The deer were driven by a single leather strap; the old, old jerk strap of the days of ox teams.  Johnny had demanded at once the privilege of driving but he had made a sorry mess of it.  He had jerked the strap to make the deer go more slowly.  This really being the signal for greater speed, the deer had bolted across the tundra, at last spilling Johnny and his load of Chukche plunder over a cutbank.  This procedure did not please the Chukches, and Johnny was not given a second opportunity to drive.  He was compelled to trot along beside the sleds or, back to back with one of his fellow travelers, to ride over the gleaming whiteness that lay everywhere.

It was at such times as these that Johnny had ample opportunity to study the country through which they passed.  Lighted as it was by a glorious moon, it presented a grand and fascinating panorama.  To the right lay the frozen ocean, its white expanse cut here and there by a pool of salt water pitchy black by contrast with the ice.  To the left lay the mountains extending as far as the eye could see, with their dark purple shadows and triangles of light and seeming but another sea, that tempest-tossed and terrible had been congealed by the bitter northern blasts.

When twelve hours of travel had been accomplished, and it had been proposed that they camp for the night, Johnny had been quite free to offer his assistance in setting up the tents.  In this he had been even less successful than in his performance with the reindeer.  He had set the igloo poles wrong end up and, when these had been righted, had spread the long haired deerskin robes, which were to serve as the inner lining of the shelters, hair side out, which was also wrong.  He had once more been relegated to the background.  This time he had not cared, for it gave him an opportunity to study his fellow travelers.  They were for the most part a dark and sullen bunch.  Not understanding Johnny’s language, they did not attempt to talk with him, but certain gloomy glances seemed to tell him that, though his money had been accepted by them, there was still some secret reason why he might have been traveling in safer company.

This, however, was more a feeling than an idea based on any overt act of the natives, and Johnny tried to shake it off.  That he might do this more quickly, he gave himself over to the study of these strange nomads.  Their dress was a one-piece suit made of short haired deer skins.  Men, women and children dressed alike, with the exception that very small children were sewed into their garments, hands, feet and all and were strapped on the sleds like bundles.

The food was strange to the American.  One needed a good appetite to enjoy it.  Great twenty-five pound white fish were produced from skin bags and sliced off to be eaten raw.  Reindeer meat was stewed in copper kettles.  Hard tack was soaked in water and mixed with reindeer suet.  Tea from the ever present Russian tea kettle and seal oil from a sewed up seal skin took the place of drink and relish.  The tea was good, the seal oil unspeakable, a liquid not even to be smelled of by a white man, let alone tasted.