On the territory of the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk regions, the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, legends about a relict animal have been preserved. The Mansi called him Yalpyn uy, the Russians called him a snake, and the Mari called him shem gut.
This animal was cautious, sometimes aggressive towards people, possessed features that may seem to us, representatives of modern society, only a product of a sick imagination. Meanwhile, the animal existed. Or maybe it still exists today?
Collecting information about the culture of the Mari of the Sverdlovsk region, I happened to hear a story about an interesting animal - the shem gut, the “black snake”. It was told by Gennady Petrov from the village of Artemeikovo, Achitsky district.
This snake, as the name suggests, is black. The sheme gut is about two meters long, much thicker than that of an ordinary snake. She lives in the forest, near water bodies - rivers and lakes. She spends the night on a tree, after which they find traces of processes on the snake's body, which help it fix its position in such an unusual place.
This location is explained by the desire of the shem gut to protect itself from its own offspring, which is so gluttonous that it can eat its parent. By the way, it is not uncommon for snakes to eat their own kind. For example, anacondas.
Meeting with a neck in the forest is a disaster. Moreover, the snake has a habit of attacking and killing. But to find the skin in the form of a stocking discarded by the intestine is good.
In the fairy tales of the Mari, there are stories about "a huge, thick as a log" snake, which lies in a deep hole. She owns secret knowledge, is the queen of snakes and sometimes helps a person. All this is interesting, but only from the point of view of folklore, folk fantasy.
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However, the researcher of Mansi Valery Chernetsov has a description of a similar snake, which he made in the thirties of the XX century from the words of Mansi hunters. The hunters call it yalpin uy, “sacred beast,” and, in their opinion, it resembles a lizard. Its length is up to 7-8 sazhens (up to 16 meters), arm-thick, red-brown in color with a zigzag pattern.
Lives in and near water, sleeps not on the ground, but only on a tree. After her overnight stays, traces of scales remain on it. You can hear this snake in the spring. The sounds made by animals are like the cry of a duck or dripping water. "Nech, nich". Lives on the Ob, in the upper reaches of the Sosva, in the area of Russuy and Nil-tang-Paul.
There were so many such reptiles at that time that the dead snakes were kept by hunters in Niltang-paul in barrels. Nevertheless, the Mansi believed that yalpin ui does not die, but turns into ammonite stone.
According to other researchers in the eighties of the last century, a creature 6 meters long lives in Lake Tur-vat. On clear, sunny days, it floats to the surface of the lake and then “shines like silver”. Tur-wat is a sacred lake of the local Mansi, and next to the lake there is a prayer mountain Yalpin ner. In June, the Voguls used to hold their pagan services there. They asked the sacred animal to protect their land.
Researchers of the Mansi religion I. N. Gemuev and A. M. Sagalaev write that in the deep-water lake Yalpyn-Tur (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug) in the mid-forties of the last (XX) century, the Mansi (Voguls) saw Yalpyn Uya. True, he is credited with the image of either a crocodile or a huge pike. And again, there is a close connection between the sacred animal and sacred places.
Two hundred kilometers from Ivdel along the Lusum (Lozva) River, there are Mansi, who keep legends that a river man-eater, like a snake with horns, once lived in the river. To this day, in those places, the Mansi worship the Hul-khuring-oyka Old Man, like a fish, the master of local people, fish, and beasts.
In 1886, the tradesman Ivan Sheshin from the village of Nikito-Ivdel (now the city of Ivdel) wrote in his notes "On the nomadic Vogul tribe in the north of the Verkhotursky district":
"They (Mansi) have such sacred places along the rivers, through which they never ride in boats, do not even touch the bottom of the bottom, but go around these places by the shore, dragging boats on them."
Was it because the Mansi did not touch the bottom of the sixth, because they feared the formidable Yalpyn uya, and swimming in its habitats was fraught with death for a person?
At the end of his notes, Sheshin mentions a mammoth tooth and a "snake fossil" that he keeps. The author does not specify what kind of snake it is. If the named remains belong to Yalpyp, it can be assumed that a similar snake lived in the Mansi Urals from ancient times.
Some experienced Mansi hunters have no doubts about the existence of Yalpyn Uya today.
For example, another people of the forest civilization, the Nanai, have legends about the dyabdyan, a creature similar to a boa constrictor. Although it is possible that this is the Schrenk snake (Elalhe schrenckii), named after the researcher of the Amur region Leopold Schrenck. Another name for this snake, a large representative of the fauna of Russia, is the Amur snake. The successor of the Schrenk case, Vladimir Arsenyev, twice mentions in his works a meeting with such a snake. Including indicates the length (1.9 m) and thickness (6 cm) of the killed snake. True, modern zoologists claim that the Amur snake does not exceed 1.7 meters in length. But nevertheless, the fact remains.
