me, therefore, when he sailed for Okhotsk, to go by the first winter road to Anadyrsk and ascertain whether the Company’s vessels had been at the mouth of the river, and whether Bush needed any assistance.  As there was no longer anything to detain me at Gizhiga, I packed up my camp-equipage and extra fur clothes, loaded five sledges with tea, sugar, tobacco, and provisions, and on November 2d started with six Cossacks for my last journey to the Arctic Circle.

In all my Siberian experience I can recall no expedition which was so lonely and dismal as this.  For the sake of saving transportation, I had decided not to take any of my American comrades with me; but by many a silent camp-fire did I regret my self-denying economy, and long for the hearty laugh and good-humoured raillery of my “fidus Achates”—­Dodd.  During twenty-five days I did not meet a civilised being or speak a word of my native language, and at the end of that time I should have been glad to talk to an intelligent American dog.  “Aloneness,” says Beecher, “is to social life what rests are to music”; but a journey made up entirely of “aloneness” is no more entertaining than a piece of music made up entirely of rests—­only a vivid imagination can make anything out of either.

[Illustration:  A YURT OF THE SETTLED KORAKS IN MIDWINTER]

At Kuil, on the coast of Penzhinsk Gulf, I was compelled to leave my good-humoured Cossacks and take for drivers half a dozen stupid, sullen, shaven-headed Koraks, and from that time I was more lonesome than ever.  I had been able to talk a little with the Cossacks, and had managed to pass away the long winter evenings by the camp-fire in questioning them about their peculiar beliefs and superstitions, and listening to their characteristic stories of Siberian life; but now, as I could not speak the Korak language, I was absolutely without any resource for amusement.

My new drivers were the ugliest, most villainous-looking Koraks that it would have been possible to select in all the Penzhinsk Gulf settlements, and their obstinacy and sullen stupidity kept me in a chronic state of ill-humour from the time we left Kuil until we reached Penzhina.  Only by threatening them periodically with a revolver could I make them go at all.  The art of camping out comfortably in bad weather they knew nothing whatever about, and in vain did I try to teach them.  In spite of all my instructions and illustrations, they would persist night after night in digging a deep narrow hole in the snow for a fire, and squatting around the top of it like frogs around the edge of a well, while I made a camp for myself.  Of the art of cooking they were equally ignorant, and the mystery of canned provisions they could never fathom.  Why the contents of one can should be boiled, while the contents of another precisely similar can should be fried—­why one turned into soup and another into a cake—­were questions which they gravely discussed night after