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Trappers hunt these animals just for their furs, to be made into coats to keep people warm. One small animal, called the ermine, has a snow-white coat and a tail with a black tip. The ermine hates dirt or anything that will soil his white fur, so he keeps himself spotless. It is for this reason that the official robes of judges and kings are made of the fur of the ermine, as a sign that they too must be pure and clean in heart and mind. The skins of many such animals are sewn together to make a single cape or coat, which then looks white with little black tails spotted regularly over it.
The longest railway in the World is built through the bottom part of Siberia. It is so long it takes two weeks to go from one end of it to the other. One end of it on the Pacific Ocean is called Vladivostok and the other end in Russia is Moscow. It is called the Trans-Siberian Railway, which means the Across Siberia Railway.
Most of the people in Siberia live along this railway, and yet one may travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a town or even a house. Often the towns are far from the railroad, so that there is a long drive fromthe station to the town. The engines that draw the trains are fired by wood instead of coal, and along the railroad there are piles of wood at which the train stops to get fuel, as a car would stop to get gasoline. The chief Siberian cities end in “sk.” They are Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk.
A stranger once asked a man on the street how far it was to the railway station. The man replied, “If you keep on going the way you are headed it is twenty-five thousand miles, but if you turn round it’s two blocks.”
