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.
[Illustration: DOG-TEAMS DESCENDING A STEEP MOUNTAIN SLOPE]
We left our camp in the valley early on the following morning, pushed
on across the large and heavily timbered river called the Aklán, and
entered upon the great steppe which stretches away from its northern
bank toward Anadyrsk. For two days we travelled over this barren
snowy plain, seeing no vegetation but stunted trees and patches of
trailing-pine along the banks of occasional streams, and no life
except one or two solitary ravens and a red fox. The bleak and dreary
landscape could have been described in two words--snow and sky. I had
come to Siberia with full confidence in the ultimate success of the
Russian-American Telegraph line, but as I penetrated deeper and deeper
into the country and saw its utter desolation I grew less and less
sanguine. Since leaving Gizhiga we had travelled nearly three hundred
versts, had found only four places where we could obtain poles, and
had passed only three settlements. Unless we could find a better
route than the one over which we had been, I feared that the Siberian
telegraph line would be a failure.
Up to this time we had been favoured with unusually fine weather; but
it was a season of the year when storms were of frequent occurrence,
and I was not surprised to be awakened Christmas night by the roaring
of the wind and the hissing sound of the snow as it swept through our
unprotected camp and buried up our dogs and sledges. We were having a
slight touch of a Siberian _purga_ (poor'-gah = blizzard). A fringe of
trees along the little stream on which we were camped sheltered us
in a measure from the storm, but out on the steppe it was evidently
blowing a gale. We rose as usual at daylight and made an attempt to
travel; but no sooner did we leave the cover of the trees than our
dogs became almost unmanageable, and, blinded and half suffocated
with flying snow, we were driven back again into the timber. It was
impossible to see thirty feet, and the wind blew with such fury that
our dogs would not face it. We massed our sledges together as a sort
of breastwork against the drifting snow, spread our fur bags down
behind them, crawled in, covered up our heads with deerskins and
blankets, and prepared for a long dismal siege. There is nothing so
thoroughly, hopelessly dreary and uncomfortable, as camping out upon a
Siberian steppe in a storm. The wind blows with such violence that a
tent cannot possibly be made to stand; the fire is half extinguished
by drifting snow, and fills the eyes with smoke and cinders when it
burns at all; conversation is impossible on account of the roaring
of the wind and the beating of the snow in one's face; bearskins,
pillows, and furs become stiff and icy with half-melted sleet, sledges
are buried up, and there remains nothing for the unhappy traveller to
do but crawl into his sleeping-bag, cover up his head, and shiver away
the long, dismal hours.
We lay out on the snow in this storm for two days, spending nearly all
the time in our fur bags and suffering severely from the cold during
the long, dark nights. On the 28th, about four o'clock in the morning,
the storm began to abate, and by six we had dug out our sledges and
were under way. There was a low spur of the Stanavoi Mountains about
ten versts north of our camp, and our men said that if we could get
across that before daylight we should probably have no more bad
weather until we reached Penzhina. Our dog-food was entirely
exhausted, and we must make the settlement within the next twenty-four
hours if possible. The snow had been blown hard by the wind, our dogs
were fresh from two days' rest, and before daylight we had crossed
the ridge and stopped in a little valley on the northern slope of
the mountain to drink tea. When compelled to travel all night, the
Siberian natives always make a practice of stopping just before
sunrise and allowing their dogs to get to sleep. They argue that if a
dog goes to sleep while it is yet dark, and wakes up in an hour and
finds the sun shining, he will suppose that he has had a full night's
rest and will travel all day without thinking of being tired. An
hour's stop, however, at any other time will be of no use whatever. As
soon as we thought we had deluded our dogs into the belief that they
had slept all night, we roused them up and started down the valley
toward a tributary of the Penzhina River, known as the Uskanova
(Oo-skan'-o-vah). The weather was clear and not very cold, and we all
enjoyed the pleasant change and the brief two hours of sunshine which
were vouchsafed us before the sun sank behind the white peaks of
Stanavoi. Just at dark we crossed the river Kondra, fifteen miles from
Penzhina, and in two hours more we were hopelessly lost on another
great level steppe, and broken up into two or three separate and
bewildered parties. I had fallen asleep soon after passing the Kondra,
and had not the slightest idea how we were progressing or whither we
were going, until Dodd shook me by the shoulder and said, "Kennan,
we're lost." Rather a startling announcement to wake a man with, but
as Dodd did not seem to be much concerned about it, I assured him that
I didn't care, and lying back on my pillow went to sleep again, fully
satisfied that my driver would find Penzhina sometime in the course of
the night.
Guided by the stars, Dodd, Gregorie, and I, with one other sledge
which remained with us, turned away to the eastward, and about nine
o'clock came upon the Penzhina River somewhere below the settlement.
We started up it on the ice, and had gone but a short distance when we
saw two or three sledges coming down the river. Surprised to find men
travelling away from the village at that hour of the night, we hailed
them with a "Halloo!"
"Halloo!"
"Vwe kooda yáydetia?"--"Where are you going?"
"We're going to Penzhina; who are you?"
"We're Gizhigintsi, also going to Penzhina; what you coming down the
river for?"
"We're trying to find the village, devil take it; we've been
travelling all night and can't find anything!"
Upon this Dodd burst into a loud laugh, and as the mysterious sledges
drew nearer we recognised in their drivers three of our own men who
had separated from us soon after dark, and who were now trying to
reach Penzhina by going down the river toward the Okhotsk Sea. We
could hardly convince them that the village did not lie in that
direction. They finally turned back with us, however, and some time
after midnight we drove into Penzhina, roused the sleeping inhabitants
with a series of unearthly yells, startled fifty or sixty dogs into a
howling protest against such untimely disturbance, and threw the whole
settlement into a general uproar.
In ten minutes we were seated on bearskins before a warm fire in
a cozy Russian house, drinking cup after cup of fragrant tea, and
talking over our night's adventures.
[Illustration: Ladle made of Caribou antler]
[Illustration: Woman's knife for cutting meat]