before they could finish discharging the vessel’s cargo, she was wrecked by ice.  Her crew and nearly all her stores were saved, but by this misfortune the number of the party was increased from twenty-five to forty-seven, without any corresponding increase in the quantity of provisions for their subsistence.  Fortunately, however, there were bands of Wandering Chukchis within reach, and from them Bush succeeded in buying a considerable number of reindeer, which he caused to be frozen and stored away for future use.  After the freezing over of the Anadyr River, Bush was left, as Macrae had been the previous winter, without any means of getting up to the settlement, a distance of 250 miles; but he had foreseen this difficulty, and had left orders at Anadyrsk that if he failed to return in canoes before the river closed, dog-sledges should be sent to his assistance.  Notwithstanding the famine the dog-sledges were sent, and Bush, with two men, had returned on them to Anadyrsk.  Finding that settlement famine-stricken and deserted, he had started without a moment’s delay for Gizhiga, his exhausted and starving dogs dying along the road.

The situation of affairs, then, when I met Bush on the summit of the Russki Krebet, was briefly as follows: 

Forty-four men were living at the mouth of the Anadyr River, 250 miles from the nearest settlement, without provisions enough to last them through the winter, and without any means whatever of getting away.  The village of Anadyrsk was deserted, and with the exception of a few teams at Penzhina, there were no available dogs in all the Northern District, from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait.  Under such circumstances, what could be done?  Bush and I discussed the question all night beside our lonely camp-fire under the Russki Krebet, but could come to no decision, and after sleeping three or four hours we started for Anadyrsk.  Late in the afternoon we drove into the settlement—­but it could be called a settlement no longer.  The two upper villages—­“Osolkin” and “Pokorukof,” which on the previous winter had presented so thriving an appearance, were now left without a single inhabitant, and Markova itself was occupied only by a few starving families whose dogs had all died, and who were therefore unable to get away.  No chorus of howls announced our arrival; no people came out to meet us; the windows of the houses were closed with wooden shutters, and half buried in drifts; the snow was unbroken by paths, and the whole village was silent and desolate.  It looked as if one-half of the inhabitants had died and the other half had gone to the funeral!  We stopped at a small log-house where Bush had established his headquarters, and spent the remainder of the day in talking over our respective experiences.