Writer G. Snegirev about the flood. Snegirev G.Ya

Gennady Yakovlevich SNEGIREV
Wonderful boat
Stories
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Wonderful boat
Camel mitten
Starling
Guinea pig
Pelican
Doll
Elk
Donkey
Prosha
Uka
Bug
Elephant
Zhulka
Wild animal
Boars
Who plants the forest
Bear
Restless Ponytail
Cedar
Chipmunk
Sly Chipmunk
Crow
Butterfly in the snow
Night bells
Beaver keeper
Beaver lodge
Beaver
In the nature reserve
Blueberry jam
Lake Azas
Top
In the Sayan Mountains
Camel dance
in spring
Forester Tilan
Sea carp
In Lankaran
Aral
Smart porcupine
In Khiva
Little monster
Belek
How a sparrow visited Kamchatka
Teddy bear whaler
Lampanidus
Inhabited island
Octopuses
Octopus
Brave stickleback
Michael
Sailor crustacean
Bear cubs from Kamchatka
For the first time
________________________________________________________________
WONDERFUL BOAT
I was tired of living in the city, and in the spring I went to the village to visit a fisherman I knew, Mikhei. Mikheev's house stood on the very bank of the Severka River.
As soon as it was light, Micah set off on a boat to go fishing. There were huge pikes in Severka. They kept all the fish at bay: they came across roaches straight from the pike’s mouth - the scales on their sides were torn off, as if they had been scratched by a comb.
Every year Micah threatened to go to the city for pike lures, but he just couldn’t get it together.
But one day Micah returned from the river angry, without fish. He silently dragged the boat into the burdocks, told me not to let the neighbor’s kids in, and went to town to get some lures.
I sat by the window and watched a wagtail run around the boat.
Then the wagtail flew away and the neighbor's guys approached the boat: Vitya and his sister Tanya. Vitya examined the boat and began to drag it towards the water. Tanya sucked her finger and looked at Vitya. Vitya shouted at her, and together they pushed the boat into the water.
Then I left the house and said that it was impossible to take the boat.
- Why? - Vitya asked.
I didn't know why.
“Because,” I said, “this boat is wonderful!”
Tanya took her finger out of her mouth.
- Why is she wonderful?
“We’ll only swim to the turn and back,” said Vitya.
It was a long way to the river turn, and while the guys swam back and forth, I kept coming up with something wonderful and surprising. An hour has passed. The guys came back, but I still couldn’t come up with anything.
“Well,” asked Vitya, “what makes it wonderful?” A simple boat, it even ran aground once and is leaking!
- Yes, why is she wonderful? - asked Tanya.
-Didn’t you notice anything? - I said, and I tried to quickly come up with something.
“No, we didn’t notice anything,” Vitya said sarcastically.
- Of course, nothing! - Tanya said angrily.
- So, you didn’t notice anything? - I asked loudly, but I myself wanted to run away from the guys.
Vitya fell silent and began to remember. Tanya wrinkled her nose and also began to remember.
“We saw traces of a heron in the sand,” Tanya said timidly.
“We also saw how it was swimming, only its head was sticking out of the water,” said Vitya.
Then they remembered that the water buckwheat had bloomed, and they also saw a white water lily bud under the water. Vitya told how a flock of fry jumped out of the water to escape the pike. And Tanya caught a big snail, and there was also a small snail sitting on the snail...
- Isn’t all this wonderful? - I asked.
Vitya thought and said:
- Wonderful!
Tanya laughed and shouted:
- How wonderful!
CAMEL MITTEN
My mother knitted me mittens, warm ones, made of sheep’s wool.
One mitten was already ready, but mom only knitted the second one halfway - there wasn’t enough wool for the rest. It’s cold outside, the whole yard is covered with snow, they don’t let me walk without mittens - they’re afraid that I’ll freeze my hands. I’m sitting by the window, watching the tits jumping on the birch tree, quarreling: they probably couldn’t share the bug. Mom said:
- Wait until tomorrow: in the morning I’ll go to Aunt Dasha and ask for wool.
It’s good to say “see you tomorrow” to her when I want to go for a walk today! Uncle Fedya, the watchman, is coming from the yard towards us without mittens. But they don't let me in.
Uncle Fedya came in, shook off the snow with a broom and said:
- Maria Ivanovna, they brought firewood there on camels. Will you take it? Good firewood, birch.
Mom got dressed and went with Uncle Fedya to look at the firewood, and I looked out of the window, I wanted to see the camels when they came out with the firewood.
Firewood was unloaded from one cart, the camel was taken out and tied at the fence. So big and shaggy. The humps are high, like hummocks in a swamp, and hang to one side. The camel's whole face is covered with frost, and he chews something with his lips all the time - probably he wants to spit.
I look at him, and I think: “Mom doesn’t have enough wool for mittens - it would be nice to cut the camel, just a little, so that it doesn’t freeze.”
I quickly put on my coat and felt boots. I found scissors in the chest of drawers, in the top drawer, where all sorts of threads and needles are, and went out into the yard. He approached the camel and stroked its side. The camel does nothing, just glances suspiciously and chews everything.
I climbed onto the shaft, and from the shaft I sat astride between the humps.
The camel turned to see who was fussing around there, but I was scared: he might spit on me or throw me to the ground. It's high!
I slowly took out a pair of scissors and began to trim the front hump, not all of it, but the very top of the head, where there is more hair.
I trimmed a whole pocket and started cutting from the second hump so that the humps were even. And the camel turned to me, stretched out its neck and sniffed the felt boot.
I was very scared: I thought he would bite my leg, but he just licked the felt boot and chewed again.
I straightened the second hump, went down to the ground and ran quickly into the house. I cut off a piece of bread, salted it and took it to the camel because he gave me wool. The camel first licked the salt and then ate the bread.
At this time, my mother came, unloaded the firewood, took out the second camel, untied mine, and everyone left.
My mother started scolding me at home:
- What are you doing? You'll catch a cold without a hat!
I actually forgot to put on my hat. I took the wool out of my pocket and showed it to my mother - a whole bunch, just like sheep's wool, only red.
Mom was surprised when I told her that the camel gave it to me.
Mom spun thread from this wool. It turned out to be a whole ball, it was enough to tie the mitten and there was still some left.
And now I go for walks in new mittens.
The left one is ordinary, and the right one is camel. She is half red, and when I look at her, I remember a camel.
STARLING
I went for a walk in the forest. The forest is quiet, only sometimes you can hear the trees cracking from the frost.
The trees stand and do not move; there is a blanket of snow on the branches. I kicked the tree and a whole snowdrift fell on my head. I began to shake off the snow, and I saw a girl coming. The snow is up to her knees. She rests a little and walks away again, looking up at the trees, looking for something.
- Girl, what are you looking for? - I ask.
The girl shuddered and looked at me:
- Nothing, it’s that simple!
And then she went on. She is small, but her felt boots are big.
I went out onto the path, I didn’t turn off the path into the forest, otherwise my felt boots were full of snow. I walked a little, my feet were cold. Went home.
On the way back I looked - again this girl in front of me along the path was walking quietly and crying. I caught up with her.
“Why,” I say, “are you crying?” Maybe I can help.
She looked at me, wiped away her tears and said:
“Mom was ventilating the room, and Borka, the starling, flew out the window and flew into the forest. Now he will freeze at night!
- Why were you silent before?
“I was afraid,” he says, “that you would catch Borka and take it for yourself.”
The girl and I began to look for Borka. We must hurry: it is already getting dark, and at night the owl will eat Borka. The girl went one way, and I went the other. I inspect every tree, Borka is nowhere to be found. I was about to go back, suddenly I heard a girl shouting: “I found it, I found it!” I run up to her, she stands near the tree and points up:
- Here he is! Freeze, poor thing.
And a starling sits on a branch, feathers fluffed up, and looks at the girl with one eye.
The girl calls him:
- Borya, come to me, good one!
But Borya just pressed himself against the tree and doesn’t want to go. Then I climbed the tree to catch him.
He just reached the starling and wanted to grab it, but the starling flew over to the girl’s shoulder. She was delighted and hid it under her coat.
“Otherwise,” he says, “by the time I get it home, it’ll freeze.”
We went home. It had already become dark, the lights were lit in the houses. I ask the girl:
- How long has the starling lived with you?
- For a long time.
And she walks quickly, afraid that the starling under her coat will freeze. I follow the girl, trying to keep up.
We arrived at her house, the girl said goodbye to me.
“Goodbye,” she just told me.
I looked at her for a long time while she was clearing the snow from her felt boots on the porch, still waiting for the girl to tell me something else. And the girl left and locked the door behind her.
GUINEA PIG
There is a fence behind our garden. I didn’t know who lived there before. I just recently found out. I was catching grasshoppers in the grass, and I saw an eye looking at me from a hole in the fence.
- Who are you? - I ask.
But the eye is silent and keeps watching, spying on me. He looked and looked and then said:
- And I have a guinea pig!
It became interesting to me: I know a simple pig, but I’ve never seen a guinea pig.
“My hedgehog,” I say, “was alive.” Why a guinea pig?
“I don’t know,” he says. - She probably lived in the sea before. I put her in the trough, but she was afraid of water, broke free and ran under the table!
I wanted to see a guinea pig.
“What,” I say, “is your name?”
- Seryozha. How are you?
We became friends with him. Seryozha ran after the guinea pig, I looked through the hole behind him. He was gone for a long time. Seryozha came out of the house, carrying some kind of red rat in his hands.
“Here,” he says, “she didn’t want to go, she’ll have children soon: and she doesn’t like to have her stomach touched, she growls!”
-Where is her little spot?
Seryozha was surprised:
- What spot?
- Which one? All pigs have a spot on their nose!
- No, when we bought her, she didn’t have a patch.
I began to ask Seryozha what he feeds the guinea pig.
“She,” she says, “loves carrots, but also drinks milk.”
Before Seryozha had time to tell me everything, he was called home.
The next day I walked near the fence and looked through the hole: I thought Seryozha would come out and take out the pig. But he never came out. The rain was dripping, and my mother probably didn’t let it in. I started walking around the garden and saw something red lying in the grass under a tree.
I came closer, and this was Seryozha’s guinea pig. I was happy, but I don’t understand how she got into our garden. I began to examine the fence, and there was a hole at the bottom. The pig must have crawled through this hole. I took her in my hands, she doesn’t bite, she just sniffs her fingers and sighs. All wet. I brought the pig home. I looked and looked for carrots, but I couldn’t find them. I gave her a cabbage stalk, she ate the stalk and fell asleep under the bed on the rug.
I sit on the floor, look at her and think:
“What if Seryozha finds out who the pig lives with? No, he won’t find out: I won’t take it out into the street!”
I went out onto the porch and heard a car rumble somewhere nearby. I walked up to the fence, looked through the hole, and there was a truck standing in Seryozha’s yard, things were being loaded onto it. Seryozha is rummaging around with a stick under the porch - probably looking for a guinea pig. Seryozha’s mother put pillows in the car and said:
- Seryozha! Hurry up, put on your coat, let's go now!
Seryozha cried:
- No, I won’t go until I find the pig! She will have children soon, she must have hidden under the house!
I felt sorry for Seryozha, I called him to the fence.
“Seryozha,” I say, “who are you looking for?”
- My pig is gone, and now I have to leave!
I tell him:
- I have your pig, she ran into our garden. I'll bring it to you now.
“Oh,” he says, “how good!” And I was thinking: where did she go?
I brought him a pig and slipped it under the fence.
Seryozha’s mother is calling, the car is already humming.
Seryozha grabbed the pig and said to me:
- You know? I will definitely give you a little pig when she gives birth to children. Goodbye!
Seryozha got into the car, his mother covered him with a raincoat, because the rain began to fall.
Seryozha also covered the pig with a cloak. As the car drove away, Seryozha waved his hand at me and shouted something I couldn’t understand - probably about a pig.
PELICAN
When I was very little, my mother and I went to the zoo. Mom bought me a bun.
“You will,” he says, “feed the animals.”
I pinched off pieces from the bun and gave them to all the animals.
The camel ate his piece, sighed and licked my palm - apparently he wasn’t full; but I didn’t give him any more: then the other animals wouldn’t have enough.
I threw a piece to the bear, but he lies in the corner and doesn’t notice the bun. I shout to him:
- Bear, eat!
And he turned over on the other side, as if he couldn’t hear.
I gave the entire bun to the animals, only one crust remained.
Mom says:
- Let's go home, the animals are already tired and want to sleep.
We went to the exit.
“Mom,” I say, “there’s still some pink salmon left, we need to give it to the pelicans.”
And pelicans live on the lake.
Mom says:
- Well, run quickly, I’ll wait for you here.
I ran to the pelicans, and they were already sleeping. They crowded together on the shore and hid their heads under their wings.
Only one pelican does not sleep, stands near a tree and washes itself before going to bed: it cleans its feathers. The beak is large, and the eyes are small and cunning.
I pushed his hump through the bars.
“Hurry,” I shout, “eat, otherwise my mother is waiting for me!”
The pelican stopped washing himself, looked at the humpback, slowly came up to me and pecked me!
Before I had time to pull my hand away, he grabbed it along with the hump.
I screamed, and he released his hand, lifted his beak up and swallowed the hump.
I looked at my hand, and there was a scratch on it. This pelican scratched his hand and wanted to swallow it along with the hump.
- Why are you standing there, go quickly! - Mom calls me.
And the pelican hid behind a tree.
Mom asks me:
- Did you give the bun to the pelican?
“I gave it away,” I say.
- What do you keep in your pocket?
- Nothing, never mind.
And I hid my scratched hand in my pocket so that my mother wouldn’t see.
We came home. My mother never noticed that the pelican bit me, and I don’t tell my mother about it - I’m afraid that what if she scolds the pelican so that it doesn’t bite in vain.
DOLL
One day I was walking in the forest. It was quiet, only a woodpecker was pecking at a tree somewhere far away and tits were squeaking. And the grass and branches on the trees were white with frost. The water in the river was black. I stood on the shore, watched the white snowflakes melt in the black water, and thought: “Where are the fish now? And the bat? And the butterflies? The fish are sitting in holes at the bottom. The bat is sleeping somewhere in a hollow. And the butterflies “They can’t sleep in winter: they’re small and tender, and they’ll immediately freeze.” And I began to look for butterflies. Let them not be alive, but those who died from the cold. And he looked in the grass. And I dug up a mouse hole and found a beetle wing there. And I looked under the hummock. There are no dead butterflies anywhere.
Under the pine trees, in the moss, there remained a mushroom, all wrinkled. I started digging it up and in the ground I found a brown pupa, like a twig. Only she doesn't look like a bitch. She looks like a butterfly without wings, without legs and is solid.
At home I showed the doll to my father. He asked where I found it. I said under the pine tree.
“This is a pine silkworm pupa,” said the father.
I asked:
- Is she completely dead?
- No, not at all. She was alive, now she’s dead, and in the spring... you’ll see.
I was very surprised: “She was alive, now she’s dead, and in the spring... Do the dead come to life?”
I put the doll in a matchbox, and hid the box under the bed and forgot about it.
In the spring, when the snow melted and the forest became green, I woke up in the morning and heard someone rustling under the bed. I thought: a mouse. I looked under the bed, there was no mouse there, only a matchbox lying around. Someone rustles and rustles in the box. I opened the box. A butterfly, golden like pine scales, flew out of it. I didn't even have time to catch her. I didn't understand where she was coming from. After all, there was a dead doll in the box, hard as a twig.
The butterfly flew out the window and flew to the pine trees on the river bank. Birds were singing in the forest, there was a smell of grass, a rooster was crowing, and I looked at the empty matchbox and thought: “She was dead, dead!”
ELK
In the spring I was at the zoo. The peacocks were screaming. The watchman drove the hippopotamus into his house with a broom. The bear was begging for pieces on its hind legs. The elephant stamped his foot. The camel moulted and, they say, even spat at one girl, but I didn’t see it.
I was about to leave when I noticed a moose.
He stood motionless on the hill, far from the bars. The trees were black and wet. The leaves on these trees have not yet blossomed. The elk among the black trees, on long legs, was so strange and beautiful.
And I wanted to see a moose in the wild. I knew that moose can only be found in the forest. The next day I went out of town.
The train stopped at a small station. There was a path behind the switchman's booth. It led straight into the forest. It was wet in the forest, but the leaves on the trees had already blossomed. Grass grew on the hillocks.
I walked along the path very quietly. It seemed to me that the elk was somewhere close, and I was afraid.
And suddenly in the silence I heard: shadow-shadow-shadow, ping-ping-shadow...
Yes, these are not drops at all; A small bird sat on a birch tree and sang as loudly as water falling on a piece of ice. The bird saw me and flew away, I didn’t even have time to see it.
I was very sorry that I scared her away, but somewhere far away in the forest she started singing and shading again.
I sat down on a stump and began to listen to her. There was a forest puddle near the stump. The sun illuminated it, and one could see some kind of spider with a silver belly swarming at the bottom. And as soon as I looked carefully at the spider, suddenly the water strider beetle, on its thin legs, as if on ice skates, quickly slid across the water. He caught up with another water strider, and they galloped away from me together. And the spider rose up, took in air on its furry belly and slowly sank to the bottom. There he had a bell tied to a blade of grass with a web. The spider grabbed the air from its abdomen with its paws under the bell. The bell swayed, but the web held it, and I saw a balloon in it. This silver spider has such a house under water, and the spiderlings live there, so he brings air to them. Not a single bird can reach them.
And then I heard someone fiddling and rustling behind the stump on which I was sitting. I quietly looked in that direction with one eye. I see a mouse with a yellow neck sitting and picking dry moss from a stump. She grabbed a piece of moss and ran away. She will lay moss in the mice's holes. The ground is still damp.
Behind the forest the locomotive began to whistle, it was time to go home. And I’m tired of sitting quietly and not moving.
When I approached the station, I suddenly remembered: I never saw a moose!
Well, let it be, but I saw a silverback spider, a yellow-throated mouse, and a water strider, and I heard a chiffchaff sing. Aren't they as interesting as moose?
DONKEY
Even as a child, I read in some book that the guys had their own donkey. They fed him themselves and rode him wherever they wanted. And since then I only dreamed of my donkey, I even saved money to buy it.
When friends came to us, drank tea and talked with my mother about their adult affairs, I always asked: how much does a donkey cost, what is he fed, can he live with us in Moscow, what if he doesn’t like the snow? Everyone laughed, and my mother put me to bed early.
Now I have become big and recently traveled to Tajikistan. I lived in a village. The owner where I stayed had a donkey, gray and small. The donkey stood near the barn and swished flies with its tail.
I really wanted to ride him. The owner allowed me:
- Drive as much as you want, just take a stick.
I didn’t take the stick and regretted it. The donkey stopped all the time, roared and did not go any further. I begged him and pushed him from behind, but he still stands in one place. And then suddenly he ran quickly, I grabbed his mane tightly.
He took me to the middle of the stream and stopped. The water in the stream is icy, it’s far from the shore, and then I regretted that I didn’t have a stick.
I no longer called him a donkey, but scolded him randomly. It’s good that the owner got tired of waiting for me. He came to the stream, broke the rod, and we drove back quickly. The owner laughed at me. I didn’t know at all that the donkey was so stubborn. After all, in the book they talked about an obedient donkey, and it was a long-eared, stubborn donkey, not at all the one for which I saved money as a child.
ASK
One boy, his name was Prosha, did not like going to kindergarten. Mom takes him to kindergarten in the morning, and Prosha asks:
- Why are you leading me?
Mom says:
- Because you alone will get lost!
- No, I won’t get lost!
- No, you'll get lost!
Prosha argued with his mother every day. One morning his mother says to him:
- Go to kindergarten alone!
Prosha was happy and went alone, without his mother. And mom walked along the other side of the street and looked - where would he go? Prosha did not see his mother. He walked a little along the street, stopped and began to look out the window. He loved to look into other people's windows.
There was a dog sitting in this window. She saw Please and began to bark. And Prosha was not at all afraid of the dog. True, he was afraid, but only a little: he knew that the dog was behind the glass!
Prosha became more and more brave. First he stuck out his tongue at the dog, and then began throwing pebbles. The dog was angry with him. She wanted to bite him, but the glass wouldn’t let her in. Someone called the dog. She wagged her tail and jumped into the room.
Prosha still stood at the window and waited. And suddenly he sees: the door opens, this dog comes out and with it is a girl. She took her out on a chain for a walk.
Prosha wanted to run, but his legs couldn’t move from fear. I wanted to scream, but I can’t either!
And the dog saw Please and how he growled, he bared his teeth!
The girl holds the dog with all her might and shouts to Proshe:
- Run! Run!
Prosha covered his face with his hands and began to roar:
- I won’t do it again! I won't tease!
Then Prosha’s mother ran up, took him in her arms, and they quickly went to kindergarten.
UKA
I went to the swamp to pick cranberries. I’ve collected half a basket, and the sun is already low: it’s peeking out from behind the forest, about to disappear.
My back was a little tired, I straightened up, and I saw a heron fly by. Probably to sleep. She has been living in the swamp for a long time, I always see her when she flies by.
