House in Ghijiga occupied by Mr. Vanderlip and his Party.
My guide was an old man of sixty-five, but a noted sledge-driver and hunter. His name was Theodosia Chrisoffsky, a half-caste. He was a dried-up and wizened old man, but I found him as active as a youth of twenty. He was always the first up in the morning, and the last to bed at night. He owned the best dogs in northeastern Siberia, and could get more work out of a dog-team than any other man. His reputation reached from the Okhotsk Sea to the Arctic Ocean, and he was considered among the dog-men to be about the wealthiest of his class. He owned a hundred dogs, valued at from three to one hundred roubles each. Perhaps ten of them were worth the maximum price, and the rest averaged about ten roubles apiece. He also owned five horses. Not the least part of his wealth were twelve strapping sons and daughters, all of whom, with their wives and husbands, lived under the paternal roof—or, rather, under a clump of paternal roofs. There were some sixty souls in all, and they formed a little village by themselves about twenty miles up the river from Ghijiga.
I had to load the horses very light on account of the marshy condition of the tundra. Each pack was a hundred pounds only. On this trip I took only one of my Koreans.
CHAPTER VI
OFF FOR THE TUNDRA—A NATIVE FAMILY
Hard traveling—The native women—A mongrel race—Chrisoffsky's home and family and their ideas of domestic economy—Boiled fish-eyes a native delicacy—Prospecting along the Ghijiga.