e art of driving a dog-team is one of the most deceptive in the
world. The traveller at first sight imagines that driving a dog-sledge
is just as easy as driving a street-car, and at the very first
favourable opportunity he tries it. After being run away with within
the first ten minutes, capsized into a snow-drift, and his sledge
dragged bottom upward a quarter of a mile from the road, the rash
experimenter begins to suspect that the task is not quite so easy as
he had supposed, and in less than one day he is generally convinced by
hard experience that a dog-driver, like a poet, is born, not made.

The dress of the Kamchadals in winter and summer is made for the most
part of skins. Their winter costume consists of sealskin boots or
_torbasses_ worn over heavy reindeerskin stockings and coming to the
knee; fur trousers with the hair inside; a foxskin hood with a face
border of wolverine skin; and a heavy _kukhlanka_ (kookh-lan'-kah), or
double fur overshirt, covering the body to the knees. This is made of
the thickest and softest reindeerskin, ornamented around the bottom
with silk embroidery, trimmed at the sleeves and neck with glossy
beaver, and furnished with a square flap under the chin, to be held up
over the nose, and a hood behind the neck, to be drawn over the head
in bad weather. In such a costume as this the Kamchadals defy for
weeks at a time the severest cold, and sleep out on the snow safely
and comfortably in temperatures of twenty, thirty, and even forty
degrees below zero, Fahr.

Most of our time during our long detention at Lesnoi was occupied in
the preparation of such costumes for our own use, in making covered
dog-sledges to protect ourselves from winter storms, sewing bearskins
into capacious sleeping-bags, and getting ready generally for a hard
winter's campaign.

[Illustration: Root Digger]

CHAPTER XVII

A FRESH START--CROSSING THE SAMANKA MOUNTAINS--DESCENT ON A KORAK
ENCAMPMENT--NOMADS AND THEIR TENTS--DOOR-HOLES AND DOGS--POLOGS--KORAK
BREAD

About the 20th of October a Russian physician arrived from Tigil,
and proceeded to reduce the little strength that the Major had by
steaming, bleeding, and blistering him into a mere shadow of his
former robust self. The fever, however, abated under this energetic
treatment, and he began gradually to amend. Sometime during the same
week, Dodd and Meranef returned from Tigil with a new supply of tea,
sugar, rum, tobacco, and hardbread, and