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Page 63.

way is that of the Mongol.  Time is no object to him either, he lies down somewhere near the entrance of the marmot's hole, waits patiently till the animal comes out and is some little distance away from the hole, grazing in the field, and then pulls the trigger.  A Mongolian gun is worth seeing.  It is made of an old gas pipe and loaded with powder and small bits of iron.  Anyhow, if it does not explode, it certainly is effective.  The Chinese have the best and most business-like way; they know that the marmot is very curious therefore they place a small bit of bright cloth on a wire near to the entrance of the hole.  To get to the rag, the marmot has to pass a place where the Chinaman has put a loop made of strong wire anchored in the ground.  When the marmot comes up, it sees the bright cloth and is so curious that it must know what that is all about, it runs up, gets entangled in the wire loop and is caught, then friend Chinaman comes along with a club and kills it.  A more strenuous way of getting at the marmot is to dig it out, but that means pretty hard work, for the marmot lives in stony soil and it takes quite a log of digging into the ground to get at the marmot family.  The Mongol way of shooting the marmot with their gas pipe is not so good from a commercial point of view, for the bits of iron which he uses as shot spoil the skins a great deal, whereas the Chinaman's way of clubbing the animal to death preserves the skin much better.  There are two kinds of marmot skins, the yellow one which is dry, thin and full of curled up bunches of hair and therefore of no great commercial value.  The best quality is the bluish gray; the skin is fat, the fur is thick and soft and tans very well into a good fur.  There are very few fur experts who can tell you which is the winter and which is the summer, the blue or the yellow.  As I mentioned several times before in Mongolia everything is the other way round from the rest of the world.  The winter skin of every animal is the more valuable, whereas the marmot's summer skin is the best.  The reason is the following : All during the winter the marmot stays in his hole in the ground does not eat, but leaves on the accumulated fat and turns round in its own dirt.  The sharp essence of the same