The reindeer here were the first I had seen in Siberia; they had spent the winter inland, but now that spring was opening they had come out to the coast. The two young men who owned them were fine, tall fellows, somewhat resembling North American Indians; they had been out with their reindeer in all weathers during the winter, sometimes, the baron told me, for three days in succession, and their faces were burned almost black with cold and exposure. They were very hospitable and, as they had just cooked some reindeer meat as we dropped in, they gave us an enjoyable meal. My appetite was beginning to come back and my throat, in spite of the rain and fog, was better.
Refreshed and reassured as to our progress we started on our way again, crossing the ice of St. Lawrence Bay and following its shores to the east. We then went across the land for several miles and out on to the ice in the mouth of Mechigme Bay. This journey was full of interest to me. I rode most of the time and could give myself up to the enjoyment of the wild country through which we were passing. The distance from East Cape to Emma Harbor is about the same as that from New York to Boston. We averaged four or five miles an hour. Our dog-drivers were skilful and knew what they were about; their conversation was unintelligible to me but I had every confidence in their ability.
One of our drivers was about four feet tall; in an Anglo-Saxon community, I suppose, he would have been known as Goliath, but among these more literal-minded Siberians he was called “Little.” He had a small motor-boat at Indian Point and, if I could not get a ship at Emma Harbor, it would be a great convenience for Little if I went across to Alaska in his motor-boat, because he wanted to go over to Nome, anyway, when the season was far enough advanced for the voyage and I could be navigator, an arrangement which, as a possibility, was quite agreeable to me.
Little, like Artemus Ward’s bear, was “an amoosin’ little cuss.” He could manage to understand pidgin English and was well pleased with himself over it. “Me make baron speak plenty English,” he would say.
From Mechigme Bay we followed the coast west for a short distance and then crossed the mouth of the bay to the south shore; following the coast for about twenty miles we went across the land to Neegchan. It was foggy all the time and when we reached a group of arangas at a place called Mesigman and stopped to sleep, I was wet to the skin. The aranga where we were entertained, however, was warm and comfortable; I took off my clothes, wrapped myself in a nice deerskin robe and went to sleep.
At six o’clock in the afternoon we started on again. The weather had cleared up and the surface of the snow was hard, so the going was wonderfully good. For some time we travelled over the sea-ice and had to make a wide detour to avoid a long lane of open water. We stopped once at an aranga on the way for tea and at four o’clock reached a place called Elewn. Here we stayed until six o’clock in the afternoon, when we again got away for an all-night journey.
We were now on the last lap and the dogs knew it, so they travelled at even greater speed than before. At one point as we were going along, we met a Chukch woman driving a team of dogs. Our drivers stopped and talked with her. The baron asked me what I thought about her; his question rather puzzled me but I replied that I supposed the woman was driving the dogs and doing other things that men do, just as I had been accustomed to see women doing among the other Eskimo whom I had known. Then he said that, on the contrary, this was really not a woman at all but a man who had, so to speak, turned himself into a woman. It was, it seemed, a custom among these Siberians to do this and a man who thus transformed himself acted like a woman, dressed like a woman, talked like a woman and was looked upon by the other Chukches as a woman. The baron knew the whys and wherefores of this extraordinary custom but when he tried to explain it to me his English proved unequal to the occasion.
Several times during the day we stopped to have tea. At one place the Eskimo told us that they had seen or heard of a whaler at Indian Point. The master was Captain Pederson, they said, but when they described the ship, their account did not tally with the description of the Elvira, the ship that Captain Pederson commanded when the Karluk left Nome. It was afterwards to be made known to me that the Elvira had been crushed and sunk off the northern coast of Alaska the previous fall, during the stormy season when we were being driven offshore in the Karluk, and that Captain Pederson had made his way overland to Fairbanks, had thence gone to San Francisco and taken command of another ship, the Herman.
After we left the ice of Chechokium we crossed the divide to Emma Harbor. The mist lay low over the high mountains on the peninsula between Emma Harbor and Providence Bay. From time to time the wind would roll this mist away and reveal the peaks, stern and forbidding. The going up the divide was steep and we had a hard climb; when we got to the top I could look down to Emma Harbor and see open water out into Providence Bay. The land was white with snow and the ice nearer shore was unbroken, so that the open water beyond seemed as black as coal-tar, shining against the white. We went down the other side of the ridge at a terrific rate, the dogs running free and the sledge, with the brake-pole grinding hard, careening from side to side in a way that almost took a man’s breath away.
It was at seven o’clock on the morning of May 16 that we reached Emma Harbor and the home of Baron Kleist. We had been six days coming from East Cape and two months had gone by since I had parted from the men on Icy Spit, Wrangell Island. If all went well I should be back for them in two months more and I hoped they were holding out all right and would be in good shape when I reached them again. Their suspense, I knew, would be acute until they were sure that I had succeeded in crossing Long Strait to Siberia and getting over to Alaska.