LAST WORK OF THE WINTER—BIRDS AND FLOWERS OF SPRING CONTINUOUS DAYLIGHT—SOCIAL LIFE IN GIZHIGA—A CURIOUS SICKNESS—SUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS—NEWS FROM AMERICA

The months of April and May, owing to the great length of the days and the comparative mildness of the weather, are the most favourable months in north-eastern Siberia for outdoor work and travel; and as the Company\'s vessels could not be expected to arrive at Gizhiga before the early part of June, Major Abaza determined to make the most of the intervening time. As soon as he had recovered a little, therefore, from the fatigue of his journey, he started with Bush, Macrae, and the Russian governor, for Anadyrsk, intending to engage there fifty or sixty native labourers and begin at once the construction of station-houses and the cutting and distribution of poles along the Anadyr River. My own efforts to that end, owing to the laziness of the Anadyrsk people, had been unsuccessful; but it was hoped that through the influence and cooperation of the civil authority something might perhaps be done.

Major Abaza returned by the very last winter road in May. His expedition had been entirely successful; Mr. Bush had been put in command of the Northern District from Penzhina to Bering Strait, and he, together with Macrae, Harder, and Smith, had been left at Anadyrsk for the summer. As soon as the Anadyr River should open, this party was directed to descend it in canoes to its mouth, and there await the arrival of one of the Company\'s vessels from San Francisco, with reinforcements and supplies. In the meantime fifty native labourers from Anadyrsk, Osolkin, and Pokorukof, had been hired and placed at their disposal, and it was hoped that by the time the ice should be out of the river they would have six or eight station-houses prepared, and several thousand poles cut, ready for distribution in rafts between the settlements of Anadyrsk and the Pacific coast. Having thus accomplished all that it was possible to accomplish with the limited means and force at his disposal, Major Abaza returned to Gizhiga, to await the arrival of the promised vessels from America with men, material, and supplies, for the prosecution of the work.

The season for dog-sledge travel was now over; and as the country afforded no other means of interior transportation, we could not expect to do any more work, or have any further communication with our outlying parties at Anadyrsk and Okhotsk until the arrival of our vessels. We therefore rented for ourselves a little log house overlooking the valley, of the Gizhiga River, furnished it as comfortably as possible with a few plain wooden chairs and tables, hung up our maps and charts on the rough log-walls, displayed our small library of two books—Shakespeare and the New Testament—as advantageously as possible in one corner, and prepared for at least a month of luxurious idleness.

It was now June. The snow was rapidly disappearing under the influence of the warm long-continued sunshine; the ice in the river showed unmistakable signs of breaking up; patches of bare ground appeared here and there along the sunny hillsides, and everything foretold the speedy approach of the short but hot arctic summer. Winter in most parts of north-eastern Siberia begins to break up in May, and summer advances with rapid strides upon its retreating footsteps, covering instantly with grass and flowers the ground that it reclaims from the melting snow-drifts of winter. Hardly is the snow off the ground before the delicate wax-like petals of the blueberry and star-flower, and the great snowy clusters of labrador tea begin to whiten the mossy plains; the birches, willows, and alders burst suddenly into leaf, the river banks grow green with a soft carpet of grass, and the warm still air is filled all day with the trumpet-like cries of wild swans and geese, as they come in great triangular flocks from the sea and pass high overhead toward the far North. In three weeks after the disappearance of the last snow all Nature has put on the garments of midsummer and rejoices in almost perpetual sunshine. There is no long wet, lingering spring, no gradual unfolding of buds and leaves one by one as with us. The vegetation, which has been held in icy fetters for eight long months, bursts suddenly its bonds, and with one great irresistible sweep takes the world by storm. There is no longer any night; one day blends almost imperceptibly into another, with only a short interval of twilight, which has all the coolness and repose of night without its darkness. You may sit by your open window and read until twelve o\'clock, inhaling the fragrance of flowers which is brought to you on the cool night wind, listening to the murmur and plash of the river in the valley below, and tracing the progress of the hidden sun by the flood of rosy light which streams up in the North from behind the purple mountains. It is broad daylight, and yet all Nature is asleep, and a strange mysterious stillness, like that of a solar eclipse, pervades heaven and earth. You can even hear the faint roar of the surf on the rocky coast ten miles away. Now and then a song-sparrow hidden in the alder thicket by the river bank dreams that it is morning and breaks out into a quick unconscious trill of melody; but as he wakes he stops himself suddenly and utters a few "peeps" of perplexity, as if not quite sure whether it be morning, or only last evening, and whether he ought to sing or go to sleep again. He finally seems to decide upon the latter course, and all becomes silent once more save the murmur of the river over its rocky bed and the faint roar of the distant sea. Soon after one o\'clock a glittering segment of the sun appears between the cloud-like peaks of the distant mountains, a sudden flash of golden light illumines the green dewy landscape, the little sparrow in the alder thicket triumphantly takes up again his unfinished song, the ducks, geese, and aquatic birds renew their harsh discordant cries from the marshy flats along the river, and all animated nature wakes suddenly to a consciousness of daylight as if it were a new thing. There has been no night—but it is another day.

