a dozen men with lassos arranged themselves in two parallel
lines, while twenty more, with a thong of sealskin two or three
hundred yards in length, encircled a portion of the great herd, and
with shouts and waving lassos began driving it through the narrow
gantlet. The deer strove with frightened bounds to escape from the
gradually contracting circle, but the sealskin cord, held at short
distances by shouting natives, invariably turned them back, and they
streamed in a struggling, leaping throng through the narrow opening
between the lines of lassoers. Ever and anon a long cord uncoiled
itself in air, and a sliding noose fell over the antlers of some
unlucky deer whose slit ears marked him as trained, but whose
tremendous leaps and frantic efforts to escape suggested very grave
doubts as to the extent of the training. To prevent the interference
and knocking together of the deer's antlers when they should be
harnessed in couples, one horn was relentlessly chopped off close to
the head by a native armed with a heavy sword-like knife, leaving a
red ghastly stump from which the blood trickled in little streams over
the animal's ears. They were then harnessed to sledges in couples, by
a collar and trace passing between the forelegs; lines were affixed to
small sharp studs in the headstall, which pricked the right or left
side of the head when the corresponding rein was jerked, and the
equipage was ready.

Bidding good-by to the Lesnoi Kamchadals, who returned from here, we
muffled ourselves from the biting air in our heaviest furs, took
seats on our respective sledges, and at a laconic "tok" (go) from the
_taiyon_ we were off; the little cluster of tents looking like a group
of conical islands behind us as we swept out upon the limitless ocean
of the snowy steppe. Noticing that I shivered a little in the keen
air, my driver pointed away to the northward, and exclaimed with a
pantomimic shrug, "Tam _shipka_ kholodno"--"There it's awful cold." We
needed not to be informed of the fact; the rapidly sinking thermometer
indicated our approach to the regions of perpetual frost, and I looked
forward with no little apprehension to the prospect of sleeping
outdoors in the arctic temperatures of which I had read, but which I
had never yet experienced.

This was my first trial of reindeer travel, and I was a little
disappointed to find that it did not quite realise the expectations
that had been excited in my boyish days by the pic