A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 207 



was a brook of running water. Even in a hunting 

 country, it would have ranked as a fence, and the other 

 sledges turned aside to ford it. Vassilli SotnikofF, 

 however, drove straight at it with my sledge following 

 him. His deer took the channel in their stride, and the 

 sledge lumbered safely after them. But one of my 

 team, slipping in the boggy ground, leaped short, and 

 down plunged the sledge into the stream on to the top 

 of the hindermost deer. As I clutched at my seat with 

 both hands, I had a vision of struggling bodies straining 

 gallantly at the traces. Then, with a splash, the sledge 

 was jerked up the opposite bank, with me, exceedingly 

 wet, still clinging on behind. 



A soaking more or less made little difiference, how- 

 ever, for as we turned aside from the river-bank, and 

 trotted up the steep incline which led to the higher 

 tundra, the rain came down thick and fast, wrapping all 

 the landscape in a veil of mist. Before us, stretching, 

 so it seemed, into infinity, lay the old sled track, along 

 which generations of Samoyedes had travelled "into 

 the tundra." For a couple of miles after leaving the 

 river, this track was quite plain, but presently it grew 

 fainter and fainter, and finally disappeared altogether. 

 To right and left the country lay as flat as a plate, and — 

 to the inexperienced eye — almost as featureless. There 

 was not a hill by which to take bearings, no sun by 

 which to set a course. Here and there the ground 

 was broken into gullies down which poured turgid 

 streams, and in the angles of the slopes, besmirched snow- 

 drifts still lingered. More often our Avay lay over broad, 

 flat moss-hags, broken and here there by a low mound, 



