The Days of a Man 1896 



the rare days without wind or wave, and we took 

 a whaleboat to row over to Zapadni, two miles 

 niandback awa y ? a method far less fatiguing than the usual 

 tramp through waist-high wet grass, rocks, and 

 sand. But as we came back, a sudden fog shut 

 tightly down; Apollon then lost his bearings and 

 thought he was heading straight toward the village, 

 though I insisted that his course led directly out 

 to sea. He was obstinate, however, and consented 

 to only a slight compromise. Fortunately the mist 

 lifted after an hour or so as suddenly as it had 

 dropped. Tolstoi Head was now disclosed directly 

 behind, while our prow pointed straight for Kam- 

 chatka, 2000 miles away. 



A tale of During the summer, a few days of enforced idle- 

 tbe Mist ness me t j me t wr j te "jj^ g t f Matka," 



Islands & i i i i 



my own best animal tale and, in its way, the best 

 of its kind, each incident being drawn from actual 

 happenings (as vouched for in every case by photo- 

 graphs) and the local color being therefore absolutely 

 genuine even to the last item. "Matka" thus 

 differs totally from the ingeniously clever "White 

 Seal" of Rudyard Kipling. 



The accident which confined me to the house was 

 a curious one. As I climbed a low cliff behind 

 Lukanin Rookery, an "idle bull" I had not noticed 

 made a lunge at me from above. Both of us then 

 fell to the bottom of the cliff, after which I limped 

 back to the village with a sprained ankle, leaving 

 my antagonist with a snubbed nose. 



In the course of the season we did some deep-sea 

 dredging with the Albatross, which was especially 

 fitted for that sort of work. Our principal trip ex- 

 C 560] 



