If there were no Korean peacocks before, in such a cold and humid environment, hunters would usually need to go through it for several weeks before they could wash and dry their clothes.
It can be said that although mining mammoth ivory is a hugely profitable industry, it is really very painful. Not to mention the food and drink, the living environment is too harsh.
The place where I live is damp and cold, and I have to deal with water and ice when I work. It will definitely not be easy to dry the wet clothes.
But because of the existence of Han Peacock, they no longer have to worry about all this. Now they just need to find the mammoth fossil and dig it out quickly.
Not having to transport it back from here definitely saved them a lot of time, and they actually had no resistance to selling ivory to Korean peacocks.
Because even if it turns out that from the tundra to the market, more than 90% of the mammoth tusks unearthed in the Siberian tundra were eventually sold to China.
In fact, some ivory will also be processed in Russia, and these works of art will be sold domestically in Russia, but the demand for these works of art in the Chinese market is much greater.
In China, the price of ivory can reach about US$800 per pound, while in Russia, the best ivory can only sell for US$250 per pound.
Most of the people who follow Han Peacock now are local Yakuts. In Siberia, villagers often dig something on the coast. People who don’t know about it will be very surprised by their behavior, because there is nothing but soil in the digging area.
It doesn't look like anything else.
The locals won't explain it. They spend a lot of time digging out the mud, and they will be very excited when the strange sharp corners are revealed.
In more than 2000 BC, the Egyptians were building the pyramids, and in remote Siberia, the last batch of mammoths disappeared from the planet.
Thousands of years have passed, and all solid and huge existences have turned into fossils and been frozen under the permanent frozen soil.
What about the humans who once hunted them? They turned into dust that was worse than fossils and disappeared into the place we call the past.
In recent years, well-preserved mammoths with all their flesh, flesh, and fur have been discovered in the Siberian permafrost. They have been waiting in the cold for thousands of years, as if just to prove the insignificance of human beings.
Surrounding this mammoth cemetery, the Yakut people have lived for generations, and their ancestors hunted the mammoths for their fur and meat.
The Yakuts are a Russian ethnic minority, and most of them live in Yakutsk. Of course, the Yakuts are distributed in China and call themselves the Sakha people.
There is a group of Evenkis in China who were once called Yakuts, which was an erroneous name used by the Russian and Japanese invaders. They are mainly distributed in the Yakut Autonomous Republic, and some are scattered in Evenki and Tai in the north of Krasnoyarsk.
The Mer ethnic area, as well as Magadan, Sakhalin Island, and the Heilongjiang River Basin, belong to the Siberian type of Mongoloid race.
They speak Yakut language, which is divided into multiple dialects and belongs to the Turkic language family of the Altaic language family.
Nowadays, there is a new business in this cold land of the far north. The Yakuts have begun to make a living by searching for the valuable tusks of mammoths. They are called ivory hunters.
On the cold and isolated Siberian ice sea, hunters sail. Good luck does not always favor them. Sometimes, they can search for 18 hours a day for five months in a row, but without any results.
The hunter's prey is ivory frozen in ice. They do not have the guidance of hounds or the guide of scent. They can only follow the path of their ancestors and search over and over again in the vast Arctic region.
Cold and hunger are weapons that can threaten the lives of hunters. They are on the verge of exhaustion and freezing to death at any time.
Sometimes, when the food they carried ran out, they had no choice but to shoot seagulls to satisfy their hunger.
Once, hunters shot a lone polar bear. When they cut open the bear's belly, they found that it was also empty.
The sense of equality in the face of death is like a ritual in Siberia, which always strikes people who walk into the frozen wasteland.
Sometimes, hunters would pass by some unnamed cemeteries or traces of human camps. They guessed that these aged places were probably the relics left by the people who escaped from the Gulag.
Those poor, unlucky, dead souls cannot escape from prison, but cannot escape from nature.
For the Yakut indigenous people, who have little productivity and no modern means of livelihood, becoming a mammoth ivory hunter is one of many ultimate fates.
The journey into the wilderness in the past ten years has given them keen intuition and purer faith.
A pioneer hunter said: "Sometimes, ivory will appear naturally in front of you, as if it has been guiding you invisibly."
Indeed, for these ‘objects’ that have existed under the frozen soil for thousands of years, the Yakut people, who are deeply influenced by shamanism, have a sense of awe.
