The descendants of these pensioned servants of the Russian Company are the men and women you observe to-day in those little hamlets scattered along the east coast of Cook’s Inlet, or the Kenai Peninsula. They are bright, clean, and, though very, very poor, still appear wholly independent. They are engaged in small trading with the Kenaitze savages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vegetables. The cattle, of which they have a few in each settlement, are of the small, shaggy Siberian breed, not much larger than Shetland ponies, and capable of living in the rigors of a winter which would destroy or permanently injure our breeds of neat cattle. These people make butter by laboriously shaking the milk in bottles. They are obliged to shelter their cattle during winters from the driving fury of heavy snow-storms, and when the herd ranges in the grass-season, the boys and old men always have to guard it from the deadly attention of the big brown bears which infest the entire region. They have a regular “round-up” in each hamlet every night. [Illustration: THE VOLCANO OF ILYAMNA: 12,060 FEET The most prominent Fire Mountain of that Chain forming the North Shore of Cook’s Inlet] Everywhere on the west coast of Cook’s Inlet the mountains rise steeply and rugged from the sea, a wild and uninviting contrast with the park-like terraces of the Kenai coast just opposite. Here are the same lofty ridges and smoking peaks which startled and oppressed the brave heart of Captain Cook, as they muttered and trembled in volcanic throes when he sailed by. The two cones which rise dominant are the summits of Mount Ilyamna and the “Rédoute,” from which columns of brownish smoke ascend by day and ruddy fire-glowings by night. So precipitous is this mainland shore of Cook’s Inlet that at only two small points of the most limited area is there any low land to be found, and these spots have been promptly utilized by the Kenaitze Indians as sites for their villages of Toyonok and Kustatan. The dense, sombre coniferous forest which we have become so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls with the thickest of all coverings to a height of one thousand feet above the beaches below. Here and there we glance into the recesses of a cañon or a gorge where the naked, mossy surface of immense rocky declivities arrests and fixes the eye, while the glittering caps of ice and snow far away above fit down snugly upon long, rough, treeless intervals, covered with heather, lichens, and varied arctic sphagnum.