THE GOOSING 239 
away again. No get in; no good. Yes, yes,’ says 
Ustynia, with a chuckle. ‘Dorndaftsa,’ by the way, is 
our old friend the blue-bottle. 
I can recommend this plan for any who would keep 
game in this country. 
We had passed within a yard of a king-eider duck’s 
nest a dozen times, I should say, without seeing it, when 
she suddenly rose straight off her eggs and away to the 
creek. The extraordinary point was this, the eggs— 
there were five, all incubated—were completely covered 
up; and yet none of us had seen her moving, though we 
were working at the goose-