hundred pounds would not tempt them to part with a single animal
as long as the breath of life was in his body. During the two years
and a half which we spent in Siberia, no one of our parties, so far as
I know, ever succeeded in buying from the Koraks or Chukchis a single
living reindeer. All the deer which we eventually owned--some eight
hundred--we obtained from the Wandering Tunguses. [Footnote: This
feeling or superstition eventually disappeared or was overcome. Many
years later, living reindeer were bought in north-eastern Siberia for
transportation to Alaska.]

[Illustration: A RACE OF WANDERING KORAK REINDEER TEAMS]

The Koraks are probably the wealthiest deer-owners in Siberia, and
consequently in the world. Many of the herds which we saw in northern
Kamchatka numbered from eight to twelve thousand; and we were told
that a certain rich Korak, who lived in the middle of the great
tundra, had three immense herds in different places, numbering in
the aggregate thirty thousand head. 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. Every day eight or ten
Koraks, armed with spears and knives, leave the encampment just before
dark, walk a mile or two to the place where the deer happen to be
pastured, build themselves little huts of trailing pine branches,
about three feet in height and two in diameter, and squat in them
throughout the long, cold hours of an arctic night, watching for
wolves. The worse the weather is, the greater the necessity for
vigilance. Sometimes, in the middle of a dark winter's night, when a
terrible north-easterly storm is howling across the steppe in clouds
of flying snow, a band of wolves will make a fierce, sudden attack
upon a herd of deer, and scatter it to the four winds. This it is
the business of the Korak sentinels to prevent. Alone and almost
unsheltered on a great ocean of snow, each man squats down in his
frail beehive of a hut, and spends the long winter nights in watching
the magnificent auroras, which seem to fill the blue vault of heaven
with blood and dye the earth in crimson, listening to the pulsating of
the blood in his ears and the faint distant howls of his enemies the
wolves. Patiently he endures cold which freezes mercury and storms
which sweep away his frail shelter like chaff in a mist of flying
sno