The Russian population of the Trans-Urals also knows a huge snake, which they called a snake. And archival materials about this have been preserved.
What the archives report
In the archives of the Sverdlovsk region, the author of this article came across some interesting local history documents. One of them is K. Oshurkov's report to the Ural Society of Natural Science Lovers (UOL) dated February 19, 1927, from which it is worth citing some excerpts:
“Even when I was in the Yekaterinburg gymnasium, we, little gymnasium students, always listened with attention to stories about the past and present of the Urals, our respected teacher Onisim Yegorovich Kler (chairman of the ULE), who also told about the existence of large snakes in the Ural forests, which the local population calls“runners,”and which he, Claire, has no doubt about, because together with the famous zoologist Sabaneev (Sabaneev L. P., researcher of the animal world of the Middle Urals), he received confirming data.
In the 60s or 70s, a certain Lebedinsky (mining engineer L. A. Lebedinsky. - Approx. S. S.), driving a troika, somewhere in the Northern Urals saw a huge snake crossing the road. The three stopped and began to back away. Lebedinsky returned to the neighboring Vogul village and asked the Voguls to start pursuing the snake together with him. The Voguls refused: apparently, they considered the snake sacred.
After long questioning Lebedinsky, however, managed to find out the whereabouts of the snake, and he killed it by shooting a shot in the head. The specimen turned out to be up to 8 sazhens (16 m) in length and with a thickness of a good 4 inches (17.8 cm - Approx. SS) log. The skin of this snake was allegedly sent to England by Lebedinsky.
Around the 90s, Claire was informed that a huge snake had appeared in the southeastern region of the Yekaterinburg district. Claire drove to the address, and it turned out that two women had seen the snake. Moreover, one of them, being pregnant, ran into a branch in the forest while fleeing and soon died of a premature miscarriage. Hunters left the city in the area where the snake was located.
The snake was not found and went back, camped near the village of Bobrovka, 28 km from the city. And then, during peaceful hunting conversations and breakfast, a hissing hiss was heard, and the hunters saw the white head of a snake raised above the pines from the edge of the Elani (Ural dialect.: glade in the forest), which, apparently, decided to get acquainted with the hunters.
Evil tongues said that from the unexpected appearance of the Ural boa constrictor one of the hunters crawled under the cart out of fear, the other, remembering that snakes do not like horse sweat, put on a collar, and the third, although he remained in place, but his mood was greatly spoiled by what had happened with him bear disease.
The snake left the camp, leaving a mark characteristic of a large snake on the crumpled grass and needles from the abdominal scales.
I have repeatedly heard from local peasants about the trail left by a passing snake. Such a trace was seen by the dew on the arable land early in the morning by the peasant of the Beloyarsk volost of the Boyarka village Matvey Boyarskikh. The trail zigzagged down from the plowed fields into the Pyshma River.
In any Ural village you can get some information about the "snake" and "snake". There is an opinion that a meeting with a snake is dangerous for humans. The snake, like the shem-gut, swiftly rushes at a person and hits, as they say, with a "trunk": obviously, with a tail.
Bychkov, a young telegraph operator at the post station, told me a story he had heard about the death of a worker from a runner.
“It was like this: two factory workers came to their mows in a troubled time, which were in a remote place in the Urals. One stayed to unharness the horse, the other for some reason went to the mountain, to the forest. Suddenly, a desperate cry was heard, and the remaining peasant saw a comrade running from the mountain, behind whom a rolled-up ball quickly rolled, soon catching up with the runner - he fell. The lump, turning around, turned out to be a large snake, which quickly crawled into the thicket of the forest. The fallen worker died - either from a blow from the tail of a runner, or simply from a broken heart."
By the way, according to local residents, it is possible to escape from the runner by changing the direction while running.
The peasants of the village of Martyanova of the former Kungur district and two versts from the village, not far from the road, for several years saw a small "runner" as thick as a shaft. He did not touch anyone and lived near the pit. After that, the peasants filled up the pit with brushwood and lit it. Nobody saw the "runner" anymore.
There is a belief among the Urals that one should beware of killing the snake, since another snake will find and kill the killer!
