The Many Ways of Being Human

3.6

Chukchi and Yakuts

At the market in Yakutsk the frozen fish stand upright in rows, and outside a horse paws through snow at about fifty degrees below zero. The chapter sets the Sakha, who keep cattle north of the sixtieth parallel, beside the Chukchi on the coast, whom the Russian Empire never conquered by force: two peoples in the same cold, with opposite orders.