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 the exception of the cats, were depicted on the Permian bronze casts (the 5-15 centuries). Archaeologies had found the casts next to Mount Azov and along the Chusovaya River in Perm Krai, Sverdlovsk Oblast and Chelyabinsk Oblast of Russia. As for the cats, Alexei Ivanov noted that they are unlikely to come from the folk tales, and were probably added into the stories by the author. The anthropomorphous creatures are primarily female—Azovka from Beloved Name, Golden Hair, the blue snake, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, Poskakushka from The Fire-Fairy, Sinyushka, Veselukha from Veselukha's Meadow. They belong to different age groups: Poskakushka is a little girl, Golden Hair and the Mistress are maidens, Veselukha is a young woman, the blue snake is a woman, Sinyushka is an old woman. They mostly contact men, e.g. Poskakushka helps Fedyunka to find gold; the blue snake appears before boys; the Mistress traditionally helps single men only. Bazhov believed that miners missed women, because their work allowed for little contact with them, and therefore so many of their stories had female creatures.