The sun has already set, but it is still light, the sky in that place is red-red. It’s quiet all around, only someone shouts in the reeds, not very loudly, but you can hear it far away: “Uk!” He waits a little and again: “Uk!”
Who is this? I had heard this scream before, but I didn’t pay attention. And now I somehow became curious: maybe it’s a heron that screams like that?
I began to walk around this place where the scream was heard. It's really close and screaming, but no one is there. It will be dark soon. Time to go home. I only walked a little - and suddenly the screaming stopped, I couldn’t hear it anymore.
“Aha,” I think, “that means it’s here!” I hid, stood quietly, so as not to frighten off. He stood for a long time, finally on a hummock, very close, and responded: “Uk!” - and again silence.
I sat down to take a better look, and I saw that the frog was sitting and not moving. She's so small, but she screams so loud!
I caught her, hold her in my hand, but she doesn’t even break free. Its back is gray, and its belly is red-red, like the sky above the forest where the sun has set. I put it in my pocket, took the basket of cranberries and went home. The lights were turned on in our windows. They probably sat down to dinner.
I came home and my grandfather asked me:
-Where did you go?
- I was catching a bite.
He does not understand.
“What kind of scolding is this,” he says?
I reached into my pocket to show it, but the pocket was empty, only a little wet. “Ugh,” I think, “a nasty bug! I wanted to show it to my grandfather, but she ran away!”
“Grandfather,” I say, “well, you know, she’s like that - she’s always screaming in the swamp in the evening, with a red belly.”
Grandpa doesn't understand.
“Sit down,” he says, “eat and go to bed, we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”
I got up in the morning and walked around all day, thinking about the bug: did she return to the swamp or not?
In the evening I went again to the same place where I caught the duck. He stood there for a long time, listening to everything to see if he would scream.
Finally, quietly: “Uk!” - she shouted somewhere behind her and started screaming again. I looked for it and looked for it, but never found it. If you come closer, it’s silent. If you move away, it starts again. She probably hid under a mound.
I got tired of looking for her, so I went home.
But now I know who is hooting so loudly in the swamp in the evening. This is not a heron, but a small duck with a red belly.
BUG
I have a sister, Galya, she is a year younger than me, and such a crybaby, I definitely have to give up everything to her. Mom will give me something tasty, Galya will eat hers and ask me for more. If you don't give it, he starts to roar. She only thought about herself, but I weaned her off that.
One day I went for water. Mom was at work, I had to fetch some water myself. I scooped up half a bucket. It was slippery around the well, the whole ground was frozen, I could barely drag the bucket home. I put it on the bench, I looked, and there was a swimming beetle swimming in it, a big one, with furry legs. I took the bucket into the yard, poured the water into a snowdrift, and caught the beetle and put it in a jar of water. The beetle is spinning around in the jar and can’t get used to it.
I went to get water again, brought clean water, but this time I didn’t find anything. I undressed and wanted to look at the beetle, but there was no can on the window.
I ask Galya:
- Galya, did you take the beetle?
“Yes,” he says, “I, let him live in my room.”
“Why,” I say, “in yours, let there be a common beetle!”
I take a jar from her room and put it on the window: I also want to look at the beetle.
Galya cried and said:
- I’ll tell mom everything about how you took the beetle from me!
She ran to the window, grabbed the can, even spilled the water on the floor and put it back in her room.
I got angry.
“No,” I say, “my bug, I caught it!” - I took it and put the can back on the window.
As soon as Galya began to roar, she began to get dressed.
“I,” he says, “will go to the steppe and freeze there because of you.”
“Well,” I think, “let it go!” It’s always like this: if you don’t give me something, you immediately start to worry that you’ll freeze in the steppe.
She slammed the door and left. I look from the window to see what she will do, and she goes straight into the steppe, only quietly, waiting for me to run after her. “No,” I think, “you can’t wait, that’s enough, I ran after you!”
She’s walking, the snow is up to her knees, and she’s holding her face with her hands: she’s roaring, that means. He goes further and further from home into the steppe. “What, I think, will it really freeze?” I felt sorry for her. “Maybe I should go after her and return her? And I don’t need the beetle, let him take it for good. Only he’ll always make a roar again. No, I’d better wait, come what may!”
Galya has gone far, only a small dot is visible. I wanted to get dressed and go after her - I saw that the dot was getting bigger: she was coming back. She walked up to the house, kept her hands in her pockets, and looked at her feet. She’s afraid to raise her eyes: she knows that I’m looking at her from the window.
I came home, undressed silently and went to my room. She sat there for a long time, and then went to the window and said:
- What a good bug, you need to feed it!
We began to look after the beetle together.
When my mother came home from work, Galya didn’t tell her anything, and neither did I.
ELEPHANT
In April, Tanya and her mother went to the zoo.
Wild geese and swans swam in the pond. And one duck - a mandarin duck, yellow as a tangerine peel - came up to the grill and quacked. She asked Tanya for a piece of bread.
A jackal was running in another cage. He was shedding, and his red fur hung in clumps. The jackal looked like a simple mongrel and a little like a fox.
Tanya liked the shaggy yaks most of all. Their fur dragged along the ground like a brush; There is a hump on their back, they chew hay and look at everyone angrily.
In the next cage, a peacock spread its tail. Some boy stuck his hand in and wanted to snatch a feather from the peacock’s tail. The peacock screamed, folded his tail and ran to his house. Everyone laughed, and one old man said to the boy:
- If everyone tears the feathers of a peacock...
There was no one in the cage where the beavers live. Tanya stood for a long time, waiting, maybe the beaver would come out of the hole, but she never did. Beavers do not come out during the day.
And in one cage it was completely dark. Tanya thought that there was no one there, she took a closer look - two yellow eyes were burning in the darkness. It was an owl.
Tanya got scared, and she and her mother quickly went to the elephant.
The elephant lived in a large house with steps, it was hot, dark inside and smelled like a barn where cows live.
The elephant was having lunch. The watchman piled a whole heap of hay on him and brought him a bucket of carrots. The elephant carefully sniffed the carrot with its trunk and put it into its mouth. First he ate all the carrots, and then started eating the hay.
The watchman began to sweep away the remains of the hay, and the elephant pressed him against the wall. He asked him for carrots.
- Well, well, don't spoil! - the watchman shouted and hit the elephant with a broom.
The elephant curled up its trunk and walked away.
Tanya was returning home with her mother.
- Why is the elephant not allowed into the kindergarten? He wants to take a walk in the sun.
- The elephant is old, and there are cold puddles in the garden. “He’ll get his feet wet and catch a cold,” Mom said.
- What about the yaks?
- Yaks live high in the snowy mountains, they are accustomed to the cold. And the elephant was born in India, where it is always warm.
Tanya went to the window every morning and looked to see if there were still puddles in the yard.
And one day in May, when green leaves bloomed on the black trees, the ground dried up and a nettle butterfly flew into the yard, Tanya shouted:
- Mom, mom, the elephant is already walking!
SCAM
There is sand around the station, and pine trees grow on the sand. The road here turns sharply to the north, and the locomotive always unexpectedly flies out from behind the hills.
Lubricants on duty are waiting for the train.
But the dog Zhulka comes out to meet him first. She sits on the sand and listens. The rails begin to hum, then tap. Zhulka runs to the side. The duty officer looks at Zhulka. He coughs and adjusts his red cap. The greasers clink the lids of their oil cans.
If the train comes from the north, Zhulka hides: people go on vacation on northern trains. The sailors jump out of the carriages with loud laughter and try to drag Zhulka to them. Zhulka is uncomfortable: she wags her tail, presses her ears and growls quietly.
Zhulka really wants to eat. There is chewing all around and it smells delicious. Zhulka is worried - the locomotive has already started humming, but she hasn’t been given anything yet. Often Zhulka was taken so far that she spent the whole day running home.
She ran past the houses where the switchmen live. They waved their flags goodbye to her. Then a big black dog chased her. In the forest, a girl was herding a goat and two kids. The kids were playing on the rails and did not obey the girl. After all, they can be crushed. The crook showed her teeth to them and growled, and the stupid goat wanted to butt her.
But the worst thing was running across the bridge. In the middle stood a soldier with a gun. He was guarding the bridge. Zhulka came closer to the soldier and began to suck up: she tucked her tail and crawled up to him on her belly. The soldier angrily stamped his foot on her. And Zhulka ran to her station without looking back.
“No,” she thought, “I’ll never go near the train again.”
But soon Zhulka forgot all this and began begging again.
One day she was taken very far, and she did not return back.
WILD ANIMAL
Vera had a baby squirrel. His name was Ryzhik. He ran around the room, climbed onto the lampshade, sniffed the plates on the table, climbed up the back, sat on the shoulder and unclenched Vera’s fist with his claws - looking for nuts.
Ryzhik was tame and obedient.
But one day, on New Year’s Day, Vera hung toys, nuts, and candies on the tree, and as soon as she left the room, she wanted to bring candles, Ryzhik jumped onto the tree, grabbed a nut, and hid it in his galoshes. I put the second nut under the pillow. The third nut was immediately chewed...
Vera entered the room, and there was not a single nut on the tree, only silver pieces of paper were lying on the floor.
She shouted at Ryzhik:
- What have you done, you are not a wild animal, but a domesticated, tame one!
Ryzhik no longer ran around the table, did not roll on the door, and did not unclench Vera’s fist. He stocked up from morning to evening. If he sees a piece of bread, he’ll grab it, if he sees the seeds, he’ll stuff his cheeks full, and he’ll hide everything.
Ryzhik also put sunflower seeds in the guests’ pockets in reserve.
Nobody knew why Ryzhik was stocking up.
And then my father’s acquaintance came from the Siberian taiga and said that pine nuts did not grow in the taiga, and the birds flew away over the mountain ranges, and the squirrels gathered in countless flocks and followed the birds, and even hungry bears did not lie down in dens for the winter.
Vera looked at Ryzhik and said:
- You are not a tame animal, but a wild one!
It’s just not clear how Ryzhik found out that there was famine in the taiga.
BOARS
The potatoes are ripe in our garden. And every night, wild boars - wild pigs - began to come to our hut from the forest.
As soon as it got dark, my father put on a padded jacket and went to the garden with a frying pan.
He hit the frying pan and scared the wild boars.
But the wild boars were very cunning: dad rattled a frying pan at one end of the garden, and the wild boars ran to the other side and there they ate our potatoes. Yes, they will not so much eat as they will trample, crush into the ground.
The father was very angry. He took a gun from one hunter and glued a strip of white paper to the barrel. This is so that at night you can see where to shoot. But the wild boars didn’t come to our garden at all that night. But the next day they ate even more potatoes.
“Yes,” said the father, “if this continues, in winter we will have to sit without potatoes!”
Then I also began to think about how to drive away the wild boars.
We have a cat, Murka, and I showed the guys different tricks with her.
Take and soak one piece of meat with valerian and the other with kerosene. Which smells like valerian, Murka will immediately eat, but from the kerosene she ran into the yard. The guys were very surprised. And I told the guys that the second piece was enchanted.
And so I decided to drive away the wild boars with kerosene too.
In the evening, I poured kerosene into a watering can and began walking around the garden with the watering can, watering the ground with kerosene. It turned out to be a kerosene path.
That night I didn’t sleep, I kept waiting for them to come. But the boars did not come that night or the next day. They were completely scared. No matter where you approach the potatoes, there is a smell of kerosene everywhere.
I learned from the tracks how the wild boars immediately rushed into the forest - they chickened out. I told my father that our potatoes are now enchanted. And he talked about kerosene. My father laughed because wild boars are not afraid of guns, but they were afraid of kerosene.
WHO PLANTS FORESTS
There were only fir trees across the river. But then oak trees appeared among the fir trees. They are still very small, only three leaves stick out from the ground.
And oak trees grow far from here. But the acorns couldn’t have flown in with the wind? They are very heavy. So someone is planting them here.
Who?
It took me a long time to guess.
One day in the fall I was walking from hunting, and I saw a jay fly low and low past me.
I hid behind a tree and began to spy on her. The jay hid something under a rotten stump and looked around: did anyone see it? And then she flew to the river.
I approached the stump, and between the roots in the hole lay two acorns: the jay hid them for the winter.
So this is where the young oak trees came from among the fir trees!
A jay will hide an acorn, and then forget where it hid it, and it will sprout.
BEAR
In the fall, I was picking lingonberries in the taiga and came across moss, which for some reason was growing with its roots upward. Someone brought in some fresh soil and planted it like this.
“Who is it,” I think, “that planted the moss?”
I see a hole has been dug under a fallen pine tree and many traces have been found around, as if a barefoot man was walking, only with claws.
I was very scared: after all, it was a bear that had raked the earth out of the den and covered it with moss, he wanted to hide the earth so that the den would not be found. I quickly ran to my grandfather and told him everything.
Grandfather was happy:
- This bear came running here when the taiga across the river was burning.
My grandfather told me to stay at home, while he took a gun and went to the village to gather people. I've been waiting for him for a long time. It became dark. “What,” I think, “if a bear killed my grandfather?”
I'm scared and sorry for my grandfather. I wanted to get dressed and look for him. I heard a cart come into the yard and stop.
Grandfather came in and hung the gun on the wall.
“Well,” he says, “go see the bear!”
I went out into the yard and saw a dead bear lying on a cart. Big, head hung down, teeth bared.
The hunters threw him to the ground, the horse snorted and wanted to run away, but they only restrained him. I touched the bear’s fangs, they were all yellow.
Grandfather tells me:
- The old bear, however, made a mistake, confused the roots with the tops, and so he got caught!
RESTLESS TAIL
I found a forest tent. The old spruce branches were woven together, and below there was a soft litter of yellow needles. It is dark and stuffy, and smells of resin.
A squirrel once dined here. She left behind a whole heap of plucked cones.
I began to stir up the cones. I look, there is a lump of red fur lying there. The squirrel was probably eaten by a marten, and only the tip of the squirrel's tail is lying around.
A silvery spider wrapped a web around it and made a nook for itself out of squirrel fur.
I touched the spider with my finger. He got scared, quickly climbed up and swung on the cobweb.
I picked up the tail and stuck it in the empty cartridge case. It all fit in there.
At home, when I was sorting out the cartridges, I took out the tail and put it on my table.
This tail turned out to be restless: when I look at it, I am drawn to wander again, looking for forest tents!
CEDAR
As a child, I was given a pine cone.
I loved to pick it up and look at it, and I was always amazed at how big and heavy it was - a real chest of nuts.
Many years later I came to the Sayan Mountains and immediately found cedar.
It grows high in the mountains, the winds tilt it to one side, trying to bend it to the ground, twist it.
And the cedar clings to the ground with its roots and stretches higher and higher, all shaggy with green branches.
At the ends of the branches there are cedar cones hanging: in some places there are three, in others there are five at once. The nuts are not yet ripe, but many animals and birds live around.
The cedar feeds them all, so they wait for the nuts to ripen.
The squirrel will knock the pine cone to the ground, take out the nuts, but not all of them - just one will remain. This nut will drag a mouse into its hole. She doesn’t know how to climb trees, but she also wants nuts.
The tits jump on the cedar all day long. If you listen from afar, the whole cedar is chirping.
In autumn, even more animals and birds live on the cedar tree: nutcrackers and chipmunks sit on the branches. In winter they are hungry, so they hide pine nuts under stones and bury them in the ground as a reserve.
When the first snowflakes begin to fall from the sky, there will be no cones left on the cedar tree.
But the cedar doesn’t mind. It stands all alive and stretches its green branches higher and higher towards the sun.
CHIPMUNK
Forest animals and birds are very fond of pine nuts and store them for the winter.
The chipmunk is especially trying. This is an animal like a squirrel, only smaller, and has five black stripes on its back.
When I first saw him, I couldn’t make out at first who it was sitting on the cedar cone - such a striped mattress! The cone sways in the wind, but the chipmunk is not afraid, just know that it is shelling the nuts.
He doesn’t have pockets, so he’s stuffed his cheeks with nuts and is going to drag them into the hole.
He saw me, cursed, muttered something: go on your way, don’t bother me, it’s a long winter, you can’t stock up now - you’ll end up hungry!
I don’t leave, I think: “I’ll wait until he carries the nuts and find out where he lives.” But the chipmunk doesn’t want to show his holes, he sits on a branch, folds his paws on his stomach and waits for me to leave.
I walked away - the chipmunk descended to the ground and disappeared, I didn’t even notice where he had disappeared to.
It was the bear who taught the chipmunk to be careful: he would come, dig up the chipmunk’s hole and eat all the nuts. The chipmunk doesn’t show his hole to anyone.
Cunning Chipmunk
I built myself a tent in the taiga. This is not a house or a forest hut, but simply long sticks folded together. There is bark on the sticks, and logs on the bark so that pieces of bark are not blown away by the wind.
I began to notice that someone was leaving pine nuts in the tent.
I couldn’t guess who was eating nuts in my chum without me. It even became scary.
But then one day a cold wind blew, drove up the clouds, and during the day it became completely dark.
I quickly climbed into the tent, but my place was already taken.
A chipmunk sits in the darkest corner. A chipmunk has a sack of nuts behind each cheek.
Thick cheeks, slitted eyes. He looks at me, afraid to spit out the nuts on the ground: he thinks that I will steal them.
The chipmunk endured it, endured it, and spat out all the nuts. And immediately his cheeks became thinner.
I counted seventeen nuts on the ground. The chipmunk was afraid at first, but then he saw that I was sitting calmly and began to stuff nuts into the cracks and under the logs.
When the chipmunk ran away, I looked - nuts were stuffed everywhere, large, yellow. Apparently, the chipmunk has built a storage room in my tent.
How cunning this chipmunk is! In the forest, squirrels and jays will steal all his nuts. And the chipmunk knows that not a single thieving jay will get into my tent, so he brought his supplies to me. And I was no longer surprised if I found nuts in the plague. I knew that a cunning chipmunk lived with me.
CROW
In spring there is snow in the mountains, and edelweiss blossoms, and the blue feather of a jay flickers in the green cedars. And the sun shines brighter here than down in the valley.
A black raven silently flies around the mountains. The sound of its wings can be heard far away; even a mountain stream cannot drown them out. A raven flies slowly from one peak to another: is there a sick little hare somewhere? Or maybe the little chicken has fallen behind its mother?
A little hare hid in the grass, a little chicken pressed itself even tighter to the ground. Everyone is afraid of the raven, even the deer flinches from its croaking and looks around anxiously.
The raven returns empty-handed: he is very old. He sits on a rock and warms his sore wing. The raven froze him off a hundred years ago, maybe two hundred years ago. It's spring all around, and he's all alone.
BUTTERFLY IN THE SNOW
When I left the hut, I loaded the gun with small shot. I thought if I met a hazel grouse, I’d shoot it for lunch.
I walk quietly, trying so that the snow under my felt boots doesn’t creak. Around the tree they are covered with shaggy frost, like a beard.
I went out into the clearing and saw something black under the tree ahead.
I came closer - and this was a brown butterfly sitting on the snow.
There are snowdrifts all around, the frost is crackling - and suddenly a butterfly!
I hung the gun on my shoulder, took off my hat and began to approach even closer, I wanted to cover it with my hat.
And then the snow exploded under my feet - flutter-flutter! - and three hazel grouse flew out.
While I was taking off the gun, they disappeared into the fir trees. All that was left of the hazel grouse were holes in the snow.
I walked around the forest, looked, but now you’ll find them.
They were hiding on the Christmas trees, sitting and laughing at me.
How did I mistake a hazel grouse for a butterfly?
It was this hazel grouse that poked its head out from under the snow to spy on me.
Next time I won’t catch butterflies in winter.
NIGHT BELLS
I really wanted to see the deer: to see how it eats grass, how it stands motionless and listens to the silence of the forest.
One day I approached a doe with a fawn, but they sensed me and ran away into the red autumn grasses. I recognized this from the tracks: the tracks in the swamp were filling with water before my eyes. I heard deer trumpeting at night. Somewhere far away a deer will trumpet, but it echoes along the river, and it seems very close.
Finally, in the mountains I came across a deer trail. The deer trampled it to a lonely cedar. The ground near the cedar was salty, and deer came at night to lick the salt.
I hid behind a rock and waited. At night the moon was shining and there was frost. I dozed off.
I woke up from a quiet ringing. It was as if glass bells were ringing. A deer walked past me along the path. I never got a good look at the deer, I only heard how the ground rang under his hooves with every step.
Overnight, thin ice stalks grew from the frost. They grew straight from the ground. The deer smashed them with his hooves, and they rang like glass bells.
