In this monotonous routine of riding, camping, and sleeping on the snow, day after day slowly passed until, on December 20th, we arrived at the Settled Korak village of Shestakóva, near the head of Penzhinsk Gulf. From this point our Gizhiga Cossacks were to return, and here we were to wait until the expected sledges from Penzhina should arrive. We lowered our bedding, pillows, camp-equipage, and provisions down through the chimney hole of the largest yurt in the small village, arranged them as tastefully as possible on the wide wooden platform which extended out from the wall on one side, and made ourselves as comfortable as darkness, smoke, cold, and dirt would permit.
[Illustration: Korak Adzes]
CHAPTER XXIV
DISMAL SHELTER—ARRIVAL OF A COSSACK COURIER AMERICANS ON THE ANADYR—ARCTIC FIREWOOD A SIBERIAN BLIZZARD LOST ON THE STEPPE
Our short stay at Shestakóva, while waiting for the Penzhina sledges, was dismal and lonesome beyond expression. It began to storm furiously about noon on the 20th, and the violent wind swept up such tremendous clouds of snow from the great steppe north of the village, that the whole earth was darkened as if by an eclipse, and the atmosphere, to a height of a hundred feet from the ground, was literally packed with a driving mist of white snowflakes. I ventured to the top of the chimney hole once, but I was nearly blown over the edge of the yurt, and, blinded and choked by snow, I hastily retreated down the chimney, congratulating myself that I was not obliged to lie out all day on some desolate plain, exposed to the fury of such a storm. To keep out the snow, we were obliged to extinguish the fire and shut up the chimney hole with a sort of wooden trap-door, so that we were left to total darkness and a freezing atmosphere. We lighted candles and stuck them against the black smoky logs above our heads with melted grease, so that we could see to read; but the cold was so intense that we were finally compelled to give up the idea of literary amusement, and putting on fur coats and hoods, we crawled into our bags to try to sleep away the day. Shut up in a dark half-underground dungeon, with a temperature ten degrees below the freezing-point, we had no other resource.
It is a mystery to me how human beings with any feeling at all can be satisfied to live in such abominable, detestable houses as those of the Settled Koraks. They have not one solitary redeeming feature. They are entered through the chimney, lighted by the chimney, and ventilated by the chimney; the sunshine falls into them only once a year—in June; they are cold in winter, close and uncomfortable in summer, and smoky all the time. They are pervaded by a smell of rancid oil and decaying fish; their logs are black as jet and greasy with smoke, and their earthen floors are an indescribable mixture of reindeer hairs and filth dried and trodden hard. They have no furniture except wooden bowls of seal oil, in which burn fragments of moss, and black wooden troughs which are alternately used as dishes and as seats. Sad is the lot of children born in such a place. Until they are old enough to climb up the chimney pole they never see the outside world.
The weather on the day after our arrival at Shestakóva was much better, and our Cossack Meranef, who was on his way back to Tigil, bade us good-bye, and started with two or three natives for Kamenoi. Dodd and I managed to pass away the day by drinking tea eight or ten times simply as an amusement, reading an odd volume of Cooper's novels which we had picked up at Gizhiga, and strolling along the high bluffs over the gulf with our rifles in search of foxes. Soon after dark, just as we were drinking tea in final desperation for the seventh time, our dogs who were tied around the yurt set up a general howl, and Yagór came sliding down the chimney in the most reckless and disorderly manner, with the news that a Russian Cossack had just arrived from Petropavlovsk, bringing letters for the Major. Dodd sprang up in great excitement, kicked over the teakettle, dropped his cup and saucer, and made a frantic rush for the chimney pole; but before he could reach it we saw somebody's legs coming down into the yurt, and in a moment a tall man in a spotted reindeerskin coat appeared, crossed himself carefully two or three times, as if in gratitude for his safe arrival, and then turned to us with the Russian salutation, "Zdrastvuitia."—"At kooda?"—"Where from?" demanded Dodd, quickly. "From Petropavlovsk with letters for the Maiur," (mai-oor'), was the reply; "three telegraph ships have been there, and I am sent with important letters from the American nachalnik [Footnote: Commander.]; I have been thirty-nine days and nights on the road from Petropavlovsk." This was important news. Colonel Bulkley had evidently touched at the southern end of Kamchatka on his return from Bering Sea, and the letters brought by the courier would undoubtedly explain why he had not landed the party at the mouth of the Anadyr River, as he had intended. I felt a strong temptation to open the letters; but not thinking that they could have any bearing upon my movements, I finally concluded to send them on without a moment's delay to Gizhiga, in the faint hope that the Major had not yet left there for Okhotsk. In twenty minutes the Cossack was gone, and we were left to form all sorts of wild conjectures as to the contents of the letters, and the movements of the parties which Colonel Bulkley had carried up to Bering Strait. I regretted a hundred times that I had not opened the letters, and found out to a certainty that the Anadyr River party had not been landed. But it was too late now, and we could only hope that the courier would overtake the Major before he had started from Gizhiga, and that the latter would send somebody to us at Anadyrsk with the news.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A YURT OF THE SETTLED KORAKS]
