For a week, systematically Nindemann scouted along each river, trying to pick out the one that he and Noros had followed south. But the innumerable storms since had changed the whole face of that frozen country. How many streams we examined, I cannot even guess. Nindemann, his broad brows knit with puzzled furrows, could find nothing familiar in any of them. Baffled, we gave up searching there and went far to the north, to follow down De Long’s trail from the coast, but at the same point where in November I had lost the track, Nindemann himself was able to do no better in pointing out the path. And then came a raging storm which held us snowbound for three days.
Despairingly I considered the situation. Would we ever pick up De Long’s track? It must be soon or never! Before long the river ice would break up, we could no longer travel, and swollen with melting snow from the whole interior of Siberia, the Lena would come flooding down in torrents to drown out the low delta lands, washing away forever every trace of my comrades! De Long must be somewhere to the south. In desperation, I gave up searching the central delta for his track, and decided to go back again to the delta head, to sweep the spreading rivers there as I came north.
Soon after, starting from the southward again, since Nindemann also felt that there he could do best, we began at a wide bay, from which one tremendous river flowed eastward toward Jamaveloch, another flowed westward and northward toward Tomat, and in between the Lena, in many smaller branches, flowed due north, spreading widely out and meandering over the delta, though now of course it flowed beneath the ice as every stream was still solidly frozen over.
Following the edge of this tremendous bay, I examined every headland on it. Broken slabs of ice were piled up in tangled masses on the banks; the snow, drifted by the winds, ran in smooth slopes from the river ice to the tops of the promontories, filling in the banks; dozens of frozen streams, like twigs spreading from a limb, branched out from the bay, complicating the search.
Coming in the late afternoon to a high headland on the western side of the bay, I left my sledge as usual on the river ice, and clambered up the crust of snow to its top. The crest was strongly wind-swept and fairly bare of snow; as I stooped to brace myself against the wind, I saw right on the point of the promontory signs of a long-dead fire, with half-burned driftwood logs hove into the wide bed of ashes and apparently many footprints in the ice about.
Beckoning to Nindemann to come up, I asked him,
“Did you or Noros build that fire here?”
“No,” said Nindemann, “it looks to me we came this way, but we never had a fire like that.”
I motioned up my dog-driver, questioned him in native dialect,
“Do Yakuts build fires this way?”