With the development of city life on Sakhalin there is a slowly increasing need for marketplaces. An area has already been set aside in Alexandrovsk where women sell vegetables, and it is not rare to meet exiles on the streets selling cucumbers and various greens. In some Southern areas, as in First Drop, truck gardening has already become a serious business.5
Agriculture is considered the main occupation of the exiles. Secondary occupations, which provide additional earnings, are hunting and fishing. From a hunter's point of view, vertebrates are plentiful on Sakhalin. Sable, fox and are the animals most valuable to merchants, and they inhabit the island in especially large numbers.0 Sable over- run the entire island. I was told that recently, as a result of forest fires and the cutting down of timber, the sable have abandoned the populated areas for more distant forests. I do not know how true this is. In my presence an inspector fired his revolver at a sable crossing a log over a stream just outside the Vladimirovka setclement, and the exile hunters with whom I was able to talk usually hunt quite close to the setdcments. In former times bears did not attack people or domestic animals and were considered rather meek ani- mals, but when the exiles began setding along the head- waters of thc rivers, cutting down the forcsts and barring their access to the fish which were their chief food, the Sakhalin church records and the official rcports began to record a new cause of dcath: "Clawed by a bear." The bear is now regarded as a dangerous natural phenomenon, and thc war against bears is not regarded as a sport. They also find deer and musk deer, otter, wolverine and lynx, rarely a wolf, and even more rarely an ermine or a tiger.7 In spite of this wcalth of game, hunting as a commercial endeavor is virtually nonexistent in the colony.
The exiled kulaks who are making a fortune in tradc deal in furs which they obtain from the nativcs for a pittance, in exchange for alcohol. This has nothing to do with hunting, however, but with another kind of industry. There arc so few hunters that they can be counted. The majority arc not professional hunters but men who have a passion for hunting, sportsmen who hunt with inferior weapons and wichout dogs merely for the pleasure of it. They dispose of their game at an absurdly low price or squander it on alcohol. One setder in Korsakov who tried to sell me a dead swan asked for "three rubles or a botde of vodka."
We must assume that hunting in the exile colony will never become a commercial venture, just because it is an exile colony. In order to hunt professionally a person must be free, courageous and healthy, but the overwhelming ma- jority of convicts are people of weak characters, neurotic and indecisive. They were not hunters in their homeland, and they do not know how to handle guns. This free under- taking is so alien to their depressed souls that a settler would rather butcher a calf taken on credit from the gov- ernment, even though he is then threatened with dire punishment, than go out and shoot wood grouse or rabbits. Then there is the question whether the widespread develop- ment of hunting is desirable in a colony where the ma- jority of the people sent here for correction are murderers. A former murderer should not be permitted to kill animals frequently, nor should he be permitted to do the bestial things which are very nearly necessities in hunting, like stabbing a wounded deer, or cutting the throat of a downed partridge, etc.
Sakhalin's chief wealth and its hope for the future, which may perhaps become auspicious and enviable, lies with the migratory fish, not the game animals, nor the coal, as some think. Some or perhaps all of the fry carried by the rivers into the ocean return annually to the mainland as migratory fish. The keta, a fish of the salmon family which in size, color and taste resembles our own salmon and inhabits the northern Pacific Ocean, enters the Sibe- rian and North American rivers at a certain period of its development ar.d with irrepressible strength, in absolutely incalculable numbers, swims upstream against the current, reaching the very highest mountain streams. On Sakhalin this occurs at the end of July or in the first third of August. The mass of fish observed at this time is so great and its run is so precipitous and so extraordinary that anyone who has not seen this magnificent phenomenon cannot actually understand it. The swiftness and density of the run can be judged by the surface of the river, which seems to be seething. The water has a fishy taste, the oars are jammed, and the blades propel the obstructing fish into the air.
The keta (Siberian salmon) are healthy and strong when they enter the mouth of the river, but the constant struggle against the fierce current, the compact throng of fish, hunger, friction, collisions with bushes and rocks, all these exhaust them; they become gaunt, their bodies are covered with bruises, the meat becomes white and flaccid, and the teeth protrude. The keta so completely change their characteristics that the uninitiated assume they have be- come another fish, and they call it not keta but lancet fish. The keta slowly weaken and can no longer battle against the current. They submerge or hide behind bushes with their mouths buried in the soil. At such times you can pick them up with your hands; even a bear can reach them with his paw. Finally, exhausted by their sexual cravings and by their hunger, they die. By this time many dead fish can be seen halfway along the stream, but the banks of the upper reaches of the rivers are covered with dead fish exud- ing a foul stench. All the sufferings endured by the fish during their erotic journey culminate in "a nomadic thrust wward dcath," for they always lead w death, and not a single fish returns w the ocean; all perish in the rivers. Hillendorf says: "The irresistible impulse of an erotic craving for death is the basic concept of nomadism; such indeed are the ideas of these stupid cold fish!"
The herring runs which periodically occur along the seacoast in the spring, usually in the second half of April, are no less extraordinary. The herring arrive in enormous shoals, "in absolutely unbelievable quantities," in the words of one observer. The approach of the herring can always be detected: a circular band of white foam covering a tre- mendous stretch of sea, flocks of gulls and albatrosses, whales spouting, herds of sea lions. The scene is magnifi- cent! The number of whales following the herring imo the Aniva is so great that Krusenstern's ship was encircled by them, and it was only "with extreme caution" that they could reach the bank. During the herring run the sea ap- pears to be boiling over.8
It is impossible to give an approximate figure to the amount of fish which can be caught here whenever there is a run in the Sakhalin rivers or along the shore. Only maximum figures would be appropriate.
At all events it may be said without exaggeration that fishing on Sakhalin during the runs, properly organized on a broad foundation for the markets which have long existed in Japan and China, would produce untold profits. When the Japanese controlled Southern Sakhalin and their fishing had barely begun to develop, they were already earning half a million rubles profit annually. According to Mitsul, blub- ber oil from Southern Sakhalin filled 6ii caldrons and up to i sazhens of wood were burned in order to render the blubber, while the herring alone brought 295,806 rubles annually.
\X'ith Russia's occupation of Southern Sakhalin, fishing went into the decline which continues to the present day. L. Dcytcr° wrote in 1880: "Where life recently seethed, providing food for the native Ainus and substantial profits for the entrepreneurs, there is now a wilderness." The fish- ing by our exiles in both Northern districts is insignificant; it cannot be described in any other way. I was on the Tym when the keta run had already arrived at the upper reaches, and here and there on the green banks I saw occasional fishermen pulling out half-dead fish with pothooks attached to long poles.