wooden shutters, and half buried in drifts; the snow was unbroken by
paths, and the whole village was silent and desolate. It looked as if
one-half of the inhabitants had died and the other half had gone
to the funeral! We stopped at a small log-house where Bush had
established his headquarters, and spent the remainder of the day in
talking over our respective experiences.

The unpleasant situation in which we found ourselves placed was due
almost entirely to the famine at Anadyrsk. The late arrival and
consequent wreck of the _Golden Gate_ was of course a great
misfortune; but it would not have been irretrievable had not the
famine deprived us of all means of transportation. The inhabitants of
Anadyrsk, as well as of all the other Russian settlements in Siberia,
are dependent for their very existence upon the fish which enter the
rivers every summer to spawn, and are caught by thousands as they make
their way up-stream toward the shallow water of the tributary brooks
in the interior of the country. As long as these migrations of
the fish are regular the natives have no difficulty in providing
themselves with an abundance of food; but once in every three or four
years, for some unexplained reason, the fish fail to come, and the
following winter brings precisely such a famine as the one which I
have described at Anadyrsk, only frequently much worse. In 1860
more than a hundred and fifty natives died of starvation in four
settlements on the coast of Penzhinsk Gulf, and the peninsula of
Kamchatka has been swept by famines again and again since the Russian
conquest, until its population has been reduced more than one-half.
Were it not for the Wandering Koraks, who come to the relief of the
starving people with their immense herds of reindeer, I firmly believe
that the _settled_ population of Siberia, including the Russians,
Chuances, Yukagirs, and Kamchadals, would become extinct in less than
fifty years. The great distance of the settlements one from another,
and the absence of any means of intercommunication in summer, make
each village entirely dependent upon its own resources, and prevent
any mutual support and assistance, until it is too late to be of any
avail. The first victims of such famines are always the dogs; and the
people being thus deprived of their only means of transportation,
cannot get away from the famine-stricken settlement, and after eating
their boots, sealskin thongs, and scraps of untanned leather,