At length the winter came round once more, and the hour arrived so long desired.  The sledges were ready—­six in number, and loaded as heavily as they could bear.  But for so many dogs, and for so many days, it was quite certain they must economize most strictly; while it was equally certain, if no bears fell in their way on the journey, that they must starve, if they did not perish otherwise on the terrible Frozen Sea.  Each narta, loaded with eight hundredweight of provisions and its driver, was drawn by six pair of dogs and a leader.  They took no wood, trusting implicitly to Providence for this most essential article.  They purposed following the shores of the Frozen Sea to Cape Sviatoi, because on the edge of the sea they hoped to find, as usual, plenty of wood, floated to the shore during the brief period when the ice was broken and the vast ocean in part free.  One of the sledges was less loaded than the rest with provisions, because it bore a tent, an iron plate for fire on the ice, a lamp, and the few cooking utensils of the party.

Early one morning in the month of November—­the long night still lasting—­the six sledges took their departure.  The adventurers had every day exercised themselves with the dogs for some hours, and were pretty proficient.  Sakalar drove the first team, Kolina the second, and Ivan the third.  The Kolimak men came afterward.  They took their way along the snow toward the mouth of the Tchouktcha river.  The first day’s journey brought them to the extreme limits of vegetation, after which they entered on a vast and interminable plain of snow, along which the nartas moved rapidly.  But the second day. in the afternoon, a storm came on.  The snow fell in clouds, the wind blew with a bitterness of cold as searching to the form of man as the hot blast of the desert, and the dogs appeared inclined to halt.  But Sakalar kept on his way toward a hillock in the distance, where the guides spoke of a hut of refuge.  But before a dozen yards could be crossed, the sledge of Kolina was overturned, and a halt became necessary.

Ivan was the first to raise his fair companion from the ground; and then with much difficulty—­their hands, despite all the clothes, being half-frozen—­they again put the nartas in condition to proceed.  Sakalar had not stopped, but was seen in the distance unharnessing his sledge, and then poking about in a huge heap of snow.  He was searching for the hut, which had been completely buried in the drift.  In a few minutes the whole six were at work, despite the blast, while the dogs were scratching holes for themselves in the soft snow, within which they soon lay snug, their noses only out of the hole, while over this the sagacious brutes put the tip of their long bushy tails.

At the end of an hour well employed, the hut was freed inside from snow, and a fire of stunted bushes with a few logs lit in the middle.  Here the whole party cowered, almost choked with the thick smoke, which, however, was less painful than the blast from the icy sea.  The smoke escaped with difficulty, because the roof was still covered with firm snow, and the door was merely a hole to crawl through.  At last, however, they got the fire to the state of red embers, and succeeded in obtaining a plentiful supply of tea and food:  after which their limbs being less stiff, they fed the dogs.