When the sun rose, the ice stalks melted.
BEAVER WATCHMAN
In winter, when the water was frozen, I found a beaver hut on a forest river. It was covered with snow.
It stands like a big snowdrift. At the very top the snow has melted, and there is a veiny air coming from the vent. There are many wolf tracks around.
Apparently, the wolves came and sniffed, but left with nothing. And they scratched the hut with their claws, they wanted to catch beavers.
But how can you get to the beavers: the hut is covered in mud, and the mud has turned to stone in the cold.
In the spring I was wandering around with a gun and decided to look at the beavers. When I got to the hut, the sun was already low. Near the hut the river is blocked by various sticks and branches - a real dam. And a whole lake filled with water.
I quietly approached closer to see the beavers when they swim out at the evening dawn, but that was not the case - a small wren bird jumped out of the brushwood, lifted its tail up and chirped: “Tick-tick-tick-tick!”
I approached from the other side - a wren jumped over there, chirping again, disturbing the beavers.
If you come closer, he ducks into the branches and somewhere inside he screams and strains himself.
The beavers heard his cry and swam away, only a path of bubbles followed along the water.
So I didn’t see any beavers. And all because of the wren. He built a nest for himself in a beaver hut and lives with the beavers as a watchman: if he notices an enemy, he begins to scream and scare the beavers.
BEAVER HUT
A hunter I knew came to see me.
“Come on,” he says, “I’ll show you the hut.” A beaver family lived in it, but now the hut is empty.
I've been told about beavers before. I wanted to take a better look at this hut.
The hunter took his gun and went. I'm behind him.
We walked for a long time through the swamp, then made our way through the bushes.
Finally we came to the river. On the shore there is a hut, like a haystack, only made of branches, tall, taller than a man.
“Do you want,” asks the hunter, “to climb into the hut?”
“But how,” I say, “can you fit into it if the entrance is under water?”
We began to break it apart from above - it did not give in: it was all coated with clay.
They barely made a hole.
I climbed into the hut, sat bent over, the ceiling was low, twigs were sticking out everywhere, and it was dark.
I felt something with my hands, it turned out to be wood shavings. The beavers made their bedding from the shavings. Apparently I ended up in the bedroom.
I climbed lower - there were twigs there. The beavers gnawed the bark off them, and the branches were all white. This is their dining room, and on the side, lower, there is another floor, and a hole goes down. Water splashes in the hole.
On this floor the floor is earthen and smooth. Here the beavers have a canopy.
A beaver climbs into a hut, and water flows from it into three streams.
The beaver in the canopy wrings out all the fur dry, combs it with its paw, and only then goes to the dining room.
Then the hunter called me.
I crawled out and shook myself off the ground.
“Well,” I say, “and the hut!” I would like to stay alive myself, but I don’t have enough stove!
BEAVER
In the spring, the snow quickly melted, the water rose and flooded the beaver's hut.
The beavers dragged the beaver cubs onto dry leaves, but the water rose even higher, and the beaver cubs had to swim away in different directions.
The smallest beaver was exhausted and began to drown.
I noticed him and pulled him out of the water. I thought it was a water rat, and then I saw the tail with a spatula, and I guessed that it was a beaver.
At home, he spent a long time cleaning and drying himself, then he found a broom behind the stove, sat down on his hind legs, took a twig from the broom with his front legs and began to gnaw on it.
After eating, the beaver collected all the sticks and leaves, tucked it under itself and fell asleep.
I listened to the little beaver snoring in his sleep. “Here,” I think, “what a calm animal - you can leave him alone, nothing will happen!”
He locked the little beaver in the hut and went into the forest.
All night I wandered through the forest with a gun, and in the morning I returned home, opened the door, and...
What is it? It was like I was in a carpentry shop!
There are white shavings lying all over the floor, and the table has a thin, thin leg: a beaver has gnawed it from all sides. And he hid behind the stove.
During the night the water subsided. I put the beaver in a bag and quickly took it to the river.
Ever since I see a tree felled by beavers in the forest, I immediately remember the beaver cub that chewed up my table.
IN THE NATURE RESERVE
There is a beaver reserve near the city of Voronezh. There, beavers live on forest rivers. They block rivers with dams and build huts on the banks of ponds.
You cannot cut down trees or hunt in the reserve so as not to scare the beavers.
The reserve is set up for beavers, but deer, wild boars and other animals know that hunters will not touch them here, and they also live in the reserve forest.
I arrived at the reserve in June and began to live in a hut with a forester. Once I took his bike for a ride along the forest paths.
I drove far from home, turned back, drove slowly, listened to the oriole screaming across the river...
Suddenly a badger jumped out of the bushes, wanted to run across the path, sneak through, but landed right under the wheel. I fell into the bushes, stood up, and picked up the bike. “No,” I think, “I’d better go on foot, here the animals are not at all afraid of people.”
Indeed, they are not afraid at all. In the morning a switchman came running from the railway.
“Take away,” he shouts, “your pest, he’s digging under the bridge!”
It turns out that a young beaver was swimming up the river, and he liked the place under the railway bridge. He decided to dig a hole here. The trains rumble above him, and he keeps digging, deeper and deeper.
The beaver was caught and brought back to the reserve in a bag. He puffed angrily in the bag until he was released into the river, away from the railway.
It's good in the forest in June.
A blue kingfisher will fly over the river, sit on a twig and freeze. Looks into the water. Suddenly he dives, emerges with a fish in his beak, and flies off to feed the chicks.
The kingfisher's nest is a cave in a cliff above the river.
In the evening, as the sun sets, bats fly out of the hollow to hunt, flutter over forest clearings, and grab cockchafers.
In June, the bat flies with the mice. She has two or three of them sitting on her stomach, clinging to her fur, waiting for the mother mouse to catch the beetle. They are gluttonous. When a mouse catches a beetle, the little mice open their mouths and squeal. I kept wondering how the little mice weren’t afraid to fly over the forest with their mother mouse, because they could fall off, and their wings were still weak.
At dawn, when the roosters crow, the bat returns to the hollow. He folds his wings, hangs upside down and sleeps with the mice all day until the evening.
BLUEBERRY JAM
Animals and birds in the taiga feed near the cedar tree; even a bear eats its fill of pine nuts in the fall and goes to sleep in a den all winter.
But this autumn the pine nuts did not bear fruit, and hungry bears wandered around the village.
In the morning the housewife will go out to the garden, and all the beds will be trampled by bear paws.
A hungry bear can even break into a hut. Well, whoever has a dog, it will bark and wake everyone up.
I lived in an empty hut on the very edge of the village. Outside the window the taiga immediately began, but I didn’t have a gun.
In the evening, a hunter I knew came to me and calmly said:
- If a bear breaks into the door, jump out the window and run into the village, and if he climbs in the window, hit him on the head with a bench!
- Can you tell in the dark where his head is?
Hunter says:
- Then rattle the bucket louder, the bear is afraid of the iron roar!
I didn't have a bucket.
I placed an iron pot with a spoon next to me and immediately fell asleep.
I don’t know how long I slept, but in my sleep I heard someone tapping, claws scratching on the wall.
I jumped up - he was scraping along the log! I banged on the pot with a spoon and it stopped. A little later it scratched again.
And it’s already dawn outside.
I looked out the window - there was no one.
I opened the door, went out into the street, and this nuthatch was crawling upside down around the hut, tapping the logs with its beak, looking for bugs.
I even yelled at him out of anger. He squeaked and flew off into the taiga.
In the afternoon I took a gun from a hunter in the village, loaded it with an explosive bullet and walked along the bank of the river into the taiga.
There is silence in the taiga. The wind will blow, a branch will creak, and a black woodpecker will cry sadly. I keep my gun ready, walk slowly, don’t touch the branches, so as not to make noise.
In one place, all the bark from a birch tree was peeled off: a hungry bear was picking out ants with its claws.
One turn of the river has passed, the second - there is no bear anywhere. And suddenly, around the third turn, where the black spruce trees are so tall that it’s dark under them, someone roars and squeals!
I put my gun forward, parted the bushes - I looked: a fire was burning on the stones, and a red dog was spinning around the fire, smoke coming out of its tail. A girl with a bucket ran up to the dog, poured water on its tail, saw me and was not at all surprised, but began to complain about the dog:
- Masha is very lazy, she sleeps by the fire all the time, and in her sleep she puts her tail on the fire. The whole tail was burned... Uncle, are you a hunter?
- Yes, I’m walking, well, maybe I’ll meet a bear!
- Uncle, uncle, he walks around here, doesn’t let me make jam! Would you like me to treat you to some blueberry jam? Then will you send him away?
The girl took the saucepan with jam from the coals, stirred it with a spoon and gave it to me to try. The jam is sugar-free, sour-sour. I eat it, and try not to wince.
- Very tasty jam! Aren’t you the only one scared? Aren’t you afraid of the bear?
- I'm not alone, I'm with Masha. The bear kept walking around, rustling in the bushes. Masha barked at him, and I threw a stone. He got scared and ran away.
- What is your name?
- Tanya. I'm in second grade now.
Tanya told me that her father went to the mountains to visit the reindeer herders. That soon all the deer will be driven down to the village, and big “real bears” will come down from the mountains after the deer. Then it will be scary: deer hunters will disperse across the taiga to get sick, and “real bears” will remain around the village.
I asked Tanya:
- What are they, “real bears”?
Tanya closed her eyes and thought:
- Big, big and black. I’m not afraid of them anyway, we have guns at school!
And Tanya told me that in winter the boys would go to the taiga with teacher Pyotr Ivanovich: they would get sick and get sick, learn to make a fire when the snow was falling and all the wood was wet, recognize the tracks of animals...
While Tanya was telling the story, Masha fell asleep again and in her sleep crawled up to the fire itself, but the fire had already gone out, the wind blew from the river, and a gray cloud covered half of the sky.
- Tanya, it’s almost evening, we need to go home and do our homework!
We filled the fire with water and went to the village. In front is red-haired Masha, behind her is Tanya with a saucepan of blueberry jam, I follow Tanya, the gun is over my shoulder, because I was no longer afraid of bears.
Ever since a horse suddenly snores in the taiga at night or a twig crackles in the dark, I take the gun in my hands and calmly wait.
And even when I slept on the fresh tracks of a “real bear”, I just thought about how the bear was creeping up in the dark, and could not sleep. And then I remembered blueberry jam, lazy Masha with a burnt tail, brave Tanya, and the fear passed.
LAKE AZAS
Lake Azas in Tuva is long and narrow. The taiga is visible on the other bank. A bear and a moose swim across the lake. An elk escapes from midges on the islands. A bear swims after a moose.
In autumn, fishermen catch whitefish with amber-yellow caviar, roach and perch. The largest perch in the "perch" bay. The water in it is black, there are rotten snags at the bottom, and the perch is black, large, with scales bristling on its back, like the bristles of a wild boar. Golden larch needles swirl in the wind across the black water.
A path has been carved out in the taiga to Azas. Anyone who has walked along it knows that off to the side, in the moss, an icy spring gushes out of the ground and a birch bark mug hangs on the tree nearby.
If you're tired, sit down on the moss, get drunk and move on. On the way you will come across an old geologists' camp. Tent pegs, a bent bowl, and the smoke goes in a black line all the way to the lake. If you follow the path, the taiga will part and you will come out onto the lake, to the hut of the hunter Mikin, to the very shore.
On the lake, far from the shore, snow-white swans sway on the waves, only these are not swans, but flakes of foam.
The Mikinsky dog does not bark at people, it is a bear keeper. It looks scary. Black, yellow eyes, nose forked into two halves. Meakin calls her Double-Barreled Shotgun. The dog senses that it is scary and does not run to other dogs in the village - they will kill you.
Once upon a time, a game manager promised to bring real huskies - ears erect, tail like a pretzel. He collected money for puppies, but deceived him - he brought geeks: if you want, take it, if you want, don’t take it!
Mikin doesn’t complain about his Double-Barreled Shotgun; Only when the sable barks and stands close to the tree does it miss its precious prey. A real husky should stand seven steps from the tree so that the sable can be seen where it is darting.
But Double-Barreled Shotgun is not afraid to go after a bear; he grabs the bear by the back of his “pants” - the long hair on his paws - and puts him on the ground...
Autumn is late this year. One night the larch was scorched by frost. The white-tailed eagle has flown south, fat blackbirds have gathered in flocks, and bears are digging dens higher in the mountains. This means that spring will be early and the lowlands will be flooded. A well-fed bear is watchful. Only at night it comes to the shore, eats fish guts near the boat, and during the day it lies down in the mountains. Between the cedars the ground was trampled, as if a herd of horses had been driven in a circle. This is a bear: sometimes it stretches in its sleep, sometimes it scratches the ground with its claws, sometimes it explodes. And the bear has a lot of such beds, you’ll never guess where he sleeps during the day.
Every night, against the wind, the bear comes to the Mikinsky hut and eats the day's catch on the shore. He will break the barrel and bite off the heads of the fish, and dump the whitefish in the mud.
We set a large bear trap with teeth. Fish heads were piled on top of the trap and a dragnet made from a whole log was tied to the trap so that the animal would not go far: the log would get stuck between the trees, and then the bear would reveal itself by its scent and roar. It's all in vain. At night, Double Barrel barked. While we were putting on our boots and running to the shore, the bear picked the trap from below, and it slammed shut. The bear calmly ate the fish and ran away.
Mikin found half an elk in the mountains. The bear killed the elk, ate half of it, and covered the other half with branches and will come today to finish eating. Until he eats everything, he will not leave this place: he will walk around, guarding the prey.
They tied the double-barreled shotgun on a chain so that it wouldn’t scare away the bear, loaded the gun with round cast bullets and off they went.
We walked for a long time through the swamps, our feet hit sharp stones, and finally Mikin grabbed me by the shoulder and whispered:
- Over there, over there, behind the juniper bush!
Nothing is visible, only the forest crows took off and sat on the branches.
“Well,” I think, “since the crows are feasting, there is no bear.” He waved his hand and hung the gun on his shoulder. We approached the juniper, and... a bear’s head appeared on top of the bush, as healthy as a pillow. The bear looks at me, his lip droops, and I look at the bear. Before we had time to raise our guns, the bear rushed into the thicket.
- Oh, you bungler! - I say to Mikin.
- But crows...
- "Crows, crows"! So much for Krylov's fables!
It was a long way back. It is always long when you go without prey. So the lake flashed between the trees. I loaded the gun with shot - maybe the ducks were swimming under the shore.
I approached the cliff, I looked over the bushes, and suddenly a bear stood up from the bushes: its paws were on its chest and it was looking at me. I was speechless - he! He, the same black bear, he... and the gun is loaded with shot. I turned back and said to Mikin:
- Vanya, here he is!
And I point my finger at the bear, and Mikin froze in surprise at such bearish impudence.
The bear ran away. And let him live, since he is so... no, not impudent, but cunning. He ran straight ahead to eat our whitefish, as if he knew that the double-barreled shotgun was tied to a chain.
Since then, in the village of Tora-Khem and throughout Todzha, bears have been called “Vanya, here he is.” It was on Lake Azas, from which the Great Yenisei flows. And I’m not at all surprised that there are such amazing animals like this bear, because it was on Lake Azas...
TOP
We wandered through the taiga - me and the dog Top. You can't live in the taiga without a dog. Top knew that I wouldn’t drive him away, and he didn’t listen to me at all.
Top spent the whole day chasing chipmunks. He drives the chipmunk up a tree and sits below, waiting for him to come down to the ground. Who will hunt?
At night I lit a fire, opened a can of condensed milk and waited for the kettle to boil. Suddenly a muzzle stuck out from the bush, grabbed my can and dragged it away. I jumped up and went into the bushes after Top, and he spilled the milk on the ground and ate it.
Once we were climbing a mountain, and a white partridge with chicks was descending from above. Snow fell on the top of the mountain, so she led her chicks to a forest clearing, where it was warmer. The partridge did not hide behind the pebbles, it ran across the open area, and the chicks rolled after it like gray balls.
Top, of course, saw them and immediately chased the partridge. The partridge pretended to be lame, the chicks hid in the stones, Top barked and rushed in all directions: he was about to grab the chick! I caught him, and until the partridge collected all the chicks and took them into the forest, I did not let Top go, I held him by the neck.
Finally we climbed the mountain. From here you can see the taiga far away. The forest raven flies slowly along the ridge and turns its head, looking for prey.
Now he is very close, you can hear the noise of his wings with each flap.
And suddenly Top tucked his tail and pressed himself against my leg. The raven looked at him and flew on.
I began to shame Top:
- Oh, you coward, you rush at the chicks, but the crow was scared!
Top looks away to the side and wags his tail. Since then, when he doesn’t listen to me or runs after the chipmunk, I take a towel out of the bag and slap the air. Top thinks that it is a raven flying and tucks his tail in fear.
IN THE SAYANES
There is a ridge in the Sayan Mountains. Tuvans call it Ergak Torgak Taiga - Great Great Taiga.
The snowy peaks glisten in the sun, and the taiga above seems dead. In the silence, a black woodpecker will cry sadly, and a nutcracker will fly past among the green cedars.
The wind will blow, shake the golden needles from the larches in the ravine onto the snow - and again there will be silence. No bird voices are heard, and it seems that there are no more animals or birds. But it only seems so.
Moose and deer are now on the southern slopes of the mountains, in the sun.
There is a chain of sable tracks in the snow. In the clearing, the tracks have broken off, and a bunch of capercaillie feathers turn black. The wood grouse did not have time to take off, the sable grabbed the wood grouse's throat, and... only feathers and blood stains remained in the snow.
One moment the taiga was dead, but now crows are flocking tens of kilometers away. Ravens have their own signals and their own laws: “Today I found prey, I will call others. Tomorrow someone else will find prey and will call me.” The connecting rod bear has found prey, he is eating, and the crows are sitting on the cedars, waiting for him to move away from the carcass. They will come croaking and start pecking at the meat.
In the evening the sunset was red, and at night the north wind blew. The taiga began to hum, the snow on the mountain tops began to smoke. A star lit up high in the black sky. A cloud came and the star went out.
Far away in the taiga a fire is burning. This is the glowing window of a hunting hut. The firewood crackles in the iron stove, the mice squeak under the floor. The hunter sits at the table, stuffing cartridges.
By dawn the blizzard will cover up the old tracks of the animals, and early in the morning the sable will go hunting and leave a fresh trail. Laika will drive the sable to the top of the cedar. He will bark at the sable, he will snort at the husky, and the hunter will come up unnoticed and kill the sable.
CAMEL DANCE
In winter in Kazakhstan I saw a camel caravan. The camels closed their eyes from the snow and walked towards the blizzard. On the first camel, the leader, sat a boy. He held his hump and also closed his eyes.
And the leader walked with his eyes open.
All the camels' fur was covered with frost, icicles grew on their faces, and their eyelashes were covered with white frost. The last camel was loaded with a felt yurt.
The wind blew the felt like a sail, and the camel leaned to one side. Apparently, a caravan was coming from afar, and it was hard for the camel, he was quietly moaning.
The caravan disappeared into the steppe, and I was still surprised: camels are so big and obedient, they even obey a little boy...
In the spring, a south wind blew, the snow became wet, and the camels became thoughtful.
They are being chased, shouted at, but they stand still, chew gum and look somewhere far away, dreaming about something.
Then the snow remained only in the ravines. The tubercles have dried out.
The steppe has turned red from last year's grass. Larks, eagles, and sandpipers have arrived.
The gophers stood in yellow columns near the holes and whistled loudly.
The steppe woke up and began to ring.
And then the camels went crazy. They fled to the steppe, away from people. And there they ran and tumbled, leaving shreds of winter fur on the grass.
One day I heard someone stomping behind the hill, but it was hard to see who was due to the dust.
I came closer, and these were camels dancing. They stomp on their front feet, then their hind feet. Either front or rear. Front, rear...
The camels danced the dance of spring. They were glad that winter had passed, the sun was warming and they were alive.
IN SPRING
It was snowing outside and it was cold.
But I knew that it was spring in Kazakhstan. And I so wanted to see what was happening there in the spring that I went to the station, bought a ticket and went.
At first the train rushed through the forests. And in the evening the sunset was crimson from frost.
On the Volga, the wet wind shook the trees, the rooks had already arrived and were walking across the fields.
In Kazakhstan, snow lay in holes near telegraph poles.
The spring camel sniffed the rails and moulted. And at one station they sold jelly, and wild wasps landed on hands, and in the steppe a blue camel was born, weak and blind.
I asked the Kazakh when the baby camel’s eyes would open.
“As soon as they open, they’ll lock him in the barn,” he said.
