224 A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 



promptly rolled him over into the fire ; but for once in 

 a way the family took his part, and he received the 

 scrapings of the cook-pot with abject gratitude. How- 

 ever, to show how unequal things are — two minutes 

 afterwards, when Ouss looked insinuatingly at our plates, 

 I found myself feeding him on choice morsels ; and 

 Malchik, who was too deprecatory to ask for any for him- 

 self, looked on hungrily and got none. Therefore the 

 fool was dealt with according to his folly, and every- 

 thing was as unfair as before. 



The Dolgans were going out to shoot geese for 

 Prokopchuk's larder, and invited us to accompany them, 

 Vassilli took his ancient muzzle-loader and the little 

 canoe, and we started out on reindeer sledges. 



Up on the higher ground, the mosquitoes were less 

 virulent than in the valley, but it was very hot, and 

 from horizon to horizon, the whole country seemed to 

 leap and quiver in the sunshine. Tennyson wrote of 

 the Lotus-eaters' land, " where it is always afternoon." 

 Out on the tundra it was like a perpetual Sunday 

 morning. A Sabbath stillness brooded over the vast 

 sunlit plain : one almost expected to hear the distant 

 tinkle of church bells. Away from the river valleys 

 there were no flowers among the reindeer-moss, and few 

 birds except an occasional golden plover. 



Here and there, however, we passed a small moss bog, 

 which seemed to form a kind of oasis for birds. Little 

 stints sprang up at our approach, and red-necked 

 phalaropes — koolik, as the Siberiaks call them — 

 shepherded their young out of the way of the sledges. 

 We were crossing one such bog when a curlew-sandpiper 



