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.