I was surprised:
- He probably wants to go for a walk?
“He can’t go for a walk,” the Kazakh sighed and said that the baby camel’s skin on his heels was still tender, and in the steppe there were scorpions hiding under the stones, and snakes, and a poisonous karakurt spider. And they are all just waiting for the baby camel to run away into the steppe.
The train moved on.
I stood at the window, thinking: I’ll see a snake or a scorpion. But I never saw it.
Only at the turn did I see a steam locomotive rushing, and in front, near the rails, there were yellow posts. A locomotive is about to hit a post...
And suddenly the column rolls into the steppe. These are gophers. They show their courage.
A huge iron monster rushes towards the gopher, but he stands with his paws pressed to his chest and does not move.
The wheels are rattling closer and closer: knock-knock, knock-knock! And the gopher’s heart is filled with fear: knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock!
Finally, he can’t stand it and screams - back into the hole. His bride is waiting for him there.
And then the mountains appeared.
Tulips have taken over everything. The breeze sways them, they shimmer in waves, sometimes pinkish, sometimes just like fire, and there’s a yellow stripe breaking through...
A black lark sits on a pebble. So he soared and rises up and up and up and trembles and trembles with songs. And the sun just burns and scorches.
FORESTRY TILAN
Far beyond the Syr Darya, on the edge of the desert, there is a white house. The forester Tilan lives there.
In August, every morning he takes a camel out of the barn, loads bags of seeds on it and leaves for the desert. He scatters tamarisk seeds on the tops of sand dunes, and scatters saxaul seeds in the lowlands. The camel walks quickly, just have time to put your hand into the bags - tamarisk on the left, saxaul on the right.
From under the camels' feet, round-headed lizards scatter in all directions like splashes. The boa flashed a silver arrow on the sand, curled up like a spring and hissed from afar at the camel.
By noon, lizards and snakes buried themselves in the sand to avoid being baked. Agama lizards climbed onto a tamarisk bush. At the top of the bush, on each branch, a lizard sits motionless, raised its head and breathes heavily.
Tilan ties the camel to a tamarisk branch; lizards do not run away - they have nowhere to run on the hot sand, and sometimes a cool breeze blows overhead.
Tilan unloads the camel, lays the felt on the sand, hangs a robe on top of a bush and rests in the shade.
The desert seemed to have died out until evening. Only the monitor lizard appeared at the top of the dune, saw Tilan and hissed: Tilan prevented him from catching lizards on the tamarisk.
The monitor lizard rushes at the bush, the lizards jump from above with a squeak, and the monitor lizard grabs them.
By evening the heat subsides.
Gerbils crawl out of their holes, whistle, and call to each other.
Behind them, round pincers emerge, looking like lead fillings, and the desert comes to life.
In the evening, when Tilan drives up to the white house, saigas antelopes flash on the horizon like a mirage. They run hundreds of kilometers to a deep well in the desert.
All night they will stand around the well and breathe, breathe moist air. By morning, when the shepherds bring the sheep to water, the saigas will run away into the sand.
Every day the forester Tilan goes out to sow the sands.
Saxaul takes root many meters to the sides and in depth. The roots of saxaul and tamarisk fix the sands, preventing them from moving and filling up ditches, gardens and villages.
SEA CARSP
I woke up. It was quiet. The jackals froze and the tree frogs fell silent.
Knock Knock! Knock Knock! Knock Knock! Knock Knock!
It's like wood is knocking. These are reeds knocking against each other and bending.
- Who is this?
- Sazan has gone!
- Can a carp bend reeds?
- Sea carp can!
During the day I saw a sea carp. He was all clad in red scales, like a knight in armor. He was lying in the dust, and he kept crawling towards the water, towards the water and squinted at the fishermen with his red eye, like a wild stallion.
Then I found out why he was so scorched and strong. In winter, fish stay closer to the shore, nibbling on water grasses or whatever the river carries with turbidity.
Not the sea carp. He goes to the middle of the sea, where the water is completely bitter and blue, and the wind rings from above.
In January, when there is rain, slush and the lighthouse barely blinks, the carp swims up to Turkmenistan and sees how the pink flamingos in Hasan-Kuli rise from the bay and disappear, dissolving into the sunset over the sands.
He swims along the shore, shackled in his scales, and sees a camel looking for a white camel, and the camel stands behind the dunes like a white speck.
Sazan sees the viper lying on the sand and looking at him with terrible, unseeing eyes. I want to swim closer, closer...
No, get away from this shore! Just wait for white wax flowers to bloom on the black stone branches of saxaul.
The water in the sea is heating up, and the caviar is already beginning to become heavy, and the carp swims and swims, and itself dreams of reeds, behind which snowy mountains are visible.
And drink soft, sweet, snowy water. And rub your belly, release eggs into this cool, sweet water and bend the reeds...
The reeds are knocking more and more quietly in the morning. Sea carp spawns. Calms down. He forgets what he saw, and the colors of the hot sand fade on his scales.
IN LANKORAN
On the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, in the Lankaran Nature Reserve, tree frogs are trying their calls and preparing for spring.
The buffalos crawled into a warm puddle. They shout at them, chase them, but they chew gum and lazily look around, they don’t want to get out: the sun has worn them out.
Starlings are screaming in the bushes. They flew away from the frost to the warm sea. There are kites sitting on telegraph poles; ruffled, waiting for the starlings to fly out of the bushes. Farther away, wild geese and geese browse the grass in the meadows.
Aquatic turtles with soft shells and orange bellies live in the rice fields. The turtle has a long neck to hunt for young underwater.
The sea is shallow, you can go far, the water is just above your knees. On the shore there is a wall of reeds taller than a man. The wild boars have made narrow paths through the reeds.
Lotus and horned water chestnut - chilim - grow on the lake. The lake reflects shreds of the southern sky, blue-blue, like the Sultan's chickens. No matter how warm it is in Lenkoran in January, the Sultan’s chickens have gone further to the south, where it is even warmer.
Sometimes a north wind will blow, it will snow, the birds will become agitated, make noise, and pink flocks of flamingos will move south. In the morning the sun will come out and the snow will melt.
In the Talysh Mountains, walnut forests turn black under the blue sky. At night, a porcupine will rattle its quills in a walnut thicket, and an owl will cry from the top of an oak tree.
Sychik saw the tiger silently following the deer's tracks. He took in his claws, and his paws became soft like pillows. A twig will not crack under a tiger's paw, a dry leaf will not rustle.
ARAL
I heard that there are so many fish in the Aral Sea that if you throw a boot to the bottom and then pull it out, the boot will be full of gobies.
It was May. The train was rushing through the desert. There are dunes on the right and on the left. Brown thorns grow on the dunes - both large, like umbrellas, and round, like plush pillows, moving in the wind, crawling...
These are not thorns, but camel humps. A herd of camels is grazing. During the winter, the camels became emaciated, the tops of their humps hung to one side and swayed.
The desert is brown, and camel hair is brown, and saxaul is brown from afar.
Between the sleepers, poppies bloom on thin stems. The train rushes over them - the poppies are pressed to the ground. The last carriage rushes by - they raised their heads again.
Only the petals, torn off by the whirlwind, slowly fall onto the rails.
The black dog stopped, sniffed the petal and... without taking a breath, rushed to catch up with the train.
This black dog is Tazy's greyhound, she runs after the train without falling behind.
Someone threw a bone through the window, and oiled paper flashed. Tazy grabbed the bone on the fly and ate it.
Passengers look out the window and point at the black dog with their fingers:
- Look how skinny the dog is!
They do not know that the greyhound Tazy, with a toned belly and thin legs, will run tens of kilometers in the desert after antelope and saiga and will not get tired.
Among the yellow sands the Aral Sea flashed, blue as a kingfisher’s feather.
At the station, boys sell bundles of smoked bream. They opened the window and immediately smelled fish.
In Aralsk there are camels in the yards. Above the clay fences, only camel heads and the tops of humps are visible. The camel looks from above and chews the cud.
If there is a baby camel behind the clay wall, the camel may spit, so don’t come close. Here camels carry saxaul for firewood.
Beyond the Aral Sea there is a fishing camp on the shore. Camels, walking heavily, pull the net. The water in the cauldron is boiling over the fire. Soon there will be sea carp soup. They are huge. You can barely lift one carp, but there are hundreds of them in the net; only camels can lift that much.
After eating the fish soup, one fisherman told how he met a tiger in the reed jungle in the Amu Darya delta.
- ...The boat hit the shore, I looked - it was lying on the shore and looking at me, not moving, only the tip of its tail was playing. The hair on my head went up out of fear. I wanted to push the boat away with my pole - I was afraid... I was petrified and did not move until the boat was carried away in the rapids. And I don’t need soms - just go home quickly! Since then I haven’t gone fishing in the reeds without a gun.
And the catfish in the Amu Darya are huge. The fisherman drags him on his back, and the catfish’s tail drags in the dust. This monster swallows wild ducks.
There are scorpions sitting on the shore under the stones, and I also found a fossilized shell in the sand: it glitters and has a blue tint. This shell is millions of years old.
Previously, a long time ago, where the desert used to be, there was a sea. If you look, you will find shark teeth. Each tooth is the size of a palm. Brown, sharp and jagged at the edges, like a saw.
In the evening, over the desert, in the place where the sun had gone out, a green ray lit up. The black sand tornado spun in a column. It's getting closer and closer... When the camels saw this pillar, they immediately lay down. Otherwise it will swoop in, spin you around, lift you up and throw you to the ground.
Anything can happen in the desert.
SMART PORCUBE
In Turkmenistan, porcupines are hunted with a broom.
There are porcupine quills lying at the entrance to the hole. Long, soft, like hair, from the back. Hard, sharp - from the tail, and there are footprints in the sand.
A hunter came up and swept everything away with a broom: scraps of wool, needles, traces, so that everything was clean, like the floor of a hut.
“Well, now I’ll get it,” the hunter rejoiced.
The next day the hunter returned to the hole and saw: fresh footprints with their heels back into the hole, and next to them with their heels forward. There was a porcupine, but not for long, as soon as the light left the hole.
The hunter swept away all traces with a broom, again smooth sand.
“Well, he’s cunning! He won’t get away from me anyway,” thought the hunter.
The hunter came to the hole on the third day in the evening. He sees by the tracks - there is no porcupine.
He left just recently, the sand had not yet had time to dry out and crumble on the tracks.
The hunter laid out his cotton robe near the hole behind a large stone and placed his gun next to it.
The hunter was hiding - the porcupine is a sensitive animal. If you move, you clink the gun - he will hear it from afar and will not soon return to the hole.
The porcupine hunter waited all night. In the morning the wind rose, the sky lit up over the mountains, and the jackals howled pitifully. But the porcupine didn’t come.
“I won’t be a hunter if I don’t kill him!” - the hunter got angry, put on his robe, took the gun and went home.
While walking along the road, I thought: “Where did he go? Maybe he went to the melon field to get some melons? He probably sniffed all the melons at the melon field and chose the sweetest one. Maybe he went to the pistachio grove to get some nuts?”
So the hunter returned to the village with nothing.
And the porcupine did not go to the melon field for melons, or to the pistachio grove for nuts, but to the gorge, where a spring gushed out of a rock. A thin stream of cold water flows from under the stone and disappears into the sand.
During the day, the heat over the mountains and over the sands makes the air tremble. As soon as it gets dark, the animals run to water.
A porcupine came to a watering hole, and there a herd of kulans was drinking water. They got drunk, and behind them came the gazelle antelopes. Then - the hyena. He drinks and drinks, but he just can’t get drunk.
The porcupine stands aside, but only rattles its quills, gets angry: the porcupine does not like to drink water with other animals at the watering hole, it is disdainful.
As soon as the porcupine approached the water, suddenly the partridge partridges shouted: “Ke-ke-ke, ke-ke-ke!” - and flew away. The leopard has arrived.
The sky brightened. The porcupine never had time to get drunk. The porcupine crackled its quills, rattled its prickly tail like a rattle, and went into its hole.
On the way, he licks the dew from the leaves, digs up the juicy roots and eats them. In the pistachio grove, he collected nuts in the grass, ate them, carefully folded the shells into a pile and went to the hole.
He looks: a broom of dry herbs is lying near the hole. The porcupine became wary, began to sniff, catching the breeze with its nose: was there a person nearby?
The porcupine looked around and went to another hole beyond the distant hills. I climbed in there and dozed off until evening.
The hunter sits on the carpet at home, drinks tea from a bowl, looks at his gun and thinks: “This cunning porcupine won’t get away from me anyway!”
But he just forgot that the porcupine is not a cunning, but an intelligent animal, and that a real hunter will not leave a broom at a porcupine’s hole.
IN KHIVA
In Khiva, in this ancient city, there is a fish fryer in the bazaar.
Cottonseed oil is boiling in a large cauldron. The cook throws the fish into the oil and takes it out with a crispy golden crust.
First I ate fish and walked around the market. They sell a lot of things here: roosters, grapes, clay jugs, and dishes painted by potters.
All dishes are different. Some glow like the sky at noon, blue and azure. Others have a reddish pattern, others have green leaves, such as those that bloom on mulberry trees in the spring.
- Where are such dishes made? - I asked the potter.
- Listen! - says the potter. - When you leave the market, you go straight, and there you ask where the potters live.
That's exactly what I did. At first I walked straight. Elm trees grew on the sides of the street. The trunk is thick, straight, and at the top it looks like a trimmed ball. But no one cut their hair. This is how they grow.
I reached the bridge over a fast ditch - stream. I ask an Uzbek:
- Where do your potters live here?
“Here,” he says, “walk along the ditch along the alley, this is where they live.”
I walked along the ditch to the old mosque. I look: there is a window in the wall below. And there sits an Uzbek. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to the elbows, and he is spinning a potter's wheel and making a large dish from a piece of clay.
We greeted him, I asked him:
- Can I see how you make a dish out of clay?
- Yes, come in.
I went down the steep steps.
In the workshop there is a stove and various pots for paints. There are multi-colored stones on the shelf. I later found out that they are ground and the paint is used to paint dishes.
The potter turns the potter's wheel with his foot, and from a large piece of clay he makes either a large dish or a jug.
In the corner a large stove glows with heat. There are a lot of burnt coals in the stove, but the flame flares up just a little.
The potter scooped everything into the bucket with a scoop, down to the last coal.
“Well,” he says, “help me, give me the dishes!”
I began to serve him dishes made of raw clay. And he quickly began to put all the dishes in the stove. A lot fit in there. Then he closed the stove, washed his hands in a bucket of water and said:
- OK it's all over Now!
- When will you paint? - I asked the potter.
- I will paint when all the clay has hardened. What are you doing in Khiva?
- Like what? I watch how the people of Khiva live.
- A-ah! - speaks. - Then let's go to my place.
He locked his workshop with a big lock, and we walked along the alley, where a ditch gurgles in the middle.
“Come in,” he tells me, “you will be a guest.”
We went behind the adobe fence. We sat down on the floor on a thick sheep's wool felt.
He clapped his hands and his wife came. He said something to her in Uzbek.
She brought on a large platter a huge yellow bunch of grapes, large and sweet, only each grape was a little wrinkled.
Then the Uzbek’s wife brought hot flatbreads, pillow candies and a kettle of green tea.
We drank tea, and the Uzbek told me that both his grandfather and great-grandfather were all potters. And he is a potter. His name is Ahmet Usto. Usto means master.
- Yes, only masters live here!
I ask:
- It's spring! Where do the grapes come from?
- Oh! Let’s go,” said Akhmet.
He led me to a dark barn. There is a large tub of water on the earthen floor.
- So what? - I ask him.
- You're looking in the wrong direction. Look up!
I looked up, and there were large clusters of grapes hanging from the ceiling.
“We’ve been hanging grapes in the barn since the fall,” says Akhmet. - We put a pot of water on the floor. Here we have grapes hanging all winter. He takes as much water as he needs. And now, he says, look at my fighting rams.
We went out into the courtyard, and there a thick elm tree was growing. Two huge rams are chained to the elm on two chains. Shaggy, with heavy curved horns. I have never seen such huge rams. My back is like a sofa. They are huge and fierce, like lions.
When they saw me, they rattled their chains and rushed, but their chains didn’t let them go.
- Kich-kich! - Akhmet shouted at them...
“Well,” he says, “he looked, let’s go finish the tea.”
We started drinking tea. Akhmet told me about the sheep. I learned that in the fall, when the harvest is harvested, people come from Khiva, from Urgench, from all over the Khorezm oasis to watch the Kachkar fights. When a fighting kachkar is led on a chain, everyone hides in their houses. Otherwise it will fall and could kill you. There, in the field, as soon as the kachkars see each other, they let them off the chain. The kachkars scatter and bang their horns with all their might.
If the ram is weaker, then a strong kachkar will twist his neck to one side. When the rams fight, people shout, argue, and encourage their kachkars.
Akhmet leaned towards me and said:
- My athletes are champions. There he saw how many horns were nailed to the elm. These horns are from the fighting rams they defeated.
I began to ask him how many meters the rams run before bumping their heads, how much such a ram costs...
Akhmet interrupted me:
- Hush, hush, speak in a whisper, the kachkars will hear.
“Why,” I ask, “speak in a whisper?”
“Yes, because,” Akhmet said quietly. - They understand everything. As soon as they hear about the fights, they will stop eating completely so as not to gain excess fat, and they will prepare for the fights. And now it’s only spring!
Akhmet gave me a bunch of sweet grapes and a large warm flatbread and said:
- Come whenever you want. You will be a guest. You won’t find it right away; if you ask where Akhmet Usto lives, everyone knows.
We said goodbye to him. I haven't seen him since then. And I haven’t been to Khiva. I don't know what she is like now.
But probably the same. There are kachkar fighting rams in Khiva, and Akhmet Usto, and a fish fry at the bazaar.
I just can’t get to them.
LITTLE MONSTER
Our ship was sailing in the Gulf of Anadyr. It was night. I was standing at the stern. The ice floes rustled over the sides and broke. A strong wind and snow were blowing, but the sea was calm, the heavy ice did not allow it to rage. The ship made its way between the ice floes at low speed. The ice fields will begin soon. The captain steered the ship carefully so as not to crash into the ice.
Suddenly I heard something splashing right next to the side, even the ship rocked on the wave.
I look: some kind of monster is overboard. It will float away, then come closer and sigh heavily. It disappeared, appeared in front of the ship, surfaced at the very stern, the water glowing with green light from its splashes.
Whale! I can’t figure out which one.
All night he swam behind the ship and sighed.
And at dawn I saw him: his head was blunt, like a sledgehammer, no other animal had such a long head, his eyes were tiny, and there was only one nostril. He will stick her out of the water, release a fountain of steam, sigh heavily and go under the water again.
This is a young sperm whale.
Then the captain woke up and went out on deck.
I asked him:
- Why is he swimming after us?
- Yes, that’s right, he mistook our ship for a whale. Still young, the milk on his lips has not dried. And apparently, he fell behind his mother, from his herd. As autumn storms begin, all sperm whales move towards the equator.
While the captain was talking, the sperm whale fell behind the ship and swam south. Its fountain was visible for a long time between the ice, then disappeared.
“Equator went to look,” said the captain.
Here even I sighed: will this little monster find his mother?
BELEK
Everywhere you look, there is only ice all around. White, greenish, shiny in the sun. I began to peer into the narrow strip of water that our ship cut through the ice.
And suddenly I saw two black eyes. They looked at me from an ice floe that slowly floated past.
- Stop! Stop! Someone's overboard! - I shouted.
The ship slowed down and stopped. I had to lower the boat and return to the ice floe.
The ice floe was covered with sparkling snow. And on the snow, as if on a blanket, lay a squirrel - a baby seal.
Seals leave their babies on the ice, and only in the morning the mother swims up to the baby, feeds him milk and swims away again, and he lies on the ice all day, all white, soft, like a plush. And if it weren’t for his big black eyes, I wouldn’t have noticed him.
They put the squirrel on the deck and swam further.
I brought him a bottle of milk, but he didn’t drink the squirrel, but crawled towards the side. I pulled him back, and suddenly, first one tear rolled out of his eyes, then a second, and they started to fall like hail. Belek cried silently. The sailors made a noise and said that they should quickly put him on that ice floe. Let's go to the captain. The captain grumbled and grumbled, but still turned the ship around. The ice had not yet closed, and along the water path we came to the old place. There the squirrel was again placed on a blanket of snow, only on another ice floe. He almost stopped crying. Our ship sailed on.
HOW THE SPARROW VISITED KAMCHATKA
In the evening we loaded in Vladivostok. The flight was urgent, and the captain ordered no passengers to board the ship.
I even placed a sailor at the gangway so that he wouldn’t let anyone in.
They still didn't follow up.
