemy, defending every rocky pass and difficult portage, though again and again dispersed, returned with fresh re-enforcements to dispute the way. The more faint-hearted among the Cossacks even began to talk of returning to Russia. But Yermak could now afford to peer at the protests of these malcontents. The intrepid leader at last possessed an unanswerable argument:
pointing out the impossibility of returning against the current of the long rapids that lay behind them. In their dismal councils even the mutineers decided that the only safety lay in pressing forward towards the unknown.*
We now come to an incident in Yermak's voyage made famous by the Russian ballad singers — the telling of which never fails to draw a shout of laughter from their hearers. In the peasant izhas of the North or the Cossack villages of the Ukraine, the cleverly planned ruse invented by the hero Yermak to disengage his men from the ambuscade laid by the Tartars and Voguls is always a favourite incident of folk-history. At a place where the little Cossack army was forced to pass through a long fall of rapids (a point where the Tobol rushes between high narrow banks) the Tartars had raised a barrier of rocks and logs "clamped together with iron chains," meanwhile entrenching themselves on the overhanging cliffs along the shore. With their little flotilla rushing headlong towards this well-laid trap, Yermak and his men learned of its existence in the nick of time. Some urged the leader to abandon the boats — built with so much toil and indispensable for the further success c^ their journey — and by proceeding across counti> to
* Compare the story told by the Russian bylines with the similar adventures recounted in the chronicle of Gonzalo Pizarro and Orellano in their voyage down the Amazon from Quito.
avoid the Tartar entrenchments. But the master-cunning of Yermak was equal to the occasion. By his orders short lengths of logs were cut and set up in the "long boats." These he draped with the tattered uniforms of his followers, while each scarecrow figure, surmounted with a shaggy Cossack ccdpach, was provided with a long sapling to simulate the Cossack pikes. Upon these dummy warriors, steering down upon them during the evening dusk, — each boat guided by one brave volunteer — the Tartar hordes loosed the fury of their bows and arrows. 'What must have been their dismay to find themselves in turn surprised and overwhelmed by a new army — the nearly naked forces of Yermak, who, creeping cautiously through the bushes attacked them fiercely from the flank and rear.*
Soon after this event news was brought to Yermak that near Karatchin, a little towTi not far from the river Ob, a Tartar prince had gathered and hidden a "great treasure" which included, besides a store of native placer gold and precious stones, a part of the spoil captured by the soldiers of Genghis Khan. ( These were treasures, which the soldiers of the great Asiatic conqueror were carrying back with them to Tartarj'', when, as the chroniclers state "they fell into the hands of the even more barbarous Voguls.") Yermak now har-
• Fisher's "Histoire de Siberie," quoted by Lesur, op. cit.j vol. I, page 24>0.
angued his followers concerning the merit to be obtained in recovering from the heathen these sacred vessels of gold and silver robbed from the churches and monasteries of Holy Russia.