The excitement, I can conscientiously affirm, was terrific. Viushin unslung his double-barrelled fowling-piece, and proceeded to pepper him with duck-shot; Dodd tugged at his revolver with frantic energy while his horse ran away with him over the plain; the Major dropped his bridle, and implored me by all I held sacred not to shoot him, while the horses plunged, kicked, and snorted in the most animated manner. The only calm and self-possessed individual in the whole party was the bear! He surveyed the situation coolly for a few seconds, and then started at an awkward gallop for the woods. In an instant our party recovered its conjoint presence of mind, and charged with the most reckless heroism upon his flying footsteps, shouting frantically to "stop him!" popping away in the most determined and unterrified manner with four revolvers and a shotgun, and performing prodigies of valour in the endeavour to capture the ferocious beast, without getting in his way or coming nearer to him than a hundred yards. All was in vain. The bear vanished in the forest like a flying shadow; and, presuming from his known ferocity and vindictiveness that he had prepared an ambuscade for us in the woods, we deemed it the better part of valour to abandon the pursuit. Upon comparing notes, we found that we had all been similarly impressed with his enormous size, his shagginess, and his generally savage appearance, and had all been inspired at the same moment with an irresistible inclination to take him by the throat and rip him open with a bowie-knife, in a manner so beautifully illustrated by the old geographies. Nothing but the fractiousness of our horses and the rapidity of his flight had prevented this desirable consummation. The Major even declared positively that he had seen the bear a long time before, and only rode over him "to scare him up," and said almost in the words of the redoubtable Falstaff, "that if we would do him honour for it, so; if not, we might scare up the next bear ourselves." Looking at the matter calmly and dispassionately afterward, I thought it extremely probable that if another bear did not scare the Major up, he never would go out of his way to scare up another bear. We felt it to be our duty, however, to caution him against imperilling the success of our expedition by such reckless exploits in the way of scaring up wild beasts.
Long before we reached Pushchin it grew dark; but our tired horses freshened up after sunset, with the cool evening air, and about eight o'clock we heard the distant howling of dogs, which we had already come to associate with hot tea, rest, and sleep. In twenty minutes we were lying comfortably on our bearskins in a Kamchadal house.
We had made sixty miles since daybreak; but the road had been good. We were becoming more accustomed to horseback riding, and were by no means so tired as we had been at Malqua. Only thirty versts now intervened between us and the head-waters of the Kamchatka River, where we were to abandon our horses and float down two hundred and fifty miles on rafts or in native canoes.
A sharp trot of four hours over a level plain brought us on the following morning to Sherom (sheh-rome´), where rafts had already been prepared for our use.
It was with no little regret that I ended for the present my horseback travel. The life suited me in every respect, and I could not recall any previous journey which had ever afforded me more pure, healthful enjoyment, or seemed more like a delightful pleasure excursion than this. All Siberia, however, lay before us; and our regret at leaving scenes which we should never again revisit was relieved by anticipations of future adventures equally novel, and prospective scenery grander even than anything which we had yet witnessed.
CHAPTER X
THE KAMCHATKA RIVER—LIFE ON A CANOE RAFT—RECEPTION AT MILKOVA—MISTAKEN FOR THE TSAR
To a person of an indolent disposition there is something particularly pleasant in floating in a boat down a river. One has all the advantages of variety, and change of incident and scenery, without any exertion; all the lazy pleasures—for such they must be called—of boat life, without any of the monotony which makes a long sea voyage so unendurable. I think it was Gray who said that his idea of paradise was "To lie on a sofa and read eternally new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon." Could the author of the "Elegy" have stretched himself out on the open deck of a Kamchadal boat, covered to a depth of six inches with fragrant flowers and freshly cut hay; could he have floated slowly down a broad, tranquil river through ranges of snow-clad mountains, past forests glowing with yellow and crimson, and vast steppes waving with tall, wild grass; could he have watched the full moon rise over the lonely, snowy peak of the Kluchefskoi (kloo'-chef-skoi') volcano, bridging the river with a narrow trail of quivering light, and have listened to the plash of the boatman's paddles, and the low melancholy song to which they kept time—he would have thrown Marivaux and Crebillon overboard, and have given a better example of the pleasures of paradise.
I know that I am laying myself open to the charge of exaggeration by thus praising Kamchatkan scenery, and that my enthusiasm will perhaps elicit a smile of amusement from the more experienced traveller who has seen Italy and the Alps; still, I am describing things as they appeared to me, and do not assert that the impressions they made were those that should or would have been made upon a man of more extensive experience and wider observation. To use the words of a Spanish writer, which I have somewhere read, "The man who has never seen the glory of the sun cannot be blamed for thinking that there is no glory like that of the moon; nor he who has never seen the moon, for talking of the unrivalled brightness of the morning star." Had I ever sailed down the Rhine, climbed the Matterhorn, or seen the moon rise over the Bay of Naples, I should have taken perhaps a juster and less enthusiastic view of Kamchatka; but, compared with anything that I had previously seen or imagined, the mountain landscapes of southern and central Kamchatka were superb.
At Sherom, thanks to the courier who had preceded us, we found a boat, or Kamchatkan raft, ready for our reception. It was composed of three large dugout canoes placed parallel to one another at distances of about three feet, and lashed with sealskin thongs to stout transverse poles. Over these was laid a floor or platform about ten feet by twelve, leaving room at the bow and stern of each canoe for men with paddles who were to guide and propel the unwieldy craft in some unknown, but, doubtless, satisfactory manner. On the platform, which was covered to a depth of six inches with freshly cut grass, we pitched our little cotton tent, and transformed it with bearskins, blankets, and pillows into a very cosy substitute for a stateroom. Rifles and revolvers were unstrapped from our tired bodies, and hung up against the tent poles; heavy riding boots were unceremoniously kicked off, and replaced by soft buckskin torbasses [Footnote: Moccasin boots.]; saddles were stored away in convenient nooks for future use; and all our things disposed with a view to the enjoyment of as much luxury as was compatible with our situation.