I went out on deck in the morning. The ship is sailing on the open sea, no land is visible. The weather is calm, the sun is shining. I look: a sparrow is jumping on the deck, pecking at something between the boards. A sparrow saw me, chirped and flew to the mast, looking at me from above. The feathers on his chest are blown by the wind, but there is no tail. Probably lost in a fight.
And the ship is heading to Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka.
It is no longer possible to drive away the sparrow - it will not reach land and will die in the waves.
“Well,” I think, “what should I do with him? Since he made his way onto the ship, let him stay.”
So the sparrow swam with us. During the day he jumped on the deck, and at night he hid under a tarpaulin in the boat so that the wind would not blow him out to sea.
I had already forgotten about the sparrow. On the fifth day, our ship arrived in Petropavlovsk and stood at the pier for unloading. The team was written off to shore. I also went into town to buy cigarettes.
When I was returning to the port, I looked: fishermen were standing on the street and looking at something on a tree. I came closer - and this is our tailless sparrow jumping on the branches.
I ask the fishermen why they are surprised. The fishermen tell me:
“We have a lot of crows in Kamchatka, but no sparrows at all, so we wonder how he got here.”
“This sparrow,” I say, “sailed from Vladivostok on our ship; probably wants to settle here.
The fishermen laughed:
- Let him live! There's enough room for everyone.
I came to the ship and told him that the sparrow remained in Petropavlovsk.
Some people ran into the city to look for the Kamchatka sparrow, but did not find it. He probably flew off to the hills to meet the crows.
We unloaded and headed back to Vladivostok.
And when they approached Vladivostok, a strong wind blew and tore the tarpaulin off the boat.
I began to secure the tarpaulin, and I looked, and in the bottom of the boat there was a tailless sparrow sitting! He saw me - "cherr!" shouted and fluttered out of the boat. He sees that the land is close, and without looking back he flew to Vladivostok.
He didn't like Kamchatka. Or maybe the crows drove him away from there?
BEAR-WHALER
On the whaling ship "Typhoon" there lives a dog, Mishka.
No one knows what breed she is; Probably a cross between a mongrel and a dachshund - shaggy and bow-legged.
Mishka’s fur was once white, but now you can’t even tell what color it is. The bear has been so busy in whale oil and engine oil that the captain won’t let him into his cabin.
Mishka lies on the deck all day and waits for a whale to be found in the ocean.
At the top of the mast there is an iron barrel, in which a sailor stands and looks through binoculars.
When a pair of whale nostrils see a fountain on the horizon, it sounds three beeps: whales!
As the first beep rings, Bear's eyes will open.
The second beep will raise his head.
The third one rushes to the bridge where the harpoon cannon is located.
The harpooner is in a hurry, deploys the cannon, and Mishka gets underfoot. They scold him, chase him, they even crushed his paw with a boot.
The bear will step aside, hang its head overboard and wait.
As soon as the whales appear, Mishka will tremble all over and begin to howl quietly, but does not bark - he is afraid of scaring off the whale.
They'll hit the whale with a cannon! The bear jumps up and waits for the smoke to clear.
If the harpooner misses, Mishka barks terribly, rushes at him, and grabs him by the pants!
The harpooner quickly reloads the cannon and shouts:
- Crazy creature, I’ll throw you into the sea!
But when the harpooner hits the whale, Mishka, with joy, does not know what to do. He runs in circles all over the ship, fusses, smiles, his muzzle is all stretched out, and then calms down, crawls up to the harpooner on his belly, licks his hands and waves his tail, like hitting the deck with a broom.
The hunt will be completed, the whales killed by their tails will be tied with chains to the sides and dragged to the island to the whale factory.
As soon as the island appears, the harpooner locks Mishka in his cabin, otherwise Mishka will go completely crazy when the tug comes for the whales.
They start untying the whales, he rushes into the tow, barks, and literally chokes with anger - he feels so sorry for the whales: they have been hunted for so many of them and suddenly they are given to someone else’s ship. So they lock him up so that he doesn’t interfere and doesn’t worry in vain.
From the whale hunt, Mishka became completely nervous: at night he growls in his sleep, jumps up and runs to the harpooner’s cabin, pulls the blanket off him with his teeth. He probably dreams about whales.
They wanted to put Mishka ashore so that he could rest, run around in the forest for butterflies, but he hid in a rope box, growling: he doesn’t want to go ashore - he wants to hunt whales in the ocean.
LAMPANIDUS
In the very corner of the Pacific Ocean, near Kamchatka, there are the Commander Islands. I saw them in winter.
The islands stuck out like huge snow-white snowdrifts in the green winter ocean. The snow on the tops of the snowdrifts was smoking from the wind.
The ship could not approach the islands: high waves crashed against the steep shore. The wind was blowing and a blizzard was howling on the deck. Our ship was scientific: we studied deep-sea fish.
But no matter how much we peered into the ocean, not a single whale swam past, not a single bird flew to the shore, and nothing living was visible in the snow.
Then they decided to find out what was going on in the depths. They began to lower a large net with a lid into the ocean.
It took a long time to lower the net. The sun had already set and the snowdrifts had turned pink.
When the net was lifted, it was already dark. The wind swayed it over the deck, and the net flickered in the darkness with blue lights.
The entire catch was poured into a liter jar and taken to the cabin. We found only delicate crustaceans and completely transparent fish.
I pulled out all the fish from the jar, and at the very bottom lay a small fish, the size of my little finger. Along the entire body, in three rows, like buttons, living blue lights burned.
It was a lampanis - a light bulb fish. Deep underwater, in pitch darkness, she swims like a living flashlight and lights the way for herself and other fish.
Three days have passed.
I went into the cabin. The little lampanis died long ago, and the lights still burned with a blue, unearthly light.
INHABITED ISLAND
There are many small islands in the ocean. Some are not yet on the map, they have just been born.
Some islands disappear under water, while others appear.
Our ship was sailing in the open ocean. And suddenly a rock sticks out of the water, waves crash against it.
It was the top of the underwater mountain that appeared above the water.
The ship turned around and stood at the island, swaying on the waves. The captain ordered the boat to be launched.
“This,” he says, “is an uninhabited island, we need to explore it.”
We landed on it. The island is like an island, it hasn’t even had time to be overgrown with moss, just bare rocks. I once dreamed of living on a desert island, but not like this.
I was about to return to the boat, but I saw a crack in the rock, and a bird’s head was sticking out of the crack and looking at me. I came closer, and it was a guillemot. She laid an egg right on a bare stone and sits on the egg, waiting for the chick to hatch. I touched her beak, she is not afraid, because she does not yet know what kind of animal a person is.
It must be scary for her to live alone on the island. In a strong storm, the waves even reach the nest.
At this time, the ship began to sound horns to return to the ship.
I said goodbye to the guillemot and went to the boat.
When on the ship the captain asked about the island if anyone lived on it, I said that he did.
The captain was surprised:
- How so? This island is not on the map yet!
“Kaira,” I say, “didn’t ask whether he was on the map or not, she settled in and that’s all; This means that this island is already inhabited.
OCTOPUS
In the spring, warm fogs began to undermine the ice floes. And when it got completely warm, a butterfly flew onto the deck with the onshore wind.
I caught her, brought her to the cabin and began to remember how in the spring the finches sing in the forest and hedgehogs run in the clearings.
“It would be nice,” I think, “to catch a hedgehog! But where can you catch it in the North Sea?”
And instead of a hedgehog, I got a little octopus: it got entangled in the net with the fish.
I put the octopus in a jam jar and put the jar on the table.
So he lived in my jar of octopuses. I do something, and he hides behind a pebble and spies on me. Gray pebble and gray octopus. The sun will illuminate it and it will turn yellow, that’s how it camouflages itself.
One day I was reading a book. At first he sat quietly, and then began to quickly turn through the pages.
The octopus suddenly turned red, then yellow, then green. He got scared when the pages began to flash.
Can a hedgehog really do that? He just pricks and snorts.
I once laid a green scarf under a jar - and the octopus turned green.
Once I put a jar with an octopus on a chessboard, and the octopus didn’t know which one to be - white or black? And then he got angry and blushed.
But I didn't make him angry anymore. And when real summer came, I released the octopus into an underwater clearing, where the water was shallower and warmer: after all, he was still very small!
OCTOPUS
The ship is heading to Vladivostok. Another week - and the end of sailing.
I decided to bring home a live octopus.
I consulted with Vasily Ivanovich, the boatswain, about what would be more convenient to keep the octopuses in: in a barrel or, perhaps, in the hold there was some kind of tank instead of an aquarium.
Vasily Ivanovich was surprised at my idea:
- I once brought a crocodile home from Bombay. The little one - I carried it in the washstand so that it would be wet all the time. But I haven’t heard of an octopus being carried around. Try it, maybe you'll get it!
I found a zinc box with a lid in the hold - gunpowder was transported in such boxes during the war - I brought it to my cabin, tied it to the table so that it wouldn’t tip over during a storm, and I’m waiting for them to catch fish: maybe an octopus will come across.
We didn't have to wait long. The next day, I was sleeping after my shift, and I heard someone shaking my shoulder. I open my eyes, and it’s Vasily Ivanovich.
- Get up quickly, the trawl has been pulled out, the octopus has been caught!
I dressed quickly and jumped out onto the deck. The north wind blows, but I don’t notice the cold.
The catch from the trawl was dumped: flounder, starfish, crabs swarming on the deck.
The cook selects fish for the galley in a basket, and I also dig through the shells, looking for an octopus.
Finally found it. Big, yellow. Probably the bottom here is sandy, because the octopus changes color from the soil so that it is not visible. His eyes are like those of a cat, his pupils are long, and he looks at me point-blank. I kicked him, he closed his eyes and turned red. Probably angry.
I picked it up and carried it to the cabin. It’s heavy, but without water it’s completely weak, it hangs like a rag, its tentacles wrapped around my arms and stuck to my vest.
I brought him to the cabin, put him in a box, and ran for sea water. I took a bucket from the galley, filled it with water, opened the lid, wanted to pour water into the box - but the box was empty!
What's happened? At first I didn’t even believe it, I felt the whole inside of the box - maybe it was hidden in a corner? No, there is no octopus anywhere.
I was completely upset. He couldn't crawl out of the cabin!
I started looking for the octopus in the cabin, and I saw: a wet trail, as if a rag had been drawn across the floor, led right under the bunk. I looked under the bed, and there was an octopus lying there. I pulled him out of there and put him in a box, closed it with a lid, and put boots on top of the lid just in case.
After that I began to watch the octopus so that it did not crawl out of the box. Still didn't follow it. He lifted the lid, climbed out of the box and hid in the corner where the electric heating pad stood, heating the cabin.
When I returned from my shift, the octopus was already dead: the skin on it had dried out from the heat.
I never took him home.
STICLELEBLE-BRAVE
At low tide the sea receded, and many puddles, small and large, remained on the shore.
I sat down near a large puddle and began to keep watch, because some fish do not have time to swim out to sea, they hide at the bottom and wait for the tide.
It was dark in the puddle and nothing was visible, only water spiders were climbing over the stones.
I was about to leave, and then a ray of sunshine cut through the water. And they huddled and danced in this beam, either midges or specks of dust. It was a school of fish, only very small ones - fry.
I saw their head and tail. The fry caught water fleas, and some of them didn’t even have a mouth yet, they just swam like that. For them, this puddle is a whole sea.
I tore off the twig and wanted to drive away the fry, and suddenly - I didn’t even notice from where - a fish jumped out, itself the size of a little finger, with sharp spines sticking out on its back, and well, it was shaking my twig. Either it will swim from one side, prick him with a thorn, or bite him with his mouth, and his eyes burn with blue lights from anger. She tousled the whole twig, it became like a glue brush, and she hid under a stone and looked from there, waving her fins - try to touch the fry!
I didn’t catch the fry, otherwise the stickleback would rip my whole arm off; it’s not even afraid of a big cod, it rushes into a fight.
And she’s not a stickleback at all, but a brave one.
MICHAEL
On one ship lived a tame bear, Mikhail.
One day a ship returned from a long voyage to Vladivostok. All the sailors began to go ashore, and Mikhail was with them. They wanted to not let him in, they locked him in the cabin - he began to scratch the door and roar terribly, so that you could hear him on the shore.
They released Mikhail and gave him an iron barrel to roll on the deck, and he threw it into the water: he didn’t want to play, he wanted to go ashore.
They gave him a lemon. Mikhail saw through it and made a terrible face; looked at everyone in bewilderment and barked - they deceived them!
The captain did not want to let Mikhail ashore because there was such a case.
We played football on the shore with the sailors of another ship. At first Mikhail stood calmly, watched, only biting his paw with impatience, and then he couldn’t stand how he would growl and rush onto the field! He dispersed all the players and began to kick the ball around. How it will catch you with your paw, how it will catch you! And then as soon as it hooks, the ball just booms! And it burst. How can he be allowed ashore after this?
And it’s impossible not to let it in, it’s such a huge thing: while it was small it was a ball, but when it grew it became a whole ball. We rode him, he doesn’t even squat. The strength is such that the sailors will begin to pull the rope - as much as they have, and Mikhail will pull from the other end - the sailors will fall onto the deck.
We decided to let Mikhail ashore, only with a collar, and watch carefully so that the dog does not meet him, otherwise he will break out and run after him.
They put a leather collar on Mikhail. Boatswain Klimenko, the strongest on the ship, wrapped the strap around his hand, and Mikhail and the sailors went to the local history museum.
They came to the museum, bought tickets, and Mikhail was tied near the entrance, in the kindergarten, by a cast-iron cannon; he couldn’t move it from its place.
They walked around the crawl space in the museum, and the director came running:
- Remove your bear! He doesn't let anyone in!
Klimenko ran outside and looked: Mikhail was standing in the doorway, a piece of a strap was dangling around his neck, and he was not letting anyone into the museum.
A whole crowd of people gathered.
It was Mikhail who was used to taking bribes on the ship. As soon as the sailors go ashore, he waits at the gangway; the sailors knew: if you were coming from the shore, you had to give Mikhail candy, then he would let you board the ship. It’s better not to show yourself without candy - he’ll press you and won’t let you in. Klimenko got angry and shouted at Mikhail:
- Shame on you, glutton!
Mikhail was frightened, he even covered his ears and closed his eyes. He was afraid of Klimenko alone and obeyed him.
Klimenko took him by the collar and brought him to the museum.
Mikhail immediately became quiet, did not leave the sailors, examined the portraits on the walls, photographs, stuffed animals behind the glass.
They barely pulled him away from the stuffed bear. He stood there for a long time, flaring his nostrils. Then he turned away.
He walked past all the stuffed animals, didn’t even pay any attention to the tiger, but for some reason Mikhail liked the jay, couldn’t take his eyes off him and kept licking his lips.
Finally they came to the hall where weapons were hung and a piece of the side from the sailing ship "Robber". Suddenly Klimenko shouts:
- Mikhail escaped!
Everyone looked around - no Mikhail!
They ran out into the street - Mikhail was nowhere to be found! We went around the yards to look, maybe he was chasing a dog?
And suddenly they see: the director of the museum is running down the street, holding glasses in his hand, he saw the sailors, stopped, straightened his tie and shouted:
- Now remove the bear!
It turns out that Mikhail was in the farthest room, where there were all sorts of bugs and insects, he lay down in the corner and fell asleep. They woke him up and brought him to the ship. Klimenko tells him:
- Eh, you should only tear tarpaulins on boats, and not go to the museum!
Mikhail disappeared until evening. Only when the signal for dinner was given did he crawl out of the engine room. Mikhail looked guilty and hid in shame.
SEAMAN CRASHPICK
After the voyage, we docked our ship to remove shells and sea grass. There are so many of them on the bottom of the ship that they are preventing the ship from sailing. A whole beard trails behind him across the sea!
The whole team cleaned: some with a scraper, some with brushes, and some shells had to be beaten off with a chisel - they stuck so tightly to the bottom.
We cleaned it and cleaned it, and the boatswain said:
- As soon as we go out to sea, we will grow again: in the sea all sorts of crustaceans and snails are just looking for someone to settle on. There are so many of them, there is not enough seabed, they settle on the bottom of the ship!
Indeed, they are stubborn and do not want to part with the ship.
Finally the whole bottom was cleaned out. We started painting. The boatswain comes up to me and asks:
- Did you clean your nose?
“Yes,” I say, “I am.”
“There,” he says, “you have a healthy sea acorn sticking out, you need to beat it off.”
I went to beat off the sea acorn.
This is a white shell with a lid, and a crustacean is hiding inside, waiting for our ship to go out to sea, then it will open the lid and stick out.
“No,” I think, “you won’t wait!”
I took an iron scraper and began to knock down the acorn with it, but it just wouldn’t budge.
Even evil took over me.
I pressed it even harder, but it chomped inside and didn’t give in, I just opened the lid a little to see who was bothering him.
The entire bottom has already been painted over, only the nose remains. “Eh,” I think, “let him live. Maybe he’s a seafaring crustacean. Since childhood, he didn’t want to live peacefully at the bottom, he clung to our ship and wanders the seas!” When the nose was being painted, I took a brush and painted a circle around the acorn, but didn’t touch it.
I didn’t say anything to the boatswain that there was an acorn left on the bow.
When we went out to sea, I kept thinking about this crustacean: how many more storms will he have to experience?
BEAR CUBS FROM KAMCHATKA
It was in Kamchatka, where green cedars grow along the shores of mountain lakes, and the roar of volcanoes can be heard, and the sky at night lights up with fire from the craters.
A hunter was walking through the Kamchatka taiga and suddenly saw two bear cubs sitting on a tree. He took the gun off his shoulder and thought: “The bear is somewhere close!”
And these were curious bear cubs. They ran away from their mother.
Out of curiosity, one bear cub came down very close to the hunter.
And the other little bear was a coward and only looked from above - he was afraid to go down.
Then the hunter gave them sugar. Then the cubs couldn’t stand it anymore, they climbed down from the tree and began to beg for pieces of sugar from him.
They ate all the sugar, realized that the hunter was not a scary “beast” at all, and the cubs began to play: roll around on the grass, growl, bite...
The hunter sees: cheerful bear cubs. He took them with him and brought them to a hunting hut, on the shore of a large taiga lake.
The cubs began to live with him and swim in the lake.
One bear cub - they called him Pashka - loved to fish, but he couldn’t catch anything except mud and water grass.
Another bear cub - they named him Mashka - was constantly looking for berries and sweet roots in the taiga.
As soon as Pashka gets out of the water, shakes himself off, he begins to do exercises: front paws forward, right paw up, left paw down... and stretches out.
Charging complete!
Pashka did his exercises and began walking around the hut, looking into all the holes, sniffing the logs.
I climbed onto the roof... and there was an unfamiliar beast!
He arched his back and hissed at Pashka!
Pashka wants to make friends with him, but it’s scary.
The cubs lived in a hut, swam in the lake, picked berries, dug up anthills, but not for long.
One day a large bird chirped over the lake. Pashka rushed to run away from her. And Masha, out of fear, climbed onto a branch just above the water, about to fall into the lake.
The bird descended into a taiga clearing, stopped chirping and froze.
The cubs want to come closer and sniff her, but they are afraid, they look at her from afar.
And then the cubs grew bolder and came up.
The pilot gave them sugar, there’s no way to drive them away.
By evening, the pilot put them in the cockpit, and they flew to the ocean shore.
There they were led onto a large ship, which was heading to Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka.
Pashka watched the sailors work on deck all the way.
And Masha wandered around the ship and found a crab.
I took a bite - delicious!
And she started gnawing on it - she really liked the crab.
The ship arrived in Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka.
There, the bear cubs were given to the children, and they began to live in an orphanage.
The guys fed them sugar and milk and brought them tasty roots from the taiga.
Masha ate so much that her stomach hurt.
But Pashka still begs the guys for pieces of sugar.
FOR THE FIRST TIME
In the fall I went to school for the first time. At first I was very afraid: after all, all the guys would tell me where they had been in the summer, but I had never been anywhere. I was ill.
When the teacher asked where everyone was, I said that I was sick. All the guys looked at me, and one girl sighed, and the teacher said that it was nothing. Then everyone was given paper and pencils. Some drew a house and a man near the house, some an apple, and one boy drew a mother with a bottle, as if she was going for milk. I drew a maple leaf. The rain was dripping and the leaf stuck to the glass. I also drew a soda fountain and how it glows at night.
When everyone had drawn, the teacher walked around the class and looked. He said that my leaf looked a little like a shoe, but the boy who drew his mother’s bottle looked like a crutch.
Then one boy began to cry. He was hungry.
There were no more lessons, and the teacher sent us home.
School wasn't scary at all. I walked back with the girl, who sighed. She lives near my house.