An interesting case of observing a runner was reported to me by the already mentioned telegraph operator Bychkov. His uncle once accidentally saw a "snake" swallow a hazel grouse. According to him, the hazel grouse himself flew up to the runner lying with its head raised. This is a case of bird hypnosis, which is typical of snakes.
Perhaps the day is not far off when the still disputed coluber trabalis (translated from Lat. "Huge, log-like snake"), as the famous scientist Pallas, who visited these places, called the Ural boa constrictor, will be at the disposal of specialists for study.
In one Ural steppe village, Pallas found a skin hanging from a peasant's hut or a crawling out of a huge snake. The owner of the hide, despite Pallas's request, did not sell it to him. Oshurkov also writes that in 1925 the workers of the Nizhneisetsky plant tried to catch with nets a large snake, golden in color, with a large spot on its forehead. The snake jumped over the net and left.
No less interesting is the letter to the same society of the assistant forester of the Kaslinsky forestry N. F. Kuznetsov on April 12, 1927:
“A worker of the Kasli plant, Pavel Ivanovich Sviridov, 60 years old, searching for minerals in the Kaslinskaya dacha, at the end of August 1926, in the Buldymskoe bog tract on a clear sunny day, noticed a snake of extraordinary size, which was located on a rocky hill.
Seeing for the first time in his life a snake of such size, as Sviridov says, he was horrified by this meeting and hurried to leave this place as soon as possible. The size of this snake, as he says, is 6 arshins (four meters) long and three vershok (13.3 cm) thick near the head. By color, Sviridov failed to determine exactly whether it was gray or black.
In the spring of 1924, being with a group of 54 workers to put out a forest fire in the area of Lake Sungul in Kaslinskaya dacha, we came to the shores of the Sungul in order to extinguish the said fire in order to wash after work and saw the following picture: in the very middle of the lake some that animal and above the surface of the water only its head was visible. When moving, stormy waves departed from him. All workers came to the conclusion that the swimming animal is nothing but a snake."
Further, the author of the letter reports that the fishermen on the lake, seeing an animal moving along the lake, hastened to moor to the shores.
Local historians write
In the article "The Great Snake" Boris Kazakov writes that in 1889 the merchant Ushakov told in an essay about a light gray snake with yellow spots on its belly and sides, which was seen more than once, including swimming across the Iset River three miles from the village Bobrovsky, with a hare in his mouth, which testified to the strength of this animal. Its length was up to 6.5 meters.
There is a mention of the fact that in 1869 in the Tver province the landowner Kishensky killed a snake, the length of which was 177 cm. Its back was gray, its belly was yellowish-white. The snake's body width is three fingers. This is not the only mention of the existence of large reptiles in the European part of Russia.
According to K. G. Kolyasnikova, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the forests near the village of Selivanovshchina, Darovsky District, Kirov Region, there were unusual snakes, whose cubs hid in the trees. Her grandmother recalled that in the forest during the rain, mushroom pickers risked getting on their heads the snakes that fell from the branches. It can be assumed that they could be water snakes, which are known to be able to climb trees.
But, according to eyewitnesses, these creatures were large in comparison with ordinary snakes.
I would like to note that before the arrival of the Slavs-Vyatichi in the territory of modern Kirovshchina in the 9th century, these lands were inhabited by the Mari, whose folklore, as indicated above, preserved the memory of those gut.
According to the information provided by B. Kazakov, at the end of the 50s of the XX century, a black snake with a length of about fifty meters (!) Lived on Lake Argazi (Chelyabinsk region), and in one of the peat bogs of the Ilmensky Reserve, located in the same region, in 1940 a huge snake was seen.
In the summer of 1961, not far from Lake Bolshoye Miassovo, a resident of the village of Urazbayevo saw a snake with “a head as big as a catfish-fish. The body is as big as a thick log, gray, about three meters."
Some will find all this amusing, others an ancient and long-gone legend. Perhaps this is so. Although there is evidence that in the summer of 2001 a large black snake with unusual spots on its body was seen in the vicinity of Tavda. What is it - a fright in front of an ordinary viper? Local fantasies? New puzzles?
Mansiysk "anaconda"
Does it look like an anaconda? But for sure - anaconda. It swims just as well, climbs trees and attacks from them. Only some kind of Ural, frost-resistant. But this is not news either. Alfred Brehm, in his major work "The Life of Animals", cites a case when a South American boa constrictor escaped from a menagerie lived quietly and wintered in one of the rivers of Western Europe. And although the naturalist himself was skeptical about rumors about the bloodthirstiness of such large snakes as anacondas, boas or pythons, arguing that they "are not able to swallow a man, a bull or a horse," other authors say the opposite.
