the country along the lower Anadyr was said to be wholly destitute
of wood, and inhabited only by roving bands of Chukchis, and a
party landed there without an interpreter would have no means of
communicating even with these wild, lawless natives, or of obtaining
any means whatever of transportation. If there were any Americans
there, they were certainly in a very unpleasant situation. Dodd and I
talked the matter over until nearly midnight, and finally concluded
that upon our arrival at Anadyrsk we would make up a strong party of
experienced natives, take thirty days' provisions, and push through
to the Pacific Coast on dog-sledges in search of these mysterious
Americans. It would be an adventure just novel and hazardous enough
to be interesting, and if we succeeded in reaching the mouth of the
Anadyr in winter, we should do something never before accomplished and
never but once attempted. With this conclusion we crawled into our
fur bags and dreamed that we were starting for the Open Polar Sea in
search of Sir John Franklin.

On the morning of December 23d, as soon as it was light enough to see,
we loaded our tobacco, provisions, tea, sugar, and trading-goods upon
the Penzhina sledges, and started up the shallow bushy valley of the
Shestakova River toward a mountainous ridge, a spur of the great
Stanavoi range, in which the stream had its source. We crossed the
mountain early in the afternoon, at a height of about a thousand feet,
and slid swiftly down its northern slope into a narrow valley, which
opened upon the great steppes which bordered the river Aklan. The
weather was clear and not very cold, but the snow in the valley was
deep and soft, and our progress was provokingly slow. We had hoped to
reach the Aklan by night, but the day was so short and the road so
bad that we travelled five hours after dark, and then had to stop ten
versts south of the river. We were rewarded, however, by seeing
two very fine mock moons, and by finding a magnificent patch of
trailing-pine, which furnished us with dry wood enough for a glorious
camp-fire. The curious tree or bush known to the Russians as
_kedrovnik_ (keh-drove'-nik), and rendered in the English translation
of Wrangell's Travels as "trailing cedar," is one of the most singular
productions of Siberia. I hardly know whether to call it a tree, a
bush, or a vine, for it partakes more or less of the characteristics
of all three, and yet does not look much like any of them.