The following morning was cold and stormy, and the snow was still falling in the mountains, and heavy rain in the valley.  We broke camp at daylight, saddled our horses, distributed what little baggage we had among them, as equally as possible, and made every preparation for deep snow and hard climbing.

Our guide, after a short consultation with his comrades, now came to me and proposed that we abandon our plan of crossing the mountains as wholly impracticable, and try instead to make our way along the narrow strip of beach which the ebbing tide would leave bare at the foot of the cliffs.  This plan, he contended, was no more dangerous than attempting to cross the mountains, and was much more certain of success, as there were only a few points where at low water a horse could not pass with dry feet.  It was not more than thirty miles to a ravine on the south side of the mountain range, through which we could, leave the beach and regain our old trail at a point within one hard day’s ride of Lesnoi.  The only danger was in being caught by high water before we could reach this ravine, and even then we might save ourselves by climbing up on the rocks, and abandoning our horses to their fate.  It would be no worse for them than starving and freezing to death in the mountains.  Divested of its verbal plausibility, his plan was nothing more nor less than a grand thirty-mile race with a high tide along a narrow beach, from which all escape was cut off by precipitous cliffs one and two hundred feet in height.  If we reached the ravine in time, all would be well; but if not, our beach would be covered ten feet deep with water, and our horses, if not ourselves, would be swept away like corks.  There was a recklessness and dash about this proposal which made it very attractive when compared with wading laboriously through snow-drifts, in frozen clothes, without anything to eat, and I gladly agreed to it, and credited our guide with more sense and spirit than I had ever before seen exhibited by a Kamchadal.  The tide was now only beginning to ebb, and we had three or four hours to spare before it would be low enough to start.  This time the Kamchadals improved by catching one of the dogs which had accompanied us from Lesnoi, killing him in a cold-blooded way with their long knives, and offering his lean body as a sacrifice to the Evil Spirit, in whose jurisdiction these infernal mountains were supposed to be.  The poor animal was cut open, his entrails taken out and thrown to the four corners of the earth, and his body suspended by the neck from the top of a long pole set perpendicularly in the ground.  The Evil Spirit’s wrath, however, seemed implacable, for it stormed worse after the performance of these propitiatory rites than it did before.  This did not weaken at all the faith of the Kamchadals in the efficacy of their atonement.  If the storm did not abate, it was only because an unbelieving American with a diabolical brass box called a “come-pass’”