“In essence, many of Snegirev’s stories are closer to poetry than to prose - to pure, laconic poetry that infects the reader with love for his native country and nature, in all its manifestations - both small and large.”

K. Paustovsky

March 20 - 85 years since the birth of Gennady Yakovlevich Snegirev (1933 - 2004) - children's writer, naturalist, traveler. He is not only a world-recognized writer who has worked all his life at the department of Moscow State University, but also a professional ichthyologist who is well versed in the habits and behavioral characteristics of animals and birds. Since childhood, I remember Gennady Snegirev’s story “The Camel Mitten.” And also “Inhabited Island”, “About Penguins”, “Chembulak”, “Beaver Hut”, “Wonderful Boat”, “Arctic Fox Land”, “The Cunning Chipmunk”, “About Deer”... Based on the stories of G. Snegirev in primers and anthologies children study in textbooks. His writing language is compared with the language of L. Tolstoy's children's stories and is put on a par with M. Prishvin, E. Charushin, B. Zhitkov.

Millions of former children - in three to five generations - will happily remember short stories and novellas by Gennady Snegirev, but they are unlikely to be able to say who their author is. Millions are not an exaggeration - this is the circulation of hundreds of books by Gennady Snegirev. When you get acquainted with the stories of Gennady Snegirev, a bright, kind world opens up of a man who loves and feels nature, knows and understands people, appreciates their courage, nobility, and love for all living things. Snegirev's stories are as brief as they are poignant. Here is just one phrase from the preface by Konstantin Paustovsky to G. Snegirev’s selection: “ In essence, many of Snegirev’s stories are closer to poetry than to prose - to pure, laconic poetry that infects the reader with love for his native country and nature, in all its manifestations - both small and large».

He was born a children's writer. And looked at the world like children. " I think, he said, that if a children's writer does not perceive real life as a miracle, as a fairy tale, then there is no need to take up the pen and waste time" Before becoming a writer, he tried many professions related to observing animals. He was a trapper, ichthyologist, zookeeper, ornithologist... Before he started publishing, Gennady Snegirev traveled a lot. He sailed as a sailor in the Pacific Ocean, was on various expeditions, wandered with geologists in Eastern Siberia, was a fish farmer, and a hunter. It’s not easy for him to remember all his routes. Yakutia, the White Sea, Tuva, the Arctic, Turkmenistan, the Kuril Islands, Buryatia, Gorny Altai, Kamchatka... - he has been to these parts more than once. He knew all the reserves, taiga and tundra, desert and mountains, seas and rivers. « When I travel around our country, I am always surprised by the cedars in the Sayan Mountains and the whales in the Far Eastern seas... When you are surprised, I want to tell you what a huge country we have and there are so many interesting things everywhere! In the Voronezh Nature Reserve, beavers are bred and relocated to Siberian rivers. In the south, in Lenkoran, there is no winter, but in the Tuva taiga in winter there are such frosts that the trees crack. But the frost does not stop brave hunters from searching for sables and squirrels in the taiga. Schoolchildren also go to the taiga with their teacher and learn to untangle the tracks of animals and make a fire. After all, when they grow up, they will be hunters. You will read about all this in the book, and you will probably want to go everywhere and see everything with your own eyes.», - this is how the writer began his book “In Different Lands”. No wonder Paustovsky wrote about Snegirev: “ Absolutely real and accurate things in Snegirev’s stories are sometimes perceived as a fairy tale, and Snegirev himself - as a guide through a wonderful country whose name is Russia».

This unusual writer has a very checkered biography. Gennady Snegirev was born in Moscow, on Chistye Prudy on March 20, 1933. Mom worked as a librarian at the locomotive depot of the October Railway. As the writer himself recalled: “ My stepfather served 17 years in the camps, building the northern Norilsk railway. He was tortured, and he endured these tortures because his own son was fighting at the front, and he did not want a shadow to fall on him. But the son had already been killed, and if the stepfather had known that he was killed, he would have confessed everything and incriminated himself. I didn’t know my father because my parents divorced before I was born. But my stepfather loved me, he was a theoretical physicist. He ended up in the camps as a result of a denunciation, and they made camp dust out of him. Just. I actually lived without my father" The family could barely make ends meet; Gena learned from childhood what poverty and hunger were. He dreamed of traveling to distant lands: “ As a child, I loved to play this game - bringing a map to life. You look at Chukotka and think: and there, probably, now various adventures are in full swing, the hunters killed the walrus, but they can’t drag him home, and the storm is getting stronger... Or about the taiga, how they look for gold there and whether little boys are accepted in gold diggers or not. And very often my mother wondered why it took me so long to put on stockings in the morning.

“What,” my mother said, “do you want to be late for kindergarten?”

Mom didn’t know that I was traveling at that time».

When the war began, Gena, along with his mother, grandparents, went on evacuation to the Volga steppes, lived in the village, helped an old shepherd tend a flock of sheep, caught minnows in a steppe river with the boys, and fell in love with the steppe for the rest of his life. During the evacuation he was a shepherd. There, near Chapaevsk, he forever remembered the beauty of the Volga steppe.

Returning from evacuation to Moscow, he studied at school, then at two vocational schools, but he still lacked something, as if the school classes were cramped: “ I completed three classes, but they counted me for four - as long as I left the evening school. I was a typical wartime boy. I came to school naked, and when I left, I took my coat from the locker room. I studied at the crafts so that they would give me a work card. Then there was famine… To feed themselves, they had to speculate on something all the time. It was especially profitable to sell cigarettes at retail. Then there were “Cannon”, “Red Star”, “Delhi”. We sold cigarettes, and we had enough to buy biscuits, bread and bring home" At home in the former bathroom, he had a fox taken from the zoo, guinea pigs, dogs, and aquarium fish. And always, no matter how old he was, he was irresistibly drawn in vast Moscow to where he could see animals, birds, wildlife: to the bird market, to the zoo, to the botanical garden... When Gena Snegirev grew up, he began to travel not only on the map. At the age of 10-11, with his friend Felix, he loved to wander through the forests near Moscow: “ And as soon as I heard the cry of a tit in the autumn forest, I forgot about everything... These were the best moments of my life».

One day on the boulevard he saw a crowd of boys surrounding a man in a checkered jacket made from an old plaid. Desperate mischief makers, the terror of the area, stood and listened as if spellbound. Gena made his way through the crowd and also listened. This is how the embryologist Nikolai Abramovich Ioffe entered his life: “ On Chistoprudny Boulevard I saw a man surrounded by our yard punks. The man was tall, wearing a jacket made from a checkered plaid, and he was holding a test tube in his hand. I came close, there was a scorpion preserved in alcohol in a test tube. He told the children about the desert, and they listened that in place of the desert there was the Tethys Sea. Then he pulled out these shark teeth, almost as big as his palm, which were brown with age. And that’s how we met him. And what’s interesting—this also applies to other real scientists—I never felt a difference in age, no matter how old the person was. After all, Joffe was already an old man then..."

There was no need to finish vocational school: I had to earn a living. At the age of thirteen, the future writer began working as a preparator's student at the Department of Ichthyology at Moscow University. At that time, world-famous scientists taught at the Faculty of Biology: N.N. Plavilshchikov, A.N. Druzhinin, P.Yu. Schmidt and others. The teenager learned a lot from them: “ This was my education, because I communicated with old intellectuals, professors... By the way, one of the foreign scientists noted that if the most complex theory cannot be explained to a seven-year-old boy, then this means the theory is flawed. I always received answers from scientists at the simplest level. Communication with them replaced school and everything else for me. In this atmosphere I learned decency, honesty, everything that prevented me from lying my whole life...”. Snegirev became especially attached to Vladimir Dmitrievich Lebedev, who can be considered to have replaced his father. Lebedev, polar pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union, a most modest man, had just returned from the war. Dreams that come true for other boys when they become adults came true for Snegirev in his childhood. At the age of 13, he went on his first long journey to Lake Peipsi. Together - teacher and student - they treated fish, made excavations on Lake Peipsi, the site of the residence of fish-eating tribes of the Quaternary period. Based on the bones and scales of the fish they ate, they reconstructed the breeds and size of fish from thousands of years ago. They were much larger then. They studied fish bones and scales (it turns out that scales, like a cut of a tree, can be used to determine how old a fish is). Soon G. Snegirev became an employee of the laboratory for fish diseases at the Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography. He treated fish for rubella, fungi and other diseases, and even for the first time bred the Far Eastern limneus shrimp and the Amur goby fish in an aquarium. " Then from there I moved to the All-Russian Research Institute of Oceanology - my friend, the artist Kondakov, worked there - the best draftsman of the inhabitants of the seas and oceans, a specialist in cephalopods: octopuses, squids».

At the university, Snegirev began boxing (boys need to be able to stand up for themselves), and although he was thin, if not skinny, of small stature, he became the champion of Moscow among youth flyweights. One day he went into battle sick with a sore throat, after which he suffered a serious heart complication. Both malnutrition and heavy physical exertion took their toll - he was diagnosed with a heart defect. " I had a sore throat when there were competitions for the Moscow championship. And I went out onto the carpet sick. Then I suffered a heart complication and lay motionless in bed for two years, and I was 18 years old. We lived in a room in a communal apartment, where there were 10 other people besides me. My grandmother, drinking tea, said: “Well, now no one needs you, and you cannot be a loader. But Vitya Fokin entered the electromechanical technical school.” She invited some professor Chollet. And I heard them whispering, and he told her that I was hopeless, I would soon die. But I survived. I didn’t want to stay in this room, and I hired myself as a laboratory assistant on an expedition on the Vityaz to study deep-sea fish in the Kuril-Kamchatka depression. Nobody wanted to go on the Vityaz because it had no additional ice lining. Previously, it was used to transport bananas from South America to Europe. I thought this: either I’ll die or I’ll come back healthy. It was a very difficult voyage: it was necessary to sail across the Sea of Okhotsk, the most stormy and coldest, then across the Pacific Ocean - through the Strait of Japan along Tuscarora - to Chukotka. I returned recovered, although since then I have felt tired all the time.”.

The expedition took place in the winter of 1951/52 from Vladivostok to the shores of Chukotka, studying deep-sea fish of the Okhotsk and Bering seas. “Vityaz” left Vladivostok through the ice-free Sangarsky Strait, passed between the islands of Hondo and Hokkaido into the Pacific Ocean and headed to the shores of Chukotka: “ The further we went north, the stronger the storms and snow squalls were. At night, everyone was alerted to use axes to chop off the ice from the rails, from the yards, from the deck. Then the ice fields began. "Vityaz" was without ice lining. And, having reached the latitude of Ugolnaya Bay, he turned back.” « The ship stopped at depth. And all sorts of research was carried out there... Hydrologists measured temperatures at a depth of 400 meters. And we, ichthyologists, had a metal net, a glass like this. So we lowered it, then raised it, and took out everything that fell into the purse at the bottom. Ice water poured from above, the ship was completely frozen, and they chopped the ice with axes, because the ship could become heavy. And so I brought this glass to my laboratory and, pouring it into the vessel, looked at what was there. There one day I came across a lampfish - lampanidus, which was dotted and glowing with blue lanterns. Lampanidus swam at a depth of 400 meters. He lived with me only until the morning, and by morning the flashlights went out and he died. I think he illuminated the way for himself and other fish, no one knows, but otherwise why would he need these light bulbs, these blue lanterns?..”

At the age of 17, he went to work as a trapper at a zoo center. " In the remotest rivers, swamps, and lakes of Belarus, we caught beavers all summer and, when the summer season ended, transported them in a freight car to Omsk, and then, along the Irtysh, to a small tributary river Nazym. And they released me there. I stayed until the beginning of winter to watch them spread throughout Nazim. Beaver observer" For a whole year he caught these amazing animals in the remote swamps of Belarus and transported them in freight cars for acclimatization. I observed how they settled and lived, and later described them in a series of stories “The Beaver Hut”, “The Beaver Watchman”, “The Little Beaver”.

And when he saw the results of his work, he went on a geological expedition to the Central Sayan Mountains, to Tuva. In 1964, together with his teacher, now Professor Lebedev, Snegirev set off on an extraordinary expedition - on a lifeboat, without a motor, under sail, without food supplies, with only salt, sugar, a spinning rod for fishing and a carbine for hunting . Over the course of two summers, the travelers completed an experimental survival voyage along the Siberian Lena River, starting from the upper reaches and ending with the delta in the north of the Arctic. The experimenters not only survived, but also studied environmental changes in the Yakut taiga and the Lena River. The book “On the Cold River” was later written about this journey. Then there were many more trips: to the Kuril Islands, Kamchatka, the White Sea, Lake Teletskoye of the Altai Mountains, to Buryatia, Lenkoran and Voronezh reserves... There were many professions: Snegirev drove reindeer with the reindeer herders of Chukotka, worked as a huntsman in the Kopetdag reserve of Southern Turkmenistan - but nothing one of them did not become a matter of life, just as observations of the animal world did not result in scientific works, which colleagues from the university predicted.

Gennady Snegirev’s life’s work was books, which were born from oral stories to friends and comrades in the sports section. When Gennady Snegirev returned from the Far East, he had something to tell his friends who were gathering at the house of boxer Igor Timchenko. He was an amazing storyteller. Two or three phrases - and a finished story! I could listen to him for hours. He talked about the Pacific Ocean, about beavers, about what was happening to him and around him, and he was an observant and keen-sighted man. Unexpectedly, one of the listeners invited him to record his stories and promised to broadcast them on children's radio. His friend, the poetess Veronika Tushnova, took the stories to the radio, where they were immediately picked up and broadcast. At this time, the editors of “Detgiz” were looking for new interesting writers, and on the radio they were advised to pay attention to Snegirev. So 20-year-old Gennady Snegirev began writing for children.

His first book, “The Inhabited Island,” about the fauna of the Pacific Ocean, was published in 1954. Snegirev was a writer without a desk - he most often dictated his stories over the phone. While the first book was in print, he went on a geological expedition as a collector to collect minerals. Reading Snegirev, you almost physically feel the force of attraction to distant, sparsely populated lands - a special, subtle feature of the human soul. The short story “The Wonderful Boat” begins like this:« I was tired of living in the city, and in the spring I went to the village to visit a fisherman I knew, Mikhei. Mikheev's house stood on the very bank of the Severka River" This “tired” thing arises inside in the spring, and it’s bad for those who cannot fulfill such a desire...” I have been to Central Asia 14 times, only to Samarkand twice. I worked as a forester in Turkmenistan. I was in Bathyz - this is the plateau where Alexander the Great stocked dried meat before invading Persia. There are hyenas, leopards, cobras, there is Indian fauna, pistachio groves, the kingdom of porcupines. I have been to Tuva twice. The last time I wrote a book was about deer. It came out in France. I sailed on the whaler Hurricane."

Even many years later, the writer Snegirev brought his stories to the editorial office not in solemn folders with strings, but on pieces of paper, written haphazardly, up and down, even with errors. But the editors carefully smoothed out the pieces of paper from their travel bag and were ready to sort out any scribbles. One can understand these people: it is very rare that paper words in a book actually sound like the voice of the person sitting next to them. From the very first steps in literature, the writer Gennady Snegirev clearly imagined what kind of book the little reader would expect from him: “ When I see a children's book that is unfamiliar to me, I always think: will this book help the children bring another piece of the map to life?» All the books of the writer Snegirev - “Inhabited Island”, “Chembulak”, “About Reindeer”, “About Penguins”, “Arctic Fox Land”, “Wonderful Boat” and many others - bring to life on the map the steppe, the sea, and the desert, and taiga... Having become a writer, Gennady Snegirev also traveled a lot. And on every journey he made new friends who remained his friends for life.

Snegirev talks about all living things: about crows, bear cubs, moose, camels, beavers and chipmunks, about starlings and penguins, about a baby seal called “squirrel”, and about the small fish lampanidus, which glows in the depths of the cold sea with mysterious blue lights. The writer Snegirev says nothing about himself. He simply writes: “Our ship was sailing in the Gulf of Anadyr...”. Or: “For many days we rode through the taiga on horses...” After this first line, a short story slowly takes shape - just a page, even half a page.

Snegirev's stories are very short - one or two book pages. But, despite the brevity and laconicism of the stories, the child reader receives many impressions and can travel to different places without leaving home. The author's gaze makes you look at everything in these parts and be surprised by everything - because this childish curiosity and surprise lives in him. " I wanted to go everywhere and see everything“- how many times does a similar phrase appear in his stories! With truly childlike freshness, he depicts the state of a child discovering for himself the secret of the extraordinary transformations of nature.

His books are amazing; on their pages, the author, with childlike spontaneity, never tires of being surprised and admired by nature and the animal world. He brought back stories and butterflies from his trips. Madagascar butterflies on the walls look like silk scarves - incredibly large and bright. The stories are like fairy tales. Something unusual is always happening in them, but not everyone notices it. Korney Chukovsky once asked Snegirev about his books: “So it happened?” Snegirev replied: “It could be so.” A remarkable connoisseur of nature, Gennady Snegirev, in his poetic stories, was able to open the child to the world around him in all its fascination and novelty, while involving him in ethical reflections.

Not a single feature of the life of nature, of the life of the taiga, animals, birds and plants escapes him. Snegirev's stories are educational in the broadest sense of the word. In an ordinary puddle, he sees small snails hiding in their shell houses, horned eggs clinging to sea grass or stones. He is fascinated by a “dead” pupa that comes to life and becomes a beautiful butterfly, and a spider with a silver belly, and a water strider beetle on its thin legs. The writer makes us see something that we have not noticed before, feel something that, perhaps, we have never thought about: it turns out that the house of the silver spider is a balloon in which the spiderlings live, and the parent carries air to them; and the little mice, two or three at a time, sleep and fly, clinging to the fur of their mother, the bat; and who would have thought that the octopus loves to be stroked and caressed, and he glues his caviar to a stone and it sways under the water, like white lilies of the valley on thin stems! In Snegirev's stories, all nature is alive. Everything he sounds, breathes, moves, as his word sounds, breathes, moves.

Gennady Snegirev is considered a natural scientist and a master of educational literature. In fact, he is a real poet. Short stories by Gennady Yakovlevich are called prose poems. Moreover, the relationship between poetry and prose is not external, but internal, concluded in the poetic acceptance of the world. There are no works in our children's literature of such crystal purity and touching transparency as Snegirev's. He knew how to create such an unusual and memorable picture using simple means, briefly, without any deliberate beauty, that you see much more than what was said. G. Snegirev's stories are not similar to each other, although they are united by a common theme and style of presentation. He has lyrical sketches, detailed poetic descriptions of the nature, habits and life of animals. Their main meaning is that, following the author, readers learn to see. In the story “Mendume” there is a chapter called “I am learning to see,” which tells how, following the hunter - the Tuvan Mendume - the hero of the story wandered through the taiga. Before that, he had almost never met animals; Mendume taught him to peer intently into the taiga and understand the meaning of what was revealed to an attentive gaze. Snegirev also has funny humorous stories about animals (“Whaling Bear”, “Mikhail”). Snegirev writes about nature and animals, but his stories are densely populated with people. The heroes of his works are reindeer herders, hunters, fishermen, and their children, all of whom work taking care of animals (“Grisha”, “Pinagor”). The reader is not left alone with the forest and field for a moment - he is guided by the lyrical hero of the story.

Each new meeting with animals and birds gives the child hero new knowledge and impressions. A whole portrait gallery of animals was drawn by the writer, and each one has a character. There is the arrogant dog Chembulak, the cunning chipmunk, the curious traveler sparrow, the sweet tame bear Mikhail, the proud white deer Prince, like a real prince, the child-loving lumpfish, and the affectionate baby seal Fedya. The “trick” of the writer himself is that he turns those whom we see often and therefore stop noticing, the smallest and most insignificant, into fabulous strangers, and vice versa, overseas monsters, inhabitants of the seas and ice, brings closer to us, makes family and loved ones. The octopus, this horror of divers, by G. Snegirev looks like a hedgehog (“Octopus”). In order to make a creature that is unlike a person, even menacing, close and related, he depicts it as a cub, and even lost. He draws penguins as boys, mischievous, curious, among whom there are bullies, brawlers, and daredevils (“About Penguins”). However, their life is by no means an idyll. Skuas lie in wait for penguins on the shore, and leopard seals lie in wait at sea.

