THE LENA DELTA. 769 



ahead again at 1.10, and, thank God, came in sight of 

 two huts at four p. m. At 3.30 we had made four 

 miles good, cutting off the nose of the face in the Delta. 

 Here we had to take to the bluff, and the travel- 

 ing was heavy, terribly so, still the pace was forced, 

 and at 4.50, when the advance got in, they had covered 

 two miles more, making six miles for the afternoon, or 

 twelve miles for the clay. But recollecting that we 

 had no sleep last night, it has been a hard day's work 

 for us. I arrived at 5.50, having remained behind to 

 drive up Lee. A great trouble to-day was the way 

 in which our feet balled up. Occasionally breaking 

 through the ice our boots got wet and then collected 

 snow and surface crust readily, which froze at once 

 and made a man's feet as large and unwieldy as if 

 walking in sand-bags. It is hard to make the chart 

 reconcile with the country in some instances. Though 

 I left water in cutting across the neck and reached 

 water after crossing, yet we were all the time on a 

 smooth, frozen surface with a small timber line on each 

 side, and in one place the road had all the appearance 

 of a dried river bed. Here holes were encountered, 

 into one of which I and several others tumbled to our 

 waist. 



Fox-traps were seen every two hundred yards or so, 

 baited with pieces of bird. Some of them w r ere sprung, 

 but most of them were all right. The plan seems to 

 be to entice the fox within a pen by meat, in detach- 

 ing which he dislodges a small upright and a log falls 

 down on his back. One of our two huts had fallen to 

 decay, and was uninhabitable. The other was large 

 enough to cover us all, but it was very dirty. Some 

 deer horns showed that game had been caught, some 

 mouldy scraps w 7 ithin showed that the meat had been 



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