ted, but still continued
to ask me for samples of every tin can I opened. Just before we
reached Penzhina, however, a catastrophe occurred which relieved
me from their importunity, and inspired them with a superstitious
reverence for tin cans which no subsequent familiarity could ever
overcome. We were accustomed, when we came into camp at night, to set
our cans into a bed of hot ashes and embers to thaw out, and I had
cautioned my drivers repeatedly not to do this until after the cans
had been opened. I could not of course explain to them that the
accumulation of steam would cause the cans to burst; but I did tell
them that it would be "atkin"--bad--if they did not make a hole in the
cover before putting the can on the fire. One evening, however, they
forgot or neglected to take this precaution, and while they were all
squatting in a circle around the fire, absorbed in meditation, one of
the cans suddenly blew up with a tremendous explosion, set free an
immense cloud of steam, and scattered fragments of boiling hot mutton
in every direction. Had a volcano opened suddenly under the camp-fire,
the Koraks could not have been more dismayed. They had not time to get
up and run away, so they rolled over backward with their heels in the
air, shouted "Kammuk!"--"The Devil!"--and gave themselves up for lost.
My hearty laughter finally reassured them, and made them a little
ashamed of their momentary panic; but from that time forward they
handled tin cans as if they were loaded percussion shells, and could
never again be induced to taste a morsel of their contents.

Our progress toward Anadyrsk after we left the coast of the Okhotsk
Sea was very slow, on account both of the shortness of the days, and
the depth and softness of the freshly fallen snow. Frequently, for ten
or fifteen miles at a stretch, we were compelled to break a road on
snow-shoes for our heavily loaded sledges, and even then our tired
dogs could hardly struggle through the soft powdery drifts. The
weather, too, was so intensely cold that my mercurial thermometer,
which indicated only -23 deg., was almost useless. For several days the
mercury never rose out of the bulb, and I could only estimate the
temperature by the rapidity with which my supper froze after being
taken from the fire. More than once soup turned from a liquid to a
solid in my hands, and green corn froze to my tin plate before I could
finish eating it.

On the fourteenth day after leaving Gizhi