Counting back to the Soviet period, many people remember that when they went fishing, they could see unnoticed mammoth tusks on the shores and cliffs, where they rotted.
First, the economic system of the Soviet Union made it impossible for any private economy to sell ivory; second, people who were nostalgic about the past would not touch those giant, god-like creatures.
But now, for money, for the reality that a small piece of ivory can be worth thousands of dollars, they have to do it.
Perhaps in the future, books about the 21st century will have a special place to record these hunters, just like those early 20th century Far East explorers appeared in their history books.
However, the reality is extremely cruel in all aspects. The number of mammoth tusks will become less and less, from thousands to hundreds, and finally, it will be completely "exploited".
When something becomes the lifeline of the economy, it is not far from crazy. After all, who would have thought that after the Soviet-era secret extreme cold industrial zone and the mining area were gradually closed, the Yakuts would still be there.
Can you survive on the relics of your ancestors?
The rise of capitalism, economic globalization, climate warming, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and ivory exposure.
When everyone says it is a disaster for the market, the Chinese people’s crazy pursuit of ivory products will always be brought up.
Because ivory is illegal to trade but mammoth ivory is legal, almost 90% of the ivory hunted in Siberia went to China.
Therefore, in the eyes of Yakut hunters, the Chinese have become the gods of these expensive and scarce items. Many hunters are very eager to get to know the real "Chinese" in order to avoid the layers of middlemen who change hands.
It was against this background that the Korean peacock appeared in the lives of these Yakut hunters.
In particular, Han Peacock also provides a large amount of liquor, which is really important to the Yakut people.
The Yakuts especially like to drink. Han Kongque heard from people in the camp that once, someone brought 50 kilograms of liquor for them, and all seven of them drank it in one night.
Most of the people in the hunter camp where they gathered were men. There was only one middle-aged woman named Suo Liuxia, 40 years old. I heard that Suo Liuxia had been living in the mountains since she was 17 years old. She secretly hid a few bags of the wine she exchanged from Han Kongque.
, saying to keep it for yourself and drink it slowly.
For such a nation that is addicted to alcohol, with the help of Han Peacock, the burst of vitality is simply unbearable to watch.
So, now they can go further, and they can support it here longer.
In order to avoid fierce "hunting" competition, familiar hunters will team up to go to uninhabited islands farther away in the Arctic Ocean. They cross the ice and make a living here relying on the talents inherited from their ancestors.
If it were the original, they would be counting the time, fearing that the ice bridge would melt and they would not be able to return home in time. But this time, they no longer thought so. With the support of Han Peacock, they did not have to evacuate before the high temperature in summer, but waited.
The severe cold came once again.
In the past, if they were kept on an island for too long, in the northern hemisphere summer, when temperatures rose, the ice bridge would melt, cutting off their way home.
The small boat they were traveling on could not withstand the huge waves of the Arctic Ocean, so if most hunters did not catch up with the opportunity to return, they would have no choice but to stay on the desert island for a few more months until the severe cold came, the ice and snow closed the sea, and the ice bridge reappeared
, they can go home.
Now that they have enough daily necessities, why do they want to go back early?
Therefore, almost all Yakut ivory hunters plan to stay here for a few more months this time.
Of course, staying here for a few more months is not without cost. Among them, they need the shelter provided by Han Peacock, and secondly, sufficient supplies.
Although they will suffer some exploitation from Korean peacocks during this process, compared with going through layers of exploitation by middlemen and trading directly with a pure Chinese, their income still rises sharply.
Of course, extending the hunting period can directly double their income. This is the real reason that makes these Yakut ivory hunters crazy.
What is the concept of doubling income?
Everyone knows that digging for ivory is illegal, but in the face of high returns, no one can care so much, and sometimes even risk their lives.
At the same time, because it is frozen soil, it is difficult to excavate and requires a lot of physical strength, but they will use special iron tools and grind for hours without giving up.
Because once you dig up intact ivory, your income is almost as much as a white-collar worker’s salary for a year. Even if the ivory is of poor quality, it is enough to support a family’s expenses throughout the winter.
If the price doubles, even if you find a good-quality ivory, you will have the income of a white-collar worker for two years. Who can calm down with such an income?
Moreover, they found a lot of ivory, so they were not afraid that they would not be able to sell it. They were not afraid that no one would buy these mammoth tusks. (~^~)