A Gilyak Village
Some of the houses might contain a half dozen families of ordinary size, and were well adapted to the climate. While we took wood at a Gilyak village I embraced the opportunity to visit the aboriginals. The village contained a dozen dwellings and several fish-houses. The buildings were of logs or poles, split in halves or used whole, and were roofed with poles covered with a thatch of long grass to exclude rain and cold. Some of the dwelling houses had the solid earth for floors, while others had floorings of hewn planks.
The store houses were elevated on posts like those of an American ‘corn barn,’ and were wider and lower than the dwellings. Each storehouse had a platform in front where canoes, fishing nets, and other portable property were stowed. These buildings were the receptacles of dried fish for the winter use of dogs and their owners. The elevation of the floor serves to protect the contents from dogs and wild animals. I was told that no locks were used and that theft was a crime unknown.
The dwellings were generally divided into two apartments; one a sort of ante room and receptacle of house-keeping goods, and the other the place of residence. Pots, kettles, knives, and wooden pans were the principal articles of household use I discovered. At the storehouses there were several fish-baskets of birch or willow twigs. A Gilyak gentleman does not permit fire carried into or out of his house, not even in a pipe. This is not owing to his fear of conflagrations, but to a superstition that such an occurrence may bring him ill luck in hunting or fishing.
It was in the season of curing fish, and the stench that greeted my nostrils was by no means delightful. Visits to dwellings or magazines would have been much easier had I possessed a sponge saturated with cologne water. Fish were in various stages of preparation, some just hung upon poles, while others were nearly ready for the magazine. The manner of preparation is much the same as in Kamchatka, save that the largest fish are skinned before being cut into strips. The poorest qualities go to the dogs, and the best are reserved for bipeds.
Though the natives do the most of the fishing on the Amoor, they do not have a monopoly of it, as some of the Russians indulge in the sport. One old fellow that I saw had a boat so full of salmon, that there was no room for more. Now and then a fish went overboard, causing an expression on the boatman’s face as if he were suffering from a dose of astonishment and toothache drops in equal proportions.
There were dogs everywhere, some lying around loose, and others tied to posts under the storehouses. Some walked about and manifested an unpleasant desire to taste the calves of my legs. All barked, growled, and whined in a chorus like a Pawnee concert. There were big dogs and little dogs, white, black, grey, brown, and yellow dogs, and not one friendly. They did not appear courageous, but I was not altogether certain of their dispositions. Their owners sought to quiet them, but they refused comfort.