Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

REINDEER

The tundra has no more characteristic animal than the reindeer. Over the mossy hillocks and the matted tops of the dwarf birches he runs, or through the rivers and lakes he swims, with his broad-hoofed, spade-like feet never at a loss to find a footing. In the long winter he is protected by his thick skin against the influence of the cold, and is seldom at starvation point, as he digs for food in the deepest snow, and is by no means particular what he eats; and in the short summer he is in luxurious ease, for the tundra, as we have seen, is not always as bad as it is painted. In exposed places near the coast it is little else than gravel beds interspersed with patches of peat and clay, with scarcely a rush or a sedge to break the monotony, but by far the greater part of it is a gently undulating plain, broken up by lakes, rivers, swamps, and bogs; the lakes with patches of green water-plants, the rivers flowing between sedges and rushes, the swamps the breeding haunts of ruffs and phalaropes, the bogs dotted with the white fluffy seeds of the cotton-grass. Almost everywhere the birds are in noticeable numbers, among the commonest being the golden plover (who wears the tundra colours), the bluethroat, the fieldfare, the whooper swan, and the ducks and divers—particularly the divers—and, among the birds of prey, the falcons and the rough-legged buzzards, which, with the owls, find such abundant provision in the lemmings that migrate in myriads compared with which the reindeer troops are insignificant.

"The groundwork of all this variegated scenery," says Seebohm, "is more beautiful and varied still—lichens and mosses of almost every conceivable colour, from the cream-coloured reindeer-moss to the scarlet-cupped trumpet-moss, interspersed with a brilliant alpine flora, gentians, anemones, saxifrages, and hundreds of plants, each a picture in itself, the tall aconites, both the blue and yellow species, the beautiful cloudberry, with its gay white blossom and amber fruit, the fragrant Ledum palustre and the delicate pink Andromeda polifolia. In the sheltered valleys and deep water-courses a few stunted birches, and sometimes large patches of willow scrub, survive the long severe winter, and serve as cover for willow-grouse or ptarmigan. The Lapland bunting and red-throated pipit are everywhere to be seen, and certain favoured places are the breeding-grounds of plovers and sandpipers of many species. So far from meriting the name of Barren Ground, the tundra is for the most part a veritable paradise in summer. But it has one almost fatal drawback—it swarms with mosquitoes."

OSTIAK MAN

SAMOYED MAN

The beauty of the tundra is, however, transient and skin deep; it is only such plants as can live in the soil that thaws that survive. Wherever the ground is dug into, ice is sure to be reached; in fact, it may be said that ice is one of the rocks of the subsoil, and in some places these strata of ice that never melts have been found to be three hundred feet thick—ice that has remained in block since the mammoths got into cold storage in it ages ago, for otherwise they would not have lasted intact in skin and flesh as many have done, like the very first discovered in a complete state, that chipped out by Adams in 1807.

In such a climate, whose winter terrors are only too prominent, all along the north of Siberia live the ancient peoples driven towards the sea by those mighty movements from the land of the Turk and Mongol which, north and south, east and west, flooded Europe and Asia with invaders—Ostiaks and Samoyeds west of Chelyuskin; Yakuts, Chukches, and others to the east of it, the descriptions of whose unpleasant manners and customs appear to be written with a view to showing how curiously local are the laws of health. One may well ask, as Wrangell did, why they should remain in so dreary a region and take life so contentedly. And the answer may be that they might go further north and fare worse, as their predecessors in the eastern section would seem to have done. Once, according to the legend, there were more hearths of the Omoki on the shores of the Kolyma than there are stars in the clear sky, and these Omoki, or some other departed race, appear to have left as their traces the remains of the timber forts and the tumuli that are found on the coast, especially near the Indiyirka, and the huts of earth and stones and bones found all along from Chelagskoi to the straits, similar remains of a departed people now existing in the Parry Islands, over a thousand miles away. According to another legend of more recent date, there was an intervening land, the land that Wrangell went to seek and the Jeannette went to winter at, and the supposed site of which she drifted through, in her last and longest imprisonment in the ice.