Formation of ideas about the Ural mining-and-factory culture as a special type of culture helps to understand and interpret not only the historical past but also the present of this culture. The Ural mining-and-factory culture, which has found a vivid artistic embodiment in Bazhov's tales, becomes the subject of consideration through the prism of discursive and semiotic analysis. The discourse of our analysis lies in the fact that we analyze the texts of P. P. Bazhov solely from the point of view of what cultural meanings and values were assumed by the real inhabitants of the Ural forests and the houses of mining-factory peasants. The Semiotic approach is implemented in the analysis of the way in which animals were transformed into zoomorphic symbols and signs of the Ural culture, elements of a special Bazhov’s bestiary, and bearers of the Ural cultural code. The central category of the analysis presented is the Bazhov’s bestiary, understood as a semiotic system, where each beast is a sign that has a certain meaning and carries a certain code of the Ural culture. It is demonstrated that the bestiary of Bazhov's tales arises as a result of artistic rethinking of the images of domestic and wild animals that have entered everyday life and into the culture of the mining Urals, exists in the trinity of chthonic, Christian and creative cultural codes. Hierarchical relations are established between the zoomorphic codes of the Ural culture of the first, second, and third-order. The code of the first order includes real animals in their everyday symbolic functions, the code of the second order, the bestiary, includes animals endowed with supernatural abilities, and the code of the third order, creative, includes the animals depicted by the Ural masters-artists in their works. It is revealed that the animals encoding chthonic, Christian and creative-aesthetic meanings and meanings are closely related to the everyday work of the Ural mining-factory peasants. It is concluded that the formation of the Bazhov’s bestiary code reflects the uniqueness of the Ural-mining-factory culture, codifies the system of moral values and meanings formed in the difficult labor processes of the development of natural resources: a responsible and serious attitude to the harsh Ural nature, merciful and kind attitude towards people, honest and creative attitude to work.