Englishman P. Fawcett tells about an incident that happened to him in South America. The canoe, in which he and several Indians were, was attacked by an eighteen meter high anaconda. An Indian who fell into the water became her prey. In this attack, the water around the boat seethed with the movements of the snake. It is curious that the forester Kuznetsov mentioned such boiling water in his letter.
There is information about the Amazonian anacondas, which, according to the aborigines of Brazil, reach 20 meters in length. Many people die from these huge snakes in the jungle. Usually men. The anaconda hunts, hanging in the trees above the trail that runs through the selva.
Alfred Brehm writes that the anaconda reaches a length of just over eight meters, “it swims well, can stay under water for a very long time and lie on the bottom for a long time, resting”. So try to scare off such a curiosity with a pole, sailing on a boat along its lands …
According to eyewitnesses, cited by the same author, another large snake - an ordinary boa constrictor - is capable of delivering powerful blows with its tail when attacking or defending. How can one not recall a similar statement from Oshurkov's report?
But about the hieroglyphic python, the informants told Brem the following: "When this monster, like a large log, crawls, wriggling in the tall grass and bushes, then from afar one can notice the trail made by his huge body."
Why is the yalpyn ui more like an anaconda, and not a python, for example, which swims perfectly, unlike the same boa constrictor? The fact is that the anaconda is directly related to water, lives there and hunts. Like yalpyn uy, the anaconda reaches 16-20 meters in length, and with such gigantic dimensions it is difficult to live outside the water. Both of these snakes climb trees for hunting and recreation.
Anaconda
Tales and eyewitnesses
The historian of the 18th century Gerard Miller in his essay "Description of the Siberian Kingdom" writes about the Arintsy - the people who lived during Miller's journey along the Yenisei. The Arinians of one settlement perished due to a massive invasion of large snakes, among which “one was of extraordinary size, with a large head and a body shiny like gold” *.
It is noteworthy that one of the residents escaped by stretching a lasso of horsehair around his yurt (how can one not recall Oshurkov's story about a hunter who put on a horse collar to escape from the yalpyn uy) and poured ashes near the yurt.
In turn, Pavel Bazhov, in his three tales: “About the Great Snake”, “Snake Trail”, “Near the Old Mine” tells a lot about Yalpyn uya. In the first of the named tales, a description of a giant snake is given:
“And now the body of an enormous snake began to roll out of the ground. The head rose above the forest. Then the body bent right onto the fire, stretched out along the ground, and this miracle crawled to Ryabinovka (river), and all the rings came out of the ground! yes they do. There is no end to them."
In the tale "At the Old Mine", Bazhov mentions the range of a huge snake:
“I don’t know how in the Northern Urals, but in the Middle and Southern Urals this fantastic snake is often called the Snake, the Great Snake, probably because there has long been a conversation, partly supported by naturalists of the past (Sabaneev, for example), about the existence of a particularly large species of snake - a runner.
The Russian writer emphasizes that the stories about the Poloz, his image were familiar from childhood. From which it can be inferred that in the 80-90s of the XIX century, meetings with Yalpyn were not uncommon. Moreover, as the Uralian writer claims, the image of a giant snake among the Russian population of the Urals "came not from ancient symbolism and not from moralizing conversations, but from external impressions around it."
As Bazhov wrote down, the Russians living in the Urals considered the huge Poloz to be the master of all snakes (remember the similar views of the Mari!) And gold, which “facilitated access to gold for some, indicated places and even“let the gold down”, drove others away, frightened or even killed.
In the homeland of Bazhov, near the city of Polevskoy, encounters with unusual large snakes have occurred today. Here is how Vladimir Nikolaevich Surenkov, a resident of Polevsky, described a meeting with an unusual animal near the Polevoy river:
“The event I'm talking about happened in the sixties, I was fourteen years old. It was then that I saw something that I had not seen again until I was fifty-five. A snake lay and warmed itself on a huge flagstone, which had come from nowhere at the foot of the mountain. The snake lay shangoy, curled up in a spiral, and its head lay on its body and looked at me, stared without blinking. First, I was struck by her eyes.
The eyes were large, expressive, human. The color of the body, I hardly remember, is dim, gray, with large spots, slightly darker. It began, I remembered this, as the camera, without taking its eyes off me, to unwind the spiral, and crawled away from me, almost overflowing like water, over the stone edge, into the grass. The snake was about one meter seventy in length. The serpent has seen all kinds of colors and sizes, but I have never seen one like this before, or until now."
