The Malachite Box nuggets. The story of the brothers is continued in "The Snake Trail" (alternative translation: "The Serpent's Trail"), published in 1939. In this "skaz", a young the factory worker Stepan meets the legendary Mistress of the Copper Mountain. He passes her tests and is rewarded by a malachite casket filled with jewellery for his betrothed, Nastyona. Stepan dies, leaving the Malachite Casket to his widow Nastyona. Their daughter Tanyushka likes to play with it. With black hair and green eyes, Tanyushka does not look like her mother at all, as if she was born to different parents. When she grows up,
The Malachite Box people used to say about the lucky workers that they "knew the words" and had certain helpers. The geography is well known because it is specified in the stories. Bazhov mentions real locations such as Sysert, the Polevskoy Copper Smelting Plant, the Gumyoshevsky mine, the villages Kosoy Brod and Krasnogorka, the Ryabinovka river. Mythical creatures in "The Malachite Box" are either anthropomorphous (primarily female) or zoomorphic. The animals that appear in the stories and have zoomorphic attributes are lizards, snakes ("The Great Snake"), cranes ("Dikes of Gold"), ants ("Zhabrei's Path"), swans ("Yermak's Swans"), cats, the deer. All these creatures, with