The Koraks are probably the wealthiest deer-owners in Siberia, and consequently in the world.  Many of the herds which we saw in northern Kamchatka numbered from eight to twelve thousand; and we were told that a certain rich Korak, who lived in the middle of the great tundra, had three immense herds in different places, numbering in the aggregate thirty thousand head.  The care of these great herds is almost the only occupation of the Koraks’ lives.  They are obliged to travel constantly from place to place to find them food, and to watch them night and day to protect them from wolves.  Every day eight or ten Koraks, armed with spears and knives, leave the encampment just before dark, walk a mile or two to the place where the deer happen to be pastured, build themselves little huts of trailing pine branches, about three feet in height and two in diameter, and squat in them throughout the long, cold hours of an arctic night, watching for wolves.  The worse the weather is, the greater the necessity for vigilance.  Sometimes, in the middle of a dark winter’s night, when a terrible north-easterly storm is howling across the steppe in clouds of flying snow, a band of wolves will make a fierce, sudden attack upon a herd of deer, and scatter it to the four winds.  This it is the business of the Korak sentinels to prevent.  Alone and almost unsheltered on a great ocean of snow, each man squats down in his frail beehive of a hut, and spends the long winter nights in watching the magnificent auroras, which seem to fill the blue vault of heaven with blood and dye the earth in crimson, listening to the pulsating of the blood in his ears and the faint distant howls of his enemies the wolves.  Patiently he endures cold which freezes mercury and storms which sweep away his frail shelter like chaff in a mist of flying snow.  Nothing discourages him; nothing frightens him into seeking the shelter of the tents.  I have seen him watching deer at night, with nose and cheeks frozen so that they had turned black; and have come upon him early cold winter mornings, squatting under three or four bushes, with his face buried in his fur coat, as if he were dead.  I could never pass one of those little bush huts on a great desolate tundra without thinking of the man who had once squatted in it alone, and trying to imagine what had been his thoughts while watching through long dreary nights for the first faint flush of dawn.  Had he never wondered, as the fiery arms of the aurora waved over his head, what caused these mysterious streamers?  Had the solemn far-away stars which circled ceaselessly above the snowy plain never suggested to him the possibility of other brighter, happier worlds than this?  Had not some

“—­revealings faint and far, Stealing down from moon and star, Kindled in that human clod Thought of Destiny and God?”

Alas for poor unaided human nature!  Supernatural influences he could and did feel; but the drum and wild shrieks of the shaman showed how utterly he failed to understand their nature and teachings.