er; but winter had already set in, and five days afterwards,
before they could finish discharging the vessel's cargo, she was
wrecked by ice. Her crew and nearly all her stores were saved, but by
this misfortune the number of the party was increased from twenty-five
to forty-seven, without any corresponding increase in the quantity of
provisions for their subsistence. Fortunately, however, there were
bands of Wandering Chukchis within reach, and from them Bush succeeded
in buying a considerable number of reindeer, which he caused to be
frozen and stored away for future use. After the freezing over of the
Anadyr River, Bush was left, as Macrae had been the previous winter,
without any means of getting up to the settlement, a distance of 250
miles; but he had foreseen this difficulty, and had left orders at
Anadyrsk that if he failed to return in canoes before the river
closed, dog-sledges should be sent to his assistance. Notwithstanding
the famine the dog-sledges were sent, and Bush, with two men, had
returned on them to Anadyrsk. Finding that settlement famine-stricken
and deserted, he had started without a moment's delay for Gizhiga, his
exhausted and starving dogs dying along the road.

The situation of affairs, then, when I met Bush on the summit of the
Russki Krebet, was briefly as follows:

Forty-four men were living at the mouth of the Anadyr River, 250 miles
from the nearest settlement, without provisions enough to last them
through the winter, and without any means whatever of getting away.
The village of Anadyrsk was deserted, and with the exception of a few
teams at Penzhina, there were no available dogs in all the Northern
District, from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait. Under such
circumstances, what could be done? Bush and I discussed the question
all night beside our lonely camp-fire under the Russki Krebet, but
could come to no decision, and after sleeping three or four hours
we started for Anadyrsk. Late in the afternoon we drove into the
settlement--but it could be called a settlement no longer. The two
upper villages--"Osolkin" and "Pokorukof," which on the previous
winter had presented so thriving an appearance, were now left without
a single inhabitant, and Markova itself was occupied only by a few
starving families whose dogs had all died, and who were therefore
unable to get away. No chorus of howls announced our arrival; no
people came out to meet us; the windows of the houses were closed with