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While we were gloomily making preparations to return to the Viliga, one of the Koraks who had gone to take a last look at the gap of open water came hurriedly climbing back, shouting joyfully, "Mozhno perryékat, mozhno perryékat!" "It is possible to cross."
The inhabitants of these native settlements in southern Kamchatka are a dark swarthy race, considerably below the average stature of Siberian natives, and are very different in all their characteristics from the wandering tribes of Koraks and Chukchis who live farther north.
Only seven more Kamchadal towns lay between us and the steppes of the Wandering Koraks, and we had not yet been able to think of any plan of crossing these inhospitable wastes before the winter's snows should make them passable on reindeer-sledges.
For a description of the manner in which this band gets drunk collectively and individually upon one fungus, and keeps drunk for a week, the curious reader is referred to Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, Letter 32. It is but just to say, however, that this horrible practice is almost entirely confined to the settled Koraks of Penzhinsk Gulf the lowest, most degraded portion of the whole tribe.
They led, originally, a wandering life like the other Koraks; but, losing their deer by some misfortune or disease, they built themselves houses of driftwood on the seacoast, settled down, and now gain a scanty subsistence by fishing, catching seals, and hunting for carcasses of whales which have been killed by American whaling vessels, stripped of blubber, and then cast ashore by the sea.
Amongst the wild tribes of the Malay Archipelago there is also a racing match; and it appears from M. Bourien's account, as Sir J. Lubbock remarks, that "the race, 'is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to the young man who has the good fortune to please his intended bride." A similar custom, with the same result, prevails with the Koraks of North- Eastern Asia.
With the assistance of the Russian governor I succeeded in getting two Cossacks to go to Petropavlovsk after the Americans who were presumed to have been left there by the Onward, and half a dozen Koraks to carry provisions to Yamsk, while Lieutenant Arnold himself sent sledges for the six hundred rations.
Koppen, F.T., on the migratory locust. Koraks, marriage customs of. Kordofan, protuberances artificially produced by natives of. Korte, on the proportion of sexes in locusts; Russian locusts. Kovalevsky, A., on the affinity of the Ascidia to the Vertebrata. Kovalevsky, W., on the pugnacity of the male capercailzie; on the pairing of the capercailzie.
A horse sinks to his knees in the spongy surface at every step, and soon becomes exhausted by the severe exertion which such walking necessitates. We had had an example of such travel upon the summit of the Yolofka pass, and it was not strange that we should look forward with considerable anxiety to crossing the great moss steppes of the Koraks in the northern part of the peninsula.
I had found by some experience that these unlettered Koraks estimated a man, not so much by what he knew which they did not, as by what he knew concerning their own special and peculiar pursuits; and I determined to demonstrate, even to their darkened understandings, that the knowledge of civilisation was universal in its application, and that the white man, notwithstanding his disadvantage in colour, could drive dogs better by intuition than they could by the aggregated wisdom of centuries; that in fact he could, if necessary, "evolve the principles of dog-driving out of the depths of his moral consciousness."
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