In Search of a Siberian KlondikeVanderlip, Washington Baker
History
In Search of a Siberian Klondike
Vanderlip, Washington Baker
Gold mines and mining -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia; Siberia (Russia) -- Description and travel
Myela led us before night to a Korak village of three yourtas. As we
approached it I saw a crowd huddled about something on the ground. It
proved to be a middle-aged woman, lying on a deerskin, and she seemed
to be dying. I asked why they did not take her inside, and was told
that she had asked to be brought out. I studied her symptoms, and
decided that she was suffering from the grippe, and that her case
demanded heroic treatment. She had not slept for three nights, so I
gave her twenty grains of quinine, two cathartic pills, and one-tenth
grain of morphine. She woke up the next morning with her eyes
brighter, and feeling better in every way. I gave her ten more grains
of quinine, and that afternoon she sat up, and dipped her hand into
the dish of meat and "spinach," and ate her full share. I thought her
cure was something of a triumph, for when I saw her she seemed to be
_in articulo mortis_. As I was about to leave, the husband of this
woman, a man of many reindeer, asked me if I had not forgotten
something, and intimated that I had not paid for the meat that my dogs
had eaten. I asked him if he did not think that my curing of his wife
was compensation enough; nevertheless, I paid him his full price and
departed. My Korak men told me later that the old fellow was angry
because I had saved the woman, as he had already picked out a young
and pretty girl to be her successor. Alas! I had unwittingly come
between man and wife, and had wrecked (at least his) domestic bliss.
On the whole, I am not sure but that it would have been kinder to have
let her die.
Our way led up a succession of cañons, and then over high mesas until
we reached the summit of the range. As we were passing up through
these cañons, we frequently ran under the edges of enormous
overhanging drifts, and I looked up anxiously, but nothing fell except
a little light snow and a few small pebbles. After passing the summit
I determined to take no chances at all, and so restricted traveling to
the night-time, when, of course, everything was frozen stiff.
It was now well into April, and the sun was climbing up into the
heavens at noon. The surface of the snow grew a little too soft to
make day travel quite comfortable. On this side of the mountains I
found considerable float coal, especially in the beds of the creeks.
The whole country was a sandstone formation, which, of course, meant
no gold. At last, far in the distance, we saw the blue waters of the
Okhotsk Sea flashing under the rays of the western sun, and we came
down rapidly to the shore. I saw below us a few of the hour-glass
huts, and at the mouth of a shallow stream a long promontory running
far out into the sea. This was Cape Memaitch,--whither I was bound
because the Russians had heard reports of a United States schooner
touching at this point and taking away full cargoes of ore to San
Francisco.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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