previous winter, and which I knew
must be occupied by an American. With heart beating fast from
excitement I sprang from my sledge, ran up to the _pavoska_, and
demanded in English, "Who is it?" It was too dark to recognise faces,
but I knew well the voice that answered "Bush!" and never was that
voice more welcome. For more than three weeks I had not seen a
countryman nor spoken a word of English; I was lonely and disheartened
by constantly accumulating misfortunes, when suddenly at midnight on
a desolate mountain-top, in a storm, I met an old friend and comrade
whom I had almost given up as dead. It was a joyful meeting. The
natives who had gone to Anadyr Bay in search of Bush and his party had
returned in safety, bringing Bush with them, and he was on his way to
Gizhiga to carry the news of the famine and get provisions and help.
He had been stopped by the storm as we had, and when it abated a
little at midnight we had both started from opposite sides to cross
the mountain, and had thus met upon the summit.

We went back together to my deserted camp on the south side of the
mountain, blew up the embers of my still smouldering fire, spread down
our bearskins, and sat there talking until we were as white as polar
bears with the drifting snow, and day began to break in the East.

Bush brought more bad news. They had gone down to the mouth of the
Anadyr, as the priest had already informed me, in the early part of
June, and had waited there for the Company's vessels almost four
months. Their provisions had finally given out, and they had been
compelled to subsist upon the few fish that they were able to catch
from day to day, and go hungry when they could catch none. For salt
they scraped the staves of an old pork-barrel which had been left at
Macrae's camp the previous winter, and for coffee they drank burned
rice water. At last, however, salt and rice both failed, and they were
reduced to an unvarying and often scanty diet of boiled fish, without
coffee, bread, or salt. Living in the midst of a great moss swamp
fifty miles from the nearest tree, dressing in skins for the want of
anything else, suffering frequently from hunger, tormented constantly
by mosquitoes, from which they had no protection, and looking day
after day and week after week for vessels which never came, their
situation was certainly miserable. The Company's bark _Golden Gate_
had finally arrived in October, bringing twenty-five men and a small
steam