Such constant exposures to fatigue and hardship make the average life of a tabuntshik extremely short. At the end of ten or fifteen years he is generally worn out, and unfit for such arduous duty. His pay, therefore, is proportionably high ; for every tabuntshik is a hired servant, as no serf could be impelled, by any dread of punishment, to exert that constant vigilance without which the whole taboon would be broken up in a few days. What the fear of the whip, however, cannot effect in a slave, the hope of gain may ensure from a freeman. The wages of a tabuntshik are regulated by the number of horses committed to his care. For each horse he usually receives five or six rubles a year, so that the guardian of a full taboon may earn his six thousand rubles annually (275/.) if he can keep the wolf and the thief at bay ; but every horse that is lost the tabuntshik must pay for, and horse-stealing is carried on so largely and dexterously on the steppe, that he may sometimes lose half a year's wages in a single night. He must also pay his assistants out of his own wages, and three assistants at least will be required to look after a taboon of a thousand horses. Notwithstanding all these drawbacks, however, the tabuntshik, if he were vigilant and careful, might always save money ; but few of them do so, and it rarely happens that, when invalided, they have hoarded together a little capital to enable them to embark in any more quiet occupation.
The hai'dships to which they are constantly exposed, and the high wages which they receive, make the tabuntshiks the wildest dare-devils that can be imagined ; so much so, that it is considered a settled point, that a man who has had the care of horses for twc or three years, is unfit for any quiet or settled kind of life. No one, of coiu-se, that can gain a tolerable livelihood in any other way wiU embrace a calling that subjects him to so severe a life ; and the consequence is, that it is generally from among the scamps of a village that recruits are raised for this service. They are seldom without money, and when they do visit the brandy-shop, they are not deterred from abandoning themselves to a carouse by the financial considerations likely to restrain most men in the same rank of life. They ought, it is true, never to quit the taboon for a moment, but they will often spend whole nights in the little brandy-houses of the steppe, drinking and gambhng, and drowning in their fiery potations all recollections of the last day's endm'ance. When their senses return with the returning day, they gallop after their herds, and display no little ingenuity in repairing the mischief that may have accrued from the carelessness of the preceding night.
The tabuntsliik lives in constant dread of the horse-stealer, and yet there is hardly a tabuntshik on the steppe that will not steal a horse if the occasion present itself. The traveller who has left his horses to graze during the night, or the villager who has allowed his cattle to wander away from his house, will do well to ascertain that there be no taboon in the vicinity, or in the morning he will look for them in vain. The tabuntshik, meanwhile, takes care to rid himself, as soon as possible, of his stolen goods, by exchanging them away to the first brother herdsman that he meets, who again barters them away to another, so that in a few days a horse that was stolen on the banks of the DniejDer, passes from hand to hand till it reach the Bug or the Danube, and the rightful owner may stiU be inquirmg after a steed, which has already quitted the empire of the czar, to enter the service of a Moslem, or to figure in the stud of a Hungarian magnate. The tabuntshiks have constantly little affairs of this kind to transact with one another, for which the Mongolian tumuli scattered over the steppe afford convenient places of rendezvous.