Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/169

much vicious enjoyment as possible. Hundreds, if not thousands, of convicts look forward with eagerness to enrolment in the free command merely on account of the opportunities that it affords for escape. Every summer, when the weather becomes warm enough to make life out of doors endurable, the free command begins to overflow into the forests; and for two or three months a narrow but almost continuous stream of escaping convicts runs from the Kará penal settlements in the direction of Lake Baikál. The signal for this annual movement is given by the cuckoo, whose notes, when first heard in the valley of the Kará, announce the beginning of the warm season. The cry of the bird is taken as an evidence that an escaped convict can once more live in the forests; and to run away, in convict slang, is to "go to General Kukúshka for orders." [Kukúshka is the Russian name for the cuckoo.] More than 200 men leave the Kará free command every year to join the army of "General Kukúshka"; and in Siberia, as a whole, the number of runaway exiles and convicts who take the field in response to the summons of this popular officer exceeds 30,000. Most of the Kará convicts who "go to General Kukúshka for orders" in the early summer come back to the mines under new names and in leg-fetters the next winter; but they have had their outing, and have breathed for three whole months the fresh, free air of the woods, the mountains, and the steppes. With many convicts the love of wandering through the trackless forests and over the great plains of Eastern Siberia becomes a positive mania. They do not expect to escape altogether; they know that they must live for months the life of hunted fugitives, subsisting upon berries and roots, sleeping on the cold and often water-soaked ground, enduring hardships and miseries innumerable, and facing death at almost every step. But, in spite of all this, they cannot hear in early summer the first soft notes of the cuckoo without feeling an intense, passionate longing for the adventures and ex-