Late in the afternoon we got through the rough ice and for the remaining mile or so to the shore had good going. At five o’clock in the afternoon we landed on the Siberian coast. It was the fourth of April and we had been seventeen days on the march. The distance we had actually gone in making the journey was not less than two hundred miles.
The first thing the Eskimo saw when we reached the land was the trail of a single sledge along the tundra.
“Ardegar (that’s good),” he said; “Eskimo come here.”
I asked him if it was Siberia and he said it was.
“Where we go?” I asked.
Without a moment’s hesitation he pointed to the east.
A snowstorm had already begun, while we were still on the march, and it was now coming on with rapidly increasing violence, so we set to work at once and in half an hour had an igloo built, and a shelter for our dogs, now reduced to four. When we got inside the igloo we made tea, boiled some of the bear meat we had with us and ate until we could eat no more. Then we turned in. It seemed pretty good to sleep on land again.
CHAPTER XXII
WE MEET THE CHUKCHES
At dawn the next morning we left our igloo and went back over the trail we had made to the place where we had thrown off our supplies the afternoon before. Owing to the bad light and the drifting snow, we had a good deal of trouble in picking up our things and the trail itself was frequently obscured, but we managed to get our stuff together again and by nine o’clock were back at our igloo ready to begin our march eastward. We made some tea and at ten o’clock started on our way. On account of the overcast sky and the thick snow we could see little of the surrounding country and I had no way of telling just where we were. Later on, when I had a chance to go over the chart with Baron Kleist at East Cape, I figured out that we had landed near Cape Jakan, about sixty miles west of Cape North.