The reader has a feeling of pity for careless, mischievous creatures, although they are very far from us, and a desire to protect them and protect them. Because of the baby seal, people even turned the ship around to take it to its mother (“Belyok”). The sailors took him off the ice floe, but on the ship the squirrel became sad and refused milk, “and suddenly first one tear rolled from his eyes, then a second, and so they sprinkled him with hail. Belek cried silently.” It becomes especially alarming because the baby was taken to the same place, but placed on another ice floe. And we once again worry with the author: will he, like the “little monster,” find his mother? By evoking a sense of compassion and responsibility for living beings, the story becomes a lesson in kindness. This is what happens in the story “The Camel Mitten.” The boy cut off a piece of bread, salted it and took it to the camel - this is “for the fact that he gave me wool,” and he cut a little wool from each hump so that the camel would not freeze. And he got a new mitten - half red. “And when I look at her, I remember the camel,” the boy ends the story with a feeling of warmth.

Children's literature is not something written by adults for children. This is how a child sees. The writer believed: “ In order to write for children, and even for adults, you need to know life very well and have an ear for the language. If you have no hearing of the language, it is better not to start writing at all. Nothing will come of the composition if you write what you saw, like some people do. They also sign it like this: “a true story.” What it is? If you write for little ones, you must constantly realize that life is a miracle: both in small manifestations and in large ones. But a writer shouldn’t just write. He must change his life all the time, then he will have something to write about... And if you have seen a lot in life, you will never make a mistake, even when thinking about it. The writer must think things through. I love such writers that it is impossible to throw out or insert a single word. After all, in order to write even a short story, you need to select a language for it. Because one word brings to life another. What works for a long story doesn't work for a short story.».

Snegirev's books of various genres - stories, novellas, essays - enjoyed constant success and were republished many times, because these books are amazing, filled with surprise and admiration for what he saw on his numerous travels. After reading them, the little reader himself will want to go to the taiga, to a forest fire, he will want to climb steep mountain slopes, swim across rapids, stormy rivers, ride horses, deer, and dogs. And most importantly, you want to be kind, not only to admire nature, but to protect and preserve it.

The stories of Gennady Snegirev will open up to young readers the amazing world of nature and its inhabitants: birds and animals, chicks and little animals. There is not a drop of fiction in them - after all, everything that the author writes about, he saw with his own eyes, traveling to different parts of our country, trying out many professions and activities: Gennady Snegirev participated in geological expeditions, archaeological excavations, dangerous voyages; I tried my hand at reindeer herding and huntsman, always remaining a sensitive observer of the world around me.

The illustrator of many of G. Snegirev’s books is the artist M. Miturich, they traveled together. Their best book is The Wonderful Boat. The collection takes its name from the story of the same name. This work is programmatic, and especially important for the author - it is not for nothing that the entire publication was named that way. And for readers it is interesting because in it it is easiest to discern the author’s position, to guess his artistic principle: a fabulous, poetic perception of the world combined with scientific accuracy in the depiction of nature and animal life.

His artist friend Viktor Chizhikov recalled the writer interestingly: “ When Snegirev received a long-awaited one-room apartment from the Writers' Union, the first thing he did was build a pool in the center of the only room, then he got a huge sturgeon from somewhere and threw it into this pool. Gena arranged special shows for his friends, for which he even got a fishing rod. Unfortunately, our stay with the sturgeon was short-lived, because... Neighbors downstairs began to receive complaints that the pool was leaking. A commission was called. Snegirev’s mother spoke with the commission. She explained that Gena is a writer, that he writes about nature and animals. So he built a swimming pool and kept sturgeon to watch and write about. The chairman of the commission asked: “Is your son going to write about whales?” The fate of the pool, and with it the sturgeon, was decided. When my son Sasha was five or six years old, I took him to the Zoological Museum on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. At the museum we met Snegirev and his daughter Masha. Gena took us around the museum, telling us about all the exhibits we encountered along the way. There has never been a more interesting museum visit in my life! And finally, he took us to the workshop where stuffed birds and animals were made. From there Masha and Sasha came out with small, very bright and beautiful bouquets. These were bouquets of parrot feathers. It turned out that Snegirev used to work in this museum, and he asked a female employee to make these bouquets for the guys».

From Snegirev’s memoirs: “ We lived on the fifth floor, on Komsomolsky Prospekt. It was a government highway. Sometimes, when I got drunk, I behaved outrageously. Neighbors wrote denunciations against me that I was disorderly on the government highway, thereby insulting the government. One day I decided to build an aquarium there for three tons of water. I found people carrying bricks, mixing cement, inserting glass. But the neighbors got wind and decided that the floor would collapse on them. They contacted the newspaper, and then correspondent Lavrov from Vecherka arrived, who wrote that the writer Snegirev - and the average person has an idea that the writer has an office, typewriters, a telephone on the right - built a swimming pool in his new apartment, where his wife swam naked and then jumped out and danced on a bearskin. It didn't mention that we lived in a one-room apartment. I wanted to make three compartments in the aquarium: for large fish of the chromis family, in another for cold-water ones, in the third - I have not yet decided. But while my wife and I went to the Yalta House of Creativity, a feuilleton came out. My stepfather read it and broke the aquarium, threw bricks from the balcony - at night, so that no one would see, and then died...”

The elder, Archimandrite Seraphim Tyapochkin, became Snegirev’s spiritual father: “ And he always warned me when I left him what would happen to me. This is how I remember now: I came to him for a blessing for leaving: “Bless me for the train tomorrow.” - “The day after tomorrow is better.” He was a man almost two meters tall, but in the photographs he looked bent and small. We stayed, but the train we were supposed to take crashed into another train. d." When asked in an interview whether he believes in God’s providence, he answered: “ Certainly. Sometimes the Lord himself brought me out of troubles. I once miraculously avoided being hit by a train. Or I was walking in Khiva with the artist Pyatnitsky, suddenly I fell dead to the ground - before that I was in mortal anguish - and then after a while I stood up and looked - there was a huge bruise on my heart, a little to the right...»

Snegirev became famous among the Moscow intelligentsia for his short oral - not at all childish - stories. They were admired by K. Paustovsky and Y. Olesha, M. Svetlov and Y. Dombrovsky, N. Glazkov and N. Korzhavin, D. Samoilov and E. Vinokurov, Y. Koval and Y. Mamleev, Y. Aleshkovsky and A. Bitov, artists D. Plavinsky and A. Zverev, L. Bruni and M. Miturich. They tried to write down after him, like V. Glotser, they tried to reproduce his stories from memory, like Bitov - Snegirev’s brilliant syllable became dead in other people’s lips, slipped away, evaporated. And yet, Snegirev was retold, trying to imitate his intonation, quoted, choking with laughter. In Bitov’s work, both in “The Flying Monkov” and in “Waiting for the Monkeys,” Snegirev, transformed by the author’s arbitrariness into the children’s writer Zyablikov, either decorates the narrative with his fabulous stories, or sends the hero on a hypnotic journey across Italy in search of his runaway brother, with whom he talks, having overtaken him somewhere in Venice...

Snegirev died on January 14, 2004. Many of his friends came to say goodbye to Gennady Snegirev; some cried bitterly, parting with this wonderful, “special” man. But already at the wake, when it was time to remember him, laughter suddenly began to sound, which grew into friendly laughter: some kind of sudden joy, fun, as if a truly bright, talented person who had lived an amazing and worthy life did not fit within the time frame allotted to him ...

Snegirev's short stories are just the thing for kids to read.

Camel mitten

My mother knitted me mittens, warm ones, made of sheep’s wool.

One mitten was already ready, but mom only knitted the second one halfway - there wasn’t enough wool for the rest. It’s cold outside, the whole yard is covered with snow, they don’t let me walk without mittens - they’re afraid that I’ll freeze my hands. I’m sitting by the window, watching the tits jumping on the birch tree, quarreling: they probably couldn’t share the bug. Mom said:

Wait until tomorrow: in the morning I’ll go to Aunt Dasha and ask for wool.

It’s good to say “see you tomorrow” to her when I want to go for a walk today! Uncle Fedya, the watchman, is coming from the yard towards us without mittens. But they don't let me in.

Uncle Fedya came in, shook off the snow with a broom and said:

Maria Ivanovna, they brought firewood there on camels. Will you take it? Good firewood, birch.

Mom got dressed and went with Uncle Fedya to look at the firewood, and I looked out of the window, I wanted to see the camels when they came out with the firewood.

Firewood was unloaded from one cart, the camel was taken out and tied at the fence. So big and shaggy. The humps are high, like hummocks in a swamp, and hang to one side. The camel's whole face is covered with frost, and he chews something with his lips all the time - probably he wants to spit.

I look at him, and I think: “Mom doesn’t have enough wool for mittens - it would be nice to cut the camel, just a little, so that it doesn’t freeze.”

I quickly put on my coat and felt boots. I found scissors in the chest of drawers, in the top drawer, where all sorts of threads and needles are, and went out into the yard. He approached the camel and stroked its side. The camel does nothing, just glances suspiciously and chews everything.

I climbed onto the shaft, and from the shaft I sat astride between the humps.

The camel turned to see who was fussing around there, but I was scared: he might spit on me or throw me to the ground. It's high!

I slowly took out a pair of scissors and began to trim the front hump, not all of it, but the very top of the head, where there is more hair.

I trimmed a whole pocket and started cutting from the second hump so that the humps were even. And the camel turned to me, stretched out its neck and sniffed the felt boot.

I was very scared: I thought he would bite my leg, but he just licked the felt boot and chewed again.

I straightened the second hump, went down to the ground and ran quickly into the house. I cut off a piece of bread, salted it and took it to the camel because he gave me wool. The camel first licked the salt and then ate the bread.

At this time, my mother came, unloaded the firewood, took out the second camel, untied mine, and everyone left.

My mother started scolding me at home:

What are you doing? You'll catch a cold without a hat!

I actually forgot to put on my hat. I took the wool out of my pocket and showed it to my mother - a whole bunch, just like sheep's wool, only red.

Mom was surprised when I told her that the camel gave it to me.

Mom spun thread from this wool. It turned out to be a whole ball, it was enough to tie the mitten and there was still some left.

And now I go for walks in new mittens. The left one is ordinary, and the right one is camel. She is half red, and when I look at her, I remember a camel.

Starling

I went for a walk in the forest. The forest is quiet, only sometimes you can hear the trees cracking from the frost.

The trees stand and do not move; there is a blanket of snow on the branches.

I kicked the tree and a whole snowdrift fell on my head.

I began to shake off the snow, and I saw a girl coming. The snow is up to her knees. She rests a little and walks away again, looking up at the trees, looking for something.

Girl, what are you looking for? - I ask.

The girl shuddered and looked at me:

Nothing, it's that simple!

I went out onto the path, I didn’t turn off the path into the forest, otherwise my felt boots were full of snow. I walked a little, my feet were cold. Went home.

On the way back I looked - again this girl in front of me along the path was walking quietly and crying. I caught up with her.

Why, I say, are you crying? Maybe I can help.

She looked at me, wiped away her tears and said:

Mom was airing the room, and Borka, the starling, flew out the window and flew into the forest. Now he will freeze at night!

Why were you silent before?

“I was afraid,” she says, “that you would catch Borka and take it for yourself.”

The girl and I began to look for Borka. We must hurry: it is already getting dark, and at night the owl will eat Borka. The girl went one way, and I went the other. I inspect every tree, Borka is nowhere to be found. I was about to go back, suddenly I heard a girl shouting: “I found it, I found it!”

I run up to her, she stands near the tree and points up:

Here he is! Freeze, poor thing.

And a starling sits on a branch, feathers fluffed up, and looks at the girl with one eye.

The girl calls him:

Borya, come to me, good one!

But Borya just pressed himself against the tree and doesn’t want to go. Then I climbed the tree to catch him.

He just reached the starling and wanted to grab it, but the starling flew over to the girl’s shoulder. She was delighted and hid it under her coat.

Otherwise,” he says, “by the time I get it home, it’ll freeze.”

We went home. It had already become dark, the lights were lit in the houses. I ask the girl:

How long has your starling lived with you?

For a long time.

And she walks quickly, afraid that the starling under her coat will freeze. I follow the girl, trying to keep up. We arrived at her house, the girl said goodbye to me.

Goodbye, she just told me.

I looked at her for a long time while she was clearing the snow from her felt boots on the porch, still waiting for the girl to tell me something else.

And the girl left and locked the door behind her.

Guinea pig

There is a fence behind our garden. I didn’t know who lived there before.

I just recently found out.

I was catching grasshoppers in the grass, and I saw an eye looking at me from a hole in the fence.

Who are you? - I ask.

But the eye is silent and keeps watching, spying on me.

He looked and looked and then said:

And I have a guinea pig!

It became interesting to me: I know a simple pig, but I’ve never seen a guinea pig.

“My hedgehog,” I say, “was alive.” Why a guinea pig?

“I don’t know,” he says. - She probably lived in the sea before. I put her in the trough, but she was afraid of water, broke free and ran under the table!

I wanted to see a guinea pig.

“And what,” I say, “is your name?”

Seryozha. How are you?

We became friends with him.

Seryozha ran after the guinea pig, I looked through the hole behind him. He was gone for a long time. Seryozha came out of the house, carrying some kind of red rat in his hands.

“Here,” he says, “she didn’t want to go, she will have children soon: and she doesn’t like to be touched on her stomach, she growls!”

Where is her little spot?

Seryozha was surprised:

What patch?

Like which one? All pigs have a spot on their nose!

No, when we bought it, it didn’t have a patch.

I began to ask Seryozha what he feeds the guinea pig.

She, she says, loves carrots, but also drinks milk.

Before Seryozha had time to tell me everything, he was called home.

The next day I walked near the fence and looked through the hole: I thought Seryozha would come out and take out the pig. But he never came out. The rain was dripping, and my mother probably didn’t let it in. I started walking around the garden and saw something red lying in the grass under a tree.

I came closer, and this was Seryozha’s guinea pig. I was happy, but I don’t understand how she got into our garden. I began to examine the fence, and there was a hole at the bottom. The pig must have crawled through this hole. I took her in my hands, she doesn’t bite, she just sniffs her fingers and sighs. All wet. I brought the pig home. I looked and looked for carrots, but I couldn’t find them. I gave her a cabbage stalk, she ate the stalk and fell asleep on the rug under the bed.

I sit on the floor, look at her and think: “What if Seryozha finds out who the pig lives with? No, she won’t find out: I won’t take her out into the street!”

I went out onto the porch and heard a car rumble somewhere nearby.

I walked up to the fence, looked through the hole, and there was a truck standing in Seryozha’s yard, things were being loaded onto it. Seryozha is rummaging around with a stick under the porch - probably looking for a guinea pig. Seryozha’s mother put pillows in the car and said:

Seryozha! Hurry up, put on your coat, let's go now!

Seryozha cried:

No, I won't go until I find the pig! She will have children soon, she is probably hiding under the house!

I felt sorry for Seryozha, I called him to the fence.

Seryozha, I say, who are you looking for?

Seryozha came up, and he was still crying:

My pig has disappeared, and now I have to leave!

I tell him:

I have your pig, she ran into our garden. I'll bring it to you now.

Oh,” he says, “how good!” And I was thinking: where did she go?

I brought him a pig and slipped it under the fence.

Seryozha’s mother is calling, the car is already humming.

Seryozha grabbed the pig and said to me:

You know? I will definitely give you a little pig when she gives birth to children. Goodbye!

Seryozha got into the car, his mother covered him with a raincoat because it started to rain.

Seryozha also covered the pig with a cloak. As the car drove away, Seryozha waved his hand at me and shouted something I couldn’t understand - probably about a pig.

Elk

In the spring I was at the zoo. The peacocks were screaming. The watchman drove the hippopotamus into his house with a broom. The bear was begging for pieces on its hind legs. The elephant stamped his foot. The camel moulted and, they say, even spat at one girl, but I didn’t see it. I was about to leave when I noticed a moose. He stood motionless on the hill, far from the bars. The trees were black and wet. The leaves on these trees have not yet blossomed. The elk among the black trees, on long legs, was so strange and beautiful. And I wanted to see a moose in the wild. I knew that moose can only be found in the forest. The next day I went out of town.

The train stopped at a small station. There was a path behind the switchman's booth. It led straight into the forest. It was wet in the forest, but the leaves on the trees had already blossomed. Grass grew on the hillocks. I walked along the path very quietly. It seemed to me that the elk was somewhere close, and I was afraid. And suddenly in the silence I heard: shadow-shadow-shadow, ping-ping-shadow...

Yes, these are not drops at all; A small bird sat on a birch tree and sang as loudly as water falling on a piece of ice. The bird saw me and flew away, I didn’t even have time to see it. I was very sorry that I scared her away, but somewhere far away in the forest she started singing and shading again. I sat down on a stump and began to listen to her.

There was a forest puddle near the stump. The sun illuminated it, and one could see some kind of spider with a silver belly swarming at the bottom. And as soon as I looked carefully at the spider, suddenly the water strider beetle, on its thin legs, as if on ice skates, quickly slid across the water. He caught up with another water strider, and they galloped away from me together. And the spider rose up, took in air on its furry belly and slowly sank to the bottom. There he had a bell tied to a blade of grass with a web. The spider grabbed the air from its abdomen with its paws under the bell. The bell swayed, but the web held it, and I saw a balloon in it. This silver spider has such a house under water, and the spiderlings live there, so he brings air to them. Not a single bird can reach them.

And then I heard someone fiddling and rustling behind the stump on which I was sitting. I quietly looked in that direction with one eye. I see a mouse with a yellow neck sitting and picking dry moss from a stump. She grabbed a piece of moss and ran away. She will lay moss in the mice's holes. The ground is still damp. Behind the forest the locomotive began to whistle, it was time to go home. And I’m tired of sitting quietly and not moving.

When I approached the station, I suddenly remembered: I never saw a moose! Well, let it be, but I saw a silverback spider, a yellow-throated mouse, and a water strider, and I heard a chiffchaff sing. Aren't they as interesting as moose?

Wild animal

Vera had a baby squirrel. His name was Ryzhik. He ran around the room, climbed onto the lampshade, sniffed the plates on the table, climbed up the back, sat on the shoulder and unclenched Vera’s fist with his claws - looking for nuts. Ryzhik was tame and obedient. But one day, on New Year’s Day, Vera hung toys, nuts, and candies on the tree, and as soon as she left the room, she wanted to bring candles, Ryzhik jumped onto the tree, grabbed a nut, and hid it in his galoshes. I put the second nut under the pillow. The third nut was immediately chewed up... Vera entered the room, and there was not a single nut on the tree, only silver pieces of paper were lying on the floor. She shouted at Ryzhik:

What have you done, you are not a wild animal, but a domesticated, tame one!

Ryzhik no longer ran around the table, did not roll on the door, and did not unclench Vera’s fist. He stocked up from morning to evening. If he sees a piece of bread, he’ll grab it, if he sees the seeds, he’ll stuff his cheeks full, and he’ll hide everything. Ryzhik also put sunflower seeds in the guests’ pockets in reserve. Nobody knew why Ryzhik was stocking up. And then my father’s acquaintance came from the Siberian taiga and said that pine nuts did not grow in the taiga, and the birds flew away over the mountain ranges, and the squirrels gathered in countless flocks and followed the birds, and even hungry bears did not lie down in dens for the winter. Vera looked at Ryzhik and said:

You are not a tame animal, but a wild one!

It’s just not clear how Ryzhik found out that there was famine in the taiga.

About the chipmunk

Forest animals and birds are very fond of pine nuts and store them for the winter.

The chipmunk is especially trying. This is an animal like a squirrel, only smaller, and has five black stripes on its back.

When I first saw him, I couldn’t make out at first who it was sitting on the cedar cone - such a striped mattress! The cone sways in the wind, but the chipmunk is not afraid, just know that it is shelling the nuts.

He doesn’t have pockets, so he’s stuffed his cheeks with nuts and is going to drag them into the hole. He saw me, cursed, muttered something: go on your way, don’t bother me, it’s a long winter, you can’t stock up now - you’ll end up hungry!

I don’t leave, I think: “I’ll wait until he carries the nuts and find out where he lives.” But the chipmunk doesn’t want to show his holes, he sits on a branch, folds his paws on his stomach and waits for me to leave.

I walked away - the chipmunk descended to the ground and disappeared, I didn’t even notice where he had disappeared to.

Sly Chipmunk

I built myself a tent in the taiga. This is not a house or a forest hut, but simply long sticks folded together. There is bark on the sticks, and logs on the bark so that pieces of bark are not blown away by the wind.