The traveller who has never before experienced an arctic summer, and who has been accustomed to think of Siberia as a land of eternal snow and ice, cannot help being astonished at the sudden and wonderful development of animal and vegetable life throughout that country in the month of June, and the rapidity of the transition from winter to summer in the course of a few short weeks. In the early part of June it is frequently possible to travel in the vicinity of Gizhiga upon dog-sledges, while by the last of the same month the trees are all in full leaf, primroses, cowslips, buttercups, valerian, cinquefoil, and labrador tea, blossom everywhere upon the higher plains and river banks, and the thermometer at noon frequently reaches 70° Fahr. in the shade. There is no spring, in the usual acceptation of the word, at all. The disappearance of snow and the appearance of vegetation are almost simultaneous; and although the tundras or moss steppes, continue for some time to hold water like a saturated sponge, they are covered with flowers and blossoming blueberry bushes, and show no traces of the long, cold winter which has so recently ended. In less than a month after the disappearance of snow in 1860, I collected from one high plain about five acres in extent, near the mouth of the Gizhiga River, more than sixty species of flowers. Animal life of all kinds is equally prompt in making its appearance. Long before the ice is out of the gulfs and bays along the coast, migratory birds begin to come in from the sea in immense numbers. Innumerable species of ducks, geese, and swans—many of them unknown to the American ornithologist—swarm about every little pool of water in the valleys and upon the lower plains; gulls, fish-hawks, and eagles, keep up a continual screaming about the mouths of the numerous rivers; and the rocky precipitous coast of the sea is literally alive with countless millions of red-beaked puffin or sea-parrots, which build their nests in the crevices and upon the ledges of the most inaccessible cliffs, and at the report of a pistol fly in clouds which fairly darken the air. Besides these predatory and aquatic birds, there are many others which are not so gregarious in their habits, and which, consequently, attract less notice. Among these are the common barn and chimney swallows, crows, ravens, magpies, thrushes, plover, ptarmigan, and a kind of grouse known to the Russians as "teteref." Only one singing-bird, as far as I know, is to be found in the country, and that is a species of small ground-sparrow which frequents the drier and more grassy plains in the vicinity of the Russian settlements.

The village of Gizhiga, where we had temporarily established our headquarters, was a small settlement of perhaps fifty or sixty plain log houses, situated upon the left bank of the Gizhiga River, eight or ten miles from the gulf. It was at that time one of the most important and flourishing settlements upon the coast of the Okhotsk Sea, and controlled all the trade of north-eastern Siberia as far north at the Anadyr and as far west as the village of Okhotsk. It was the residence of a local governor, the headquarters of four or five Russian merchants, and was visited annually by a government supply steamer, and several trading vessels belonging to wealthy American houses. Its population consisted principally of Siberian Cossacks and the descendants of compulsory emigrants from Russia proper, who had received their freedom as compensation for forcible expatriation. Like all other settled inhabitants of Siberia and Kamchatka, they depended for their subsistence principally upon fish; but as the country abounded in game, and the climate and soil in the valley of the Gizhiga River permitted the cultivation of the hardier kinds of garden vegetables, their condition was undoubtedly much better than it would have been in Russia proper. They were perfectly free, could dispose of their time and services as they chose, and by hiring themselves and their dog-sledges to Russian traders in the winter, they earned money enough to keep themselves supplied with the simpler luxuries, such as tea, sugar, and tobacco, throughout the year. Like all the inhabitants of Siberia, and indeed like all Russians, they were extremely hospitable, good-natured, and obliging, and they contributed not a little to our comfort and amusement during the long months which we were obliged to spend in their far-away isolated settlement.

