Ere she knew it, Lucile was tucked in behind a fleet-footed reindeer, speeding over the low hills.
"Now, please tell me where we are going," she asked with a smile.
"We are going to visit the most unique people in all the world—the Reindeer Chukches. They are almost an extinct race now, but the time was when every clump of willows that lined the banks of the rivers of the far north in Siberia hid one of their igloos, and every hill and tundra fed one of their herds.
"Long before the Eskimos of Alaska thought of herding the reindeer, short-haired deerskin and soft, spotted fawn-skins were traded across Bering Straits and far up along the Alaskan coast. These skins came from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches of Siberia. Many years ago the Mikado of Japan, in the treasure of furs with which he decorated his royal family, besides the mink, ermine and silver fox, had skins of rare beauty, spotted skins, brown, white and black. These were fawn-skins traded from village to village until they reached Japan. They came from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches. And now we are to see them as they were many years ago, for they have not changed. And I am to paint them! Paint them! Think of it!"
"Yes, but," Lucile smiled doubtfully, "supposing the ice gets solid while we're gone. Suppose Phi takes a fancy to cross without us? What then?"
Marian's face sobered for a moment. But the zeal of a born artist and explorer was upon her.
"Oh, fudge!" she exclaimed, "it won't. He won't. I—I—why, I'll hurry. We'll be back at East Cape in no time at all."
No wildest nomadic dream could have exceeded the life which the two girls lived in the weeks that followed.
Trailing a reindeer herd over hills and tundra; camping now in a clump of willows by the glistening ice of a stream, now beneath some shelving rock, and now in the open, wind-swept tundra; eating about an open fire, while the smoke curled from the top of the dome of the tepee-like igloo, they reveled in the strange wildness of it all. Here was a people who paid no rent, no taxes, owned no land yet lived always in abundance. In the box beside the sleeping platform were tea and sugar. Over the fire hung a copper teakettle of ancient design. In the sleeping-box, which was made of long-haired deerskins, were many robes of short-haired deerskin, fawn-skin and Siberian squirrel.
To all these the two girls were more than welcome. Their guide and his daughter did not live alone. A little tribe whose twenty igloos dotted the tundra traveled with him. These people were sometimes in need of simple remedies. For these they were singularly grateful. They, their women and their children, posed untiringly for sketches. But one thing Marian had not taken into consideration; these people seldom visited the village of East Cape. Although she did not know it, their herds were at this time feeding away from this trading metropolis of the Straits region. Each day while she seized every opportunity to sketch and hastened her work as much as she could, found them some ten miles farther from East Cape.