There were no signs yet of the Penzhina sledges, and we spent another night and another long dreary day in the smoky yurt at Shestakóva, waiting for transportation. Late in the evening of December 2d, Yagór, who acted in the capacity of sentinel, came down the chimney with another sensation. He had heard the howling of dogs in the direction of Penzhina. We went up on the roof of the yurt and listened for several minutes, but hearing nothing but the wind, we concluded that Yagór had either been mistaken, or that a pack of wolves had howled in the valley east of the settlement. Yagór however was right; he had heard dogs on the Penzhina road, and in less than ten minutes the long-expected sledges drew up, amid general shouting and barking, before our yurt. In the course of conversation with the new arrivals, I thought I understood one of the Penzhina men to say something about a party who had mysteriously appeared near the mouth of the Anadyr River, and who were building a house there as if with the intention of spending the winter. I did not yet understand Russian very well, but I guessed at once that the long-talked-of Anadyr River party had been landed, and springing up in considerable excitement, I called Dodd to interpret. It seemed from all the information which the Penzhina men could give us that a small party of Americans had mysteriously appeared, early in the winter, near the mouth of the Anadyr, and had commenced to build a house of driftwood and a few boards which had been landed from the vessel in which they came. What their intentions were, who they were, or how long they intended to stay, no one knew, as the report came through bands of Wandering Chukchis, who had never seen the Americans themselves, but who had heard of them from others. The news had been passed along from one encampment of Chukchis to another until it had finally reached Penzhina, and had thus been brought on to us at Shestakóva, more than five hundred miles from the place where the Americans were said to be. We could hardly believe that Colonel Bulkley had landed an exploring party in the desolate region south of Bering Strait, at the very beginning of an arctic winter; but what could Americans be doing there, if they did not belong to our expedition? It was not a place which civilised men would be likely to select for a winter residence, unless they had in view some very important object. The nearest settlement—Anadyrsk—was almost two hundred and fifty miles distant; the country along the lower Anadyr was said to be wholly destitute of wood, and inhabited only by roving bands of Chukchis, and a party landed there without an interpreter would have no means of communicating even with these wild, lawless natives, or of obtaining any means whatever of transportation. If there were any Americans there, they were certainly in a very unpleasant situation. Dodd and I talked the matter over until nearly midnight, and finally concluded that upon our arrival at Anadyrsk we would make up a strong party of experienced natives, take thirty days' provisions, and push through to the Pacific Coast on dog-sledges in search of these mysterious Americans. It would be an adventure just novel and hazardous enough to be interesting, and if we succeeded in reaching the mouth of the Anadyr in winter, we should do something never before accomplished and never but once attempted. With this conclusion we crawled into our fur bags and dreamed that we were starting for the Open Polar Sea in search of Sir John Franklin.
On the morning of December 23d, as soon as it was light enough to see, we loaded our tobacco, provisions, tea, sugar, and trading-goods upon the Penzhina sledges, and started up the shallow bushy valley of the Shestakóva River toward a mountainous ridge, a spur of the great Stanavoi range, in which the stream had its source. We crossed the mountain early in the afternoon, at a height of about a thousand feet, and slid swiftly down its northern slope into a narrow valley, which opened upon the great steppes which bordered the river Aklán. The weather was clear and not very cold, but the snow in the valley was deep and soft, and our progress was provokingly slow. We had hoped to reach the Aklán by night, but the day was so short and the road so bad that we travelled five hours after dark, and then had to stop ten versts south of the river. We were rewarded, however, by seeing two very fine mock moons, and by finding a magnificent patch of trailing-pine, which furnished us with dry wood enough for a glorious camp-fire. The curious tree or bush known to the Russians as kedrovnik (keh-drove'-nik), and rendered in the English translation of Wrangell's Travels as "trailing cedar," is one of the most singular productions of Siberia. I hardly know whether to call it a tree, a bush, or a vine, for it partakes more or less of the characteristics of all three, and yet does not look much like any of them. It resembles as much as anything a dwarf pine tree, with a remarkably gnarled, crooked, and contorted trunk, growing horizontally like a neglected vine along the ground, and sending up perpendicular branches through the snow. It has the needles and cones of the common white pine, but it never stands erect like a tree, and grows in great patches from a few yards to several acres in extent. A man might walk over a dense growth of it in winter and yet see nothing but a few bunches of sharp green needles, sticking up here and there through the snow. It is found on the most desolate steppes and upon the rockiest mountain-sides from the Okhotsk Sea to the Arctic Ocean, and seems to grow most luxuriantly where the soil is most barren and the storms most severe. On great ocean-like plains, destitute of all other vegetation, this trailing-pine lurks beneath the snow, and covers the ground in places with a perfect network of gnarled, twisted, and interlocking trunks. For some reason it always seems to die when it has attained a certain age, and wherever you find its green spiny foliage you will also find dry white trunks as inflammable as tinder. It furnishes almost the only firewood of the Wandering Koraks and Chukchis, and without it many parts of north-eastern Siberia would be absolutely uninhabitable by man. Scores of nights during our explorations in Siberia, we should have been compelled to camp without fire, water, or warm food, had not Nature provided everywhere an abundance of trailing-pine, and stored it away under the snow for the use of travellers.