Of course, one can put forward a version that this snake was a yellow-bellied (Caspian) snake (Coluber caspius) - the largest snake in Europe, reaching 2.5 meters. In addition, the Caspian snakes are gray in color. But zoologists claim that the maximum range of this snake is the Volga-Ural interfluve.
Who are you, yalpyn uy?
Whether or not there was a giant snake is a moot point. Moreover, there is no direct material evidence of its existence. And science loves facts that cannot be refuted.
Of course, the question can be solved like this: no evidence - no problem. And then the words from the report of K. M. Oshurkova: "The Academy of Sciences did not believe Kler and Sabaneev about the presence of large snakes in the Ural forests, and thus, until now, no one dared, without risking losing their reputation, to raise the question of the existence of a snake in the Urals." Well, but if you muster up the courage and compare all the above facts? And at the same time, take into account that informants are not related to each other.
Who is Yalpin uy? Fruit of the invention of frightened hunters? Embodied fears of drunken peasants? Or an animal that survived despite natural disasters?
Some generalizations can be made from the analysis of the meetings of people with Yalpyn mentioned here:
1) The dimensions of the snake vary: thickness in diameter from 6 to 18 cm; length from 1 m 70 cm to 16 m (according to some data, up to several tens of meters). The size of the yalpyn uya most likely depends on age, habitat and food. It is possible that there were several types of snakes. Based on the size and footprint, similar to the imprint of a log on the grass or sand, Yalpyn uy had a solid weight.
2) The snake is light gray (golden, steel in the sun) or black. The head is large, "like a catfish", with a spot on the forehead. On the body there is a zigzag pattern or yellow or even red spots. It is possible that on the skull of one of the Yalpyn uya species there were growths "in the form of horns." The eyes protrude up to three centimeters in diameter.
3) It can be assumed that the range of this snake until the 17th century (the time of the mention of the existence of crocodiles in the Pskov Chronicle for 1582 and in the notes of the travelers Herberstein, Horsey) extended from the European part of Russia to the Far East. Moreover, exotic animals can exist in the harsh climate of our country, which was proved at the beginning of the 20th century by the zoologist A. Krulikovsky, citing as an example a turtle brought from Astra Hani, which lived for more than five years in a pond near the village of Lazarev in the Vyatka province.
Since the 19th century, Yalpyn uya has been met on the territory of modern Perm (near the city of Kungur), Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk regions, in the Khanty-Mansiysk district. In the 19th century, a large number of encounters with a giant snake were recorded north of Chelyabinsk. This is due to the fact that in the north of this area there are many lakes and swamps, especially in the Techa river basin, where, as a rule, meetings took place. But with the increase in population, the growth of industry, with the deterioration of the ecological situation in this area, the snake may have completely disappeared from those places.
3) Yalpyn ui lived in swamps, freshwater lakes, rivers surrounded by forests. In deep holes (holes) outside the reservoir the snake rested and, perhaps, hibernated, because there is no data on the detection of Yalpyn uya in winter. Most likely, the great snake spent the night on trees in the event of a large concentration of similar snakes in a certain area or because of another danger. Based on this, we can assume that Yalpyn uy, on occasion, ate his own kind.
4) Yalpyn uy hunted game, mammals, including domestic animals. He attacked a person, killed him, as a rule, thereby protecting his territory and, perhaps, his offspring. It can be assumed that he also ate fish like a modern water one.
5) Like modern reptiles, Yalpyn uy loved to bask on the stones in the sun. He lay curled up in rings for convenience. As a result of this large size, his body resembled a slide. Most likely, Yalpyn uy was not a warm-blooded animal.
6) The snake swam well on the surface of the water. Most likely zigzag, serpentine. Hence the large waves as it travels through the water. Climbed trees well. For this purpose, there were processes on her body that prevent slipping.
7) The snake had the ability to hypnotize his victims. This led to the loss of spatial reference points by the victim. The snake also killed his opponents with a tail blow. Cases of his attack from a tree have been recorded. It is possible that he strangled the victims like an anaconda. From the mountain he chased the victim, curled up in a ball. Hence the way to avoid his embrace is to move not in a straight line.
Of course, the reader remembers Mikhail Bulgakov's story "Fatal Eggs", written, by the way, in the mid-1920s, following the impression of meetings of eyewitnesses with a mysterious reptile in the Crimea. It seems that everyone's right is to decide whether the story is a fairy tale or reality. At the same time, one should not forget that the most incredible and inexplicable sometimes becomes simple and mundane …
Stanislav Skurydin