I began to notice that someone was leaving pine nuts in the tent.

I couldn’t guess who was eating nuts in my chum without me.

It even became scary.

But then one day a cold wind blew, drove up the clouds, and during the day it became completely dark due to the bad weather.

I quickly climbed into the tent, I looked - and my place was already taken. A chipmunk sits in the darkest corner. A chipmunk has a sack of nuts behind each cheek. Thick cheeks, slitted eyes. He looks at me, afraid to spit out the nuts on the ground - he thinks that I will steal them.

The chipmunk endured it, endured it, and spat out all the nuts. And immediately his cheeks became thinner.

I counted seventeen nuts on the ground.

The chipmunk was afraid at first, but then he saw that I was sitting calmly and began to hide the nuts in the cracks and under the logs.

When the chipmunk ran away, I looked - nuts were stuffed everywhere, large, yellow.

Apparently, the chipmunk has built a storage room in my tent. How cunning this chipmunk is! In the forest, squirrels and jays will steal all his nuts. And the chipmunk knows that not a single thieving jay will get into my tent, so he brought his supplies to me.

And I was no longer surprised if I found nuts in the plague. I knew that a cunning chipmunk lived with me.

Beaver lodge

A hunter I knew came to see me.

Let’s go,” he says, “I’ll show you the hut.” A beaver family lived in it, but now the hut is empty.

I've been told about beavers before. I wanted to take a better look at this hut. The hunter took his gun and went. I'm behind him. We walked for a long time through the swamp, then made our way through the bushes.

Finally we came to the river. On the shore there is a hut, like a haystack, only made of branches, tall, taller than a man.

Do you want, the hunter asks, to climb into the hut?

But how, I say, can you fit into it if the entrance is under water?

We began to break it apart from above - it did not give in: it was all coated with clay. They barely made a hole. I climbed into the hut, sat bent over, the ceiling was low, twigs were sticking out everywhere, and it was dark. I felt something with my hands, it turned out to be wood shavings. The beavers made their bedding from the shavings. Apparently I ended up in the bedroom. I climbed lower - there were twigs there. The beavers gnawed the bark off them, and the branches were all white. This is their dining room, and on the side, lower, there is another floor, and a hole goes down. Water splashes in the hole. On this floor the floor is earthen and smooth. Here the beavers have a canopy. A beaver climbs into a hut, and water flows from it into three streams. The beaver in the canopy wrings out all the fur dry, combs it with its paw, and only then goes to the dining room. Then the hunter called me. I crawled out and shook myself off the ground.

Well, - I say, - and the hut! I would like to stay alive myself, but I don’t have enough stove!

Beaver

In the spring, the snow quickly melted, the water rose and flooded the beaver's hut. The beavers dragged the beaver cubs onto dry leaves, but the water rose even higher, and the beaver cubs had to swim away in different directions. The smallest beaver was exhausted and began to drown. I noticed him and pulled him out of the water. I thought it was a water rat, and then I saw the tail with a spatula, and I guessed that it was a beaver.

At home, he spent a long time cleaning and drying himself, then he found a broom behind the stove, sat down on his hind legs, took a twig from the broom with his front legs and began to gnaw on it. After eating, the beaver collected all the sticks and leaves, tucked it under itself and fell asleep. I listened to the little beaver snoring in his sleep. “Here,” I think, “what a calm animal - you can leave him alone, nothing will happen!”

Little monster

Our ship was sailing in the Gulf of Anadyr. It was night. I was standing at the stern. The ice floes rustled over the sides and broke. A strong wind and snow were blowing, but the sea was calm, the heavy ice did not allow it to rage. The ship made its way between the ice floes at low speed. The ice fields will begin soon. The captain steered the ship carefully so as not to crash into the ice.

Suddenly I heard something splashing right next to the side, even the ship rocked on the wave.

I look: some kind of monster is overboard. It will float away, then come closer and sigh heavily. It disappeared, appeared in front of the ship, surfaced at the very stern, the water glowing with green light from its splashes.

Whale! I can’t figure out which one.

Seals leave their babies on the ice, and only in the morning the mother swims up to the baby, feeds him milk and swims away again, and he lies on the ice all day, all white, soft, like a plush. And if it weren’t for his big black eyes, I wouldn’t have noticed him.

They put the squirrel on the deck and swam further.

I brought him a bottle of milk, but he didn’t drink the squirrel, but crawled towards the side. I pulled him back, and suddenly, first one tear rolled out of his eyes, then a second, and they started to fall like hail. Belek cried silently. The sailors made a noise and said that they should quickly put him on that ice floe. Let's go to the captain. The captain grumbled and grumbled, but still turned the ship around. The ice had not yet closed, and along the water path we came to the old place. There the squirrel was again placed on a blanket of snow, only on another ice floe. He almost stopped crying. Our ship sailed on.

Michael

On one ship lived a tame bear, Mikhail. One day a ship returned from a long voyage to Vladivostok. All the sailors began to go ashore, and Mikhail was with them. They wanted to not let him in, they locked him in the cabin - he began to scratch the door and roar terribly, so that you could hear him on the shore.

They released Mikhail and gave him an iron barrel to roll on the deck, and he threw it into the water: he didn’t want to play, he wanted to go ashore. They gave him a lemon. Mikhail saw through it and made a terrible face; looked at everyone in bewilderment and barked - they deceived them!

The captain did not want to let Mikhail ashore because there was such a case. We played football on the shore with the sailors of another ship. At first Mikhail stood calmly, watched, only biting his paw with impatience, and then he couldn’t stand how he would growl and rush onto the field! He dispersed all the players and began to kick the ball around. How it will catch you with your paw, how it will catch you! And then as soon as it hooks, the ball just booms! And it burst. How can he be allowed ashore after this? And it’s impossible not to let it in, it’s such a huge thing: while it was small it was a ball, but when it grew it became a whole ball. We rode him, he doesn’t even squat. The strength is such that the sailors will begin to pull the rope - as much as they have, and Mikhail will pull from the other end - the sailors will fall onto the deck.

We decided to let Mikhail ashore, only with a collar, and watch carefully so that the dog does not meet him, otherwise he will break out and run after him. They put a leather collar on Mikhail. Boatswain Klimenko, the strongest on the ship, wrapped the strap around his hand, and Mikhail and the sailors went to the local history museum. They came to the museum, bought tickets, and Mikhail was tied near the entrance, in the kindergarten, by a cast-iron cannon; he couldn’t move it from its place. They walked around the crawl space in the museum, and the director came running:

Remove your bear! He doesn't let anyone in!

Klimenko ran outside and looked: Mikhail was standing in the doorway, a piece of a strap was dangling around his neck, and he was not letting anyone into the museum. A whole crowd of people gathered. It was Mikhail who was used to taking bribes on the ship. As soon as the sailors go ashore, he waits at the gangway; the sailors knew: if you were coming from the shore, you had to give Mikhail candy, then he would let you board the ship. It’s better not to show yourself without candy - he’ll press you and won’t let you in. Klimenko got angry and shouted at Mikhail:

Shame on you, glutton!

Mikhail was frightened, he even covered his ears and closed his eyes. He was afraid of Klimenko alone and obeyed him.

Klimenko took him by the collar and brought him to the museum. Mikhail immediately became quiet, did not leave the sailors, examined the portraits on the walls, photographs, stuffed animals behind the glass. They barely pulled him away from the stuffed bear. He stood there for a long time, flaring his nostrils. Then he turned away. He walked past all the stuffed animals, didn’t even pay any attention to the tiger, but for some reason Mikhail liked the jay, couldn’t take his eyes off him and kept licking his lips. Finally they came to the hall where weapons were hung and a piece of the side from the sailing ship “Robber”. Suddenly Klimenko shouts:

Mikhail has escaped!

Everyone looked around - no Mikhail! They ran out into the street - Mikhail was nowhere to be found! We went around the yards to look, maybe he was chasing a dog? And suddenly they see: the director of the museum is running down the street, holding glasses in his hand, he saw the sailors, stopped, straightened his tie and shouted:

Remove the bear now!

It turns out that Mikhail was in the farthest room, where there were all sorts of bugs and insects, he lay down in the corner and fell asleep. They woke him up and brought him to the ship. Klimenko tells him:

Eh, you should only tear tarpaulins on boats, and not go to the museum!

Mikhail disappeared until evening. Only when the signal for dinner was given did he crawl out of the engine room. Mikhail looked guilty and hid in shame.

Bear cubs from Kamchatka

It was in Kamchatka, where green cedars grow along the shores of mountain lakes, and the roar of volcanoes can be heard, and the sky at night lights up with fire from the craters. A hunter was walking through the Kamchatka taiga and suddenly saw two bear cubs sitting on a tree. He took the gun off his shoulder and thought: “The bear is somewhere close!” And these were curious bear cubs. They ran away from their mother. Out of curiosity, one bear cub came down very close to the hunter. And the other little bear was a coward and only looked from above - he was afraid to go down. Then the hunter gave them sugar. Then the cubs couldn’t stand it anymore, they climbed down from the tree and began to beg for pieces of sugar from him. They ate all the sugar, realized that the hunter, the “beast,” was not at all scary, and the cubs began to play: lying on the grass, growling, biting... The hunter sees: cheerful cubs. He took them with him and brought them to a hunting hut, on the shore of a large taiga lake.

The cubs began to live with him and swim in the lake. One bear cub - they called him Pashka - loved to fish, but he couldn’t catch anything except mud and water grass. Another bear cub - they named him Mashka - was constantly looking for berries and sweet roots in the taiga. As soon as Pashka gets out of the water, shakes himself off, he begins to do exercises: front paws forward, right paw up, left paw down... and stretches out. Charging complete! Pashka did his exercises and began walking around the hut, looking into all the holes, sniffing the logs. I climbed onto the roof... and there was an unfamiliar beast! He arched his back and hissed at Pashka! Pashka wants to make friends with him, but it’s scary.

The cubs lived in a hut, swam in the lake, picked berries, dug up anthills, but not for long. One day a large bird chirped over the lake. Pashka rushed to run away from her. And Masha, out of fear, climbed onto a branch just above the water, about to fall into the lake. The bird descended into a taiga clearing, stopped chirping and froze. The cubs want to come closer and sniff her, but they are afraid, they look at her from afar. And then the cubs grew bolder and came up. The pilot gave them sugar, there’s no way to drive them away. By evening, the pilot put them in the cockpit, and they flew to the ocean shore. There they were led onto a large ship, which was heading to Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka. Pashka watched the sailors work on deck all the way. And Masha wandered around the ship and found a crab. I took a bite - delicious! And she started gnawing on it - she really liked the crab. The ship arrived in Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka. There, the bear cubs were given to the children, and they began to live in an orphanage. The guys fed them sugar and milk and brought them tasty roots from the taiga. Masha ate so much that her stomach hurt. But Pashka still begs the guys for pieces of sugar.

Cedar

As a child, I was given a pine cone. I loved to pick it up and look at it, and I was always amazed at how big and heavy it was—a real chest of nuts. Many years later I came to the Sayan Mountains and immediately found cedar. It grows high in the mountains, the winds tilt it to one side, trying to bend it to the ground, twist it. And the cedar clings to the ground with its roots and stretches higher and higher, all shaggy with green branches. At the ends of the branches there are cedar cones hanging: in some places there are three, in others there are five at once. The nuts are not yet ripe, but many animals and birds live around. The cedar feeds them all, so they wait for the nuts to ripen. The squirrel will knock the pine cone to the ground, take out the nuts, but not all of them - just one will remain. This nut will drag a mouse into its hole. She doesn’t know how to climb trees, but she also wants nuts. The tits jump on the cedar all day long. If you listen from afar, the whole cedar is chirping. In autumn, even more animals and birds live on the cedar tree: nutcrackers and chipmunks sit on the branches. In winter they are hungry, so they hide pine nuts under stones and bury them in the ground as a reserve. When the first snowflakes begin to fall from the sky, there will be no cones left on the cedar tree. But the cedar doesn’t mind. It stands all alive and stretches its green branches higher and higher towards the sun.

Chembulak sat on the floor and looked into my mouth. And then he grabbed a candle from the table and chewed it. Grandfather will think that I hid the candle so that I could light it later. I wanted to take the candle away, but Chembulak would growl. I climbed onto the table and threw a felt boot at Chembulak. He screamed and ran out of the hut.

In the evening, grandfather came, and with him Chembulak.

- Tell me why you offended Chembulak, he ran to my village and told me everything.

I got scared and said about the bread. And about felt boots too. I think it’s true that Chembulak told his grandfather everything. This is not a simple dog, but a cunning, cunning one!

Many writers - both Russian and foreign - devoted their work to nature, praising it in various forms: in the form of poems, fables, stories, novellas and novels. Such authors include Ivan Krylov, who is considered the most famous Russian fabulist; Sergei Yesenin, who wrote many poems about his native land; the great Alexander Pushkin, whose lines from the poem “Sad time! The charm of the eyes! many remember by heart; Rudyard Kipling, who created The Jungle Book, many of the stories from which were filmed.

Biography of Gennady Snegirev

The future writer was born on March 20, 1933 in Moscow. Gennady Snegirev’s childhood cannot be called prosperous: his father died in one of Stalin’s camps, and his mother worked in the library at the locomotive depot. The librarian's salary was often not enough even for the basic necessities, so the boy had to experience hunger and need early on.

After graduating from elementary school, Gennady Snegirev entered a vocational school. However, it took a lot of time, and I had to give up my studies to earn a living.

At the age of 13, Snegirev got a job at Moscow University as an assistant to scientist Vladimir Lebedev, who held the position of preparator at the department of ichthyology. Lebedev and Gennady Snegirev studied fish bones and scales and carried out excavations.

The boy began boxing and, despite his short stature and thin body, was the city champion in his weight category. However, he also had to leave the sport due to a discovered heart defect.

At the age of 17, Gennady Snegirev went on an expedition to study fish in the Bering and Okhotsk seas. After returning, he became interested in beavers and spent a year studying these animals. The result was Gennady Snegirev's stories about beavers.

The writer continued his expeditions. Together with Lebedev, they made a voyage along the Lena River in order to study environmental changes in the taiga. After this there were many more different trips: to Altai, Kamchatka, Buryatia and other parts of Russia. However, contrary to everyone's expectations, Snegirev did not become a scientist. He chose literature as his life's work.

Snegirev's stories. "Inhabited Island"

The first book, a collection of stories about nature, included 4 short works. All of them are united by one theme and tell about the fauna of the Pacific Ocean. Snegirev wrote them based on his personal observations during one of the expeditions.

One of the stories by writer Gennady Snegirev, included in this collection, is called “Lampanidus”. Lampanidus is a small fish, sometimes called a “lamp fish” due to the fact that small lights with a bluish glow are located throughout its body.

The story “The Inhabited Island,” from which the book takes its name, tells of a landing on a small island, on which only the guillemot bird is found among living creatures.

"Little Monster"

“The Little Beaver” was written by Gennady Snegirev while studying beavers, their life and behavior. As the title suggests, the main character of the story is a little beaver, who, due to the rising water in the river in the spring, swam far from his home and got lost.

The story "The Cunning Chipmunk" begins with the hero, probably a hunter, discovering that someone is leaving pine nuts in his home. It was a chipmunk who dragged all his supplies here so that jays and other animals would not steal them.

“Little Monster” is another work written after an expedition to explore the Bering Sea. Something is discovered overboard the ship, which the author first calls a “monster,” and later turns out to be a baby sperm whale that mistook the ship for another whale.

"Deer in the Mountains"

The illustrations for this collection were created by artist Mai Miturich. Together, Miturich and Snegirev form an ideal creative tandem - the stories and drawings complement each other, making them more lively and accurate.

The book is more voluminous than previous collections: it includes five dozen stories. Not only new works were included, but also those already familiar to readers - “Lampanidus”, “The Cunning Chipmunk”, “The Beaver” and others.

Snegirev created not only stories - he also authored two stories: “About Deer” and “About Penguins”. One of them was included in this collection.

Snegirev wrote the story “About Reindeer” during his expedition to Chukotka. It consists of 10 parts and tells about the writer’s journey through the taiga in the company of the reindeer herder Chodu.

"Arctic fox land"

Gennady Snegirev’s story “The Arctic Fox Land” is more voluminous compared to most of the writer’s works, so it was published as a separate book, and not just as part of collections.

The main character is a boy named Seryozha, who lives in Vladivostok. One day he ends up on an island where arctic foxes live. There Seryozha meets a girl, Natasha, and by force of circumstances they have to live alone on the island for some time. After some time, returning home, Seryozha does not forget about Pestsovaya Land and hopes to someday get there again.

"About Penguins"

Another story by Gennady Snegirev is “About Penguins,” first published in 1980 by the Children's Literature publishing house.

As you can guess from the title, the main characters are penguins who live “near Antarctica on a small island on the African side.” The story contains 8 parts, each of which tells about a specific episode in the life of these birds.

Like many of his works, the writer created this story based on his observations during the trip, so Snegirev was able to accurately and realistically describe the behavior of penguins in all sorts of situations.

"Hunting Stories"

The collection “Hunting Stories” is a cycle of stories about a boy, whose name is not given, and his hunter grandfather. They live in a small hut next to a stream. Grandfather has a hunting dog named Chembulak.

The cycle includes 4 stories. The narration comes from the perspective of a boy who talks about various episodes from his daily life, about how he goes hunting with his grandfather and Chembulak, and about the animals that they meet.

For example, in the story “Fur Skis,” the main character is a moose, whom a boy meets in a clearing in winter while walking on his grandfather’s fur skis.

Gennady Yakovlevich SNEGIREV

Wonderful boat

Stories

Wonderful boat

Camel mitten

Guinea pig

Wild animal

Who plants the forest

Restless Ponytail

Chipmunk

Sly Chipmunk

Butterfly in the snow

Night bells

Beaver keeper

Beaver lodge

Beaver

In the nature reserve

Blueberry jam

Lake Azas

Camel dance

Forester Tilan

Sea carp

In Lankaran

Smart porcupine

Little monster

How a sparrow visited Kamchatka

Teddy bear whaler

Lampanidus

Inhabited island

Octopuses

Octopus

Brave stickleback

Sailor crustacean

Bear cubs from Kamchatka

For the first time

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WONDERFUL BOAT

I was tired of living in the city, and in the spring I went to the village to visit a fisherman I knew, Mikhei. Mikheev's house stood on the very bank of the Severka River.

As soon as it was light, Micah set off on a boat to go fishing. There were huge pikes in Severka. They kept all the fish at bay: they came across roaches straight from the pike’s mouth - the scales on their sides were torn off, as if they had been scratched by a comb.

Every year Micah threatened to go to the city for pike lures, but he just couldn’t get it together.

But one day Micah returned from the river angry, without fish. He silently dragged the boat into the burdocks, told me not to let the neighbor’s kids in, and went to town to get some lures.

I sat by the window and watched a wagtail run around the boat.

Then the wagtail flew away and the neighbor's guys approached the boat: Vitya and his sister Tanya. Vitya examined the boat and began to drag it towards the water. Tanya sucked her finger and looked at Vitya. Vitya shouted at her, and together they pushed the boat into the water.

Then I left the house and said that it was impossible to take the boat.

Why? - Vitya asked.

I didn't know why.

Because,” I said, “this boat is wonderful!”

Tanya took her finger out of her mouth.

Why is she wonderful?

“We’ll just swim to the turn and back,” said Vitya.

It was a long way to the river turn, and while the guys swam back and forth, I kept coming up with something wonderful and surprising. An hour has passed. The guys came back, but I still couldn’t come up with anything.

Well, - Vitya asked, - why is she wonderful? A simple boat, it even ran aground once and is leaking!

Yes, why is she wonderful? - asked Tanya.

Didn't you notice anything? - I said, and I tried to quickly come up with something.

No, we didn’t notice anything,” Vitya said sarcastically.

Of course, nothing! - Tanya said angrily.

So, that means you didn’t notice anything? - I asked loudly, but I myself wanted to run away from the guys.

Vitya fell silent and began to remember. Tanya wrinkled her nose and also began to remember.

We saw traces of a heron in the sand,” Tanya said timidly.

We also saw how it was swimming, only its head was sticking out of the water,” said Vitya.

Then they remembered that the water buckwheat had bloomed, and they also saw a white water lily bud under the water. Vitya told how a flock of fry jumped out of the water to escape the pike. And Tanya caught a big snail, and there was also a small snail sitting on the snail...

Isn't all this wonderful? - I asked.

Vitya thought and said:

Wonderful!

Tanya laughed and shouted:

How wonderful!

CAMEL MITTEN