The presence of Americans in a village so little frequented by strangers as Gizhiga had a very enlivening influence upon society, and as soon as the inhabitants ascertained by experiment that these distinguished sojourners did not consider it beneath their dignity to associate with the prostoi narod, or common people, they overwhelmed us with invitations to tea-parties and evening dances. Anxious to see more of the life of the people, and glad to do anything which would diversify our monotonous existence, we made it a point to accept every such invitation which we received, and many were the dances which Arnold and I attended during the absence of the Major and the Russian governor at Anadyrsk. We had no occasion to ask our Cossack Yagór when there was to be another dance. The question was rather, "Where is the dance to be tonight?" because we knew to a certainty that there would be one somewhere, and wished only to know whether the house in which it was to be held had a ceiling high enough to insure the safety of our heads. It would seem like a preposterous idea to invite people to dance the Russian jig in a room which was too low to permit a man of average stature to stand upright; but it did not seem at all so to these enthusiastic pleasure-seekers in Gizhiga, and night after night they would go hopping around a seven-by-nine room to the music of a crazy fiddle and a two-stringed guitar, stepping on one another\'s toes and bumping their heads against the ceiling with the most cheerful equanimity imaginable. At these dancing parties the Americans always received a hearty welcome, and were fed with berries, black-bread, and tea, until they could eat and dance no more. Occasionally, however, Siberian hospitality took a form which, to say the least, was not altogether pleasant. For instance, Dodd and I were invited one evening to some kind of an entertainment at the house of one of the Cossacks, and, as was customary in such cases, our host set before us a plain lunch of black-bread, salt, raw frozen fish, and a small pepper-sauce bottle about half full of some liquid which he declared to be vodka. Knowing that there was no liquor in the settlement except what we had, Dodd inquired where he had obtained it. He replied with evident embarrassment that it was some which he had bought from a trading vessel the previous fall, and which he had reserved for cases of emergency! I didn\'t believe that there was a Cossack in all north-eastern Siberia who was capable of reserving a bottle of liquor for any such length of time, and in view of his evident uneasiness we thought best to decline to partake of the liquid refreshments and to ask no further questions. It might be vodka, but it was not free from suspicion. Upon our return home I called our boy and inquired if he knew anything about the Cossack\'s liquor—how he obtained it, and where it came from at that season of the year, when none of the Russian merchants had any for sale. The boy hesitated a moment, but upon being questioned closely he explained the mystery. It appeared that the liquor was ours. Whenever any of the inhabitants of the village came to call upon us, as they frequently did, especially upon holidays, it was customary to give each one of them a drink. Taking advantage of this custom, our friend the Cossack used to provide himself with a small bottle, hang it about his neck with a string, conceal it under his fur coat, and present himself at our house every now and then for the ostensible purpose of congratulating us upon some Russian holiday. Of course we were expected to reward this disinterested sociability with a drink. The Cossack would swallow all he could of the fiery stuff, and then holding as much as possible in his mouth he would make a terrible grimace, cover his face with one hand as if the liquor were very strong, and start hurriedly for the kitchen to get some water. As soon as he was secure from observation he would take out his bottle, deposit in it the last mouthful of liquor which he had not swallowed, and return in a few-moments to thank us for our hospitality—and our vodka. This manoeuvre he had been practising at our expense for an unknown length of time, and had finally accumulated nearly a pint. He then had the unblushing audacity to set this half-swallowed vodka before us in an old pepper-sauce bottle, and pretend that it was some that he had reserved since the previous fall for cases of emergency! Could human impudence go farther?

I will relate one other incident which took place during the first month of our residence at Gizh............