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turn the skin yellow and through the constant turning round in the hole the hair gets curly in some places and valueless.  But in the spring the marmot comes out again and grazes all through the summer.  It gets nice and fat and the skin turns into a fine bluish gray by the Autumn time, that is the best skin.  It is therefore very stupid to kill any marmots in spring.  First of all the skins have but little commercial value, besides it does give the animal a chance in the summer to get young ones.  Shooting in spring should be prohibited by the government altogether.  The marmot meat can be eaten, but the meat tastes rather oily.  The oil is boiled out of the meat and is used by the Mongols.  We once ran short of motor oil for the engine, but my word, it stinks when it gets hot in the engine.  That could ^[[not]] be help anyhow, ^[[because]] without the oil we should not have been able to go along.

The best marmot skins come from the West of Urga, the Metschegun and Uliassutai districts, whereas the Eastern marmots round about Sainbetze are less valuable.

Then there are the foxes, owing to the winters in Mongolia being very cold these skins are very thick and realize a good price.

There are two kinds of wolves in Mongolia, the little ones called the sand wolves ^[[whose]] [[strikethrough]] thick [[/strikethrough]] skins are not very valuable, but the big ones similar to the usual Siberian wolves fetch very good prices.  It is rather a weird noise when you are lying in your tent at night trying to go off to sleep to hear the wolves howling not very far away.  In Mongolia they do not appear in big bunches and I never heard of anybody being attacked by wolves, but still it gives you a creepy feeling to hear them so near to your tent.  They do not seem to be very afraid.  I have seen single wolves quite near to the cars.  Somehow they seem to know that people travelling by car do not carry guns as a rule and only when the car drives straight at them do they move off at a long stride.  Lately foxes and wolves have increased a great deal, for the government has prohibited the import of strychnine.  Formerly the Mongols had an