CHAPTER IV.


The name of Kamchatka is generally associated with snow-fields,
glaciers, frozen mountains, and ice-bound shores. Its winters are long
and severe; snow falls to a great depth, and ice attains a thickness
proportioned to the climate. But the summers, though short, are
sufficiently hot to make up for the cold of winter. Vegetation is
wonderfully rapid, the grasses, trees and plants growing as much in a
hundred days as in six months of a New England summer. Hardly has the
snow disappeared before the trees put forth their buds and blossoms,
and the hillsides are in all the verdure of an American spring. Men
tell me they have seen in a single week the snows disappear, ice break
in the streams, the grass spring up, and the trees beginning to bud.
Nature adapts herself to all her conditions. In the Arctic as in the
Torrid zone she fixes her compensations and makes her laws for the
best good of her children.

It was midsummer when we reached Kamchatka, and the heat was like that
of August in Richmond or Baltimore. The thermometer ranged from
sixty-five to eighty. Long walks on land were out of question, unless
one possessed the power of a salamander. The shore of the bay was the
best place for a promenade, and we amused ourselves watching the
salmon fishers at work.

Salmon form the principal food of the Kamchadales and their dogs. The
fishing season in Avatcha Bay lasts about six weeks, and at its close
the salmon leave the bay and ascend the streams, where they are caught
by the interior natives. In the bay they are taken in seines dragged