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On November 1st we put on our heavy fur clothes, which turned us into wild animals of most ferocious appearance, bade good-by to all the hospitable people of Lesnoi, and set out with a train of sixteen sledges, eighteen men, two hundred dogs, and forty days' provisions, for the territory of the Wandering Koraks.
The temperature of a Korak tent in winter seldom ranges above 20° or 25° Fahr., and as constant exposure to such a degree of cold would be at least very disagreeable, the Koraks construct around the inner circumference of the tent small, nearly air-tight apartments called pologs, which are separated one from another by skin curtains, and combine the advantages of exclusiveness with the desirable luxury of greater warmth.
The care of these great herds is almost the only occupation of the Koraks' lives. They are obliged to travel constantly from place to place to find them food, and to watch them night and day to protect them from wolves.
This immense chain of mountains, which has never even been named, stretches from the fifty-first to the sixtieth degree of latitude in one almost continuous ridge, and at last breaks off abruptly into the Okhotsk Sea, leaving to the northward a high level steppe called the "dole" or desert, which is the wandering ground of the Reindeer Koraks.
My voice failed to produce the startling effect that I had anticipated. The leader a grim, bluff Nestor of a dog glanced carelessly over his shoulder and very perceptibly slackened his pace. This sudden and marked contempt for my authority on the part of the dogs did more than all the sneers of the Koraks to shake my confidence in my own skill.
I find myself more and more inclined to the opinion that the aboriginal South Americans are the oldest people on this continent; that they are distinct in race; and that the wild Indians of the North came originally from Asia, where the race to which they belong seems still represented by the Koraks and Chookchees found in that part of Asia which extends to Behring’s Strait.
I thought of De Quincey's celebrated Essay upon "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," and of the field which a Korak encampment would afford to his "Society of Connoisseurs in Murder." All Koraks are taught to look upon such a death as the natural end of their existence, and they meet it generally with perfect composure.
Supernatural influences he could and did feel; but the drum and wild shrieks of the shamán showed how utterly he failed to understand their nature and teachings. The natural disposition of the Wandering Koraks is thoroughly good. They treat their women and children with great kindness; and during all my intercourse with them, extending over two years, I never saw a woman or a child struck.
It is a religion which varies considerably in different places and among different people; but with the Koraks and Chukchis it may be briefly defined as the worship of the evil spirits who are supposed to be embodied in all the mysterious powers and manifestations of Nature, such as epidemic and contagious diseases, severe storms, famines, eclipses, and brilliant auroras.
Shut up in a dark half-underground dungeon, with a temperature ten degrees below the freezing-point, we had no other resource. It is a mystery to me how human beings with any feeling at all can be satisfied to live in such abominable, detestable houses as those of the Settled Koraks. They have not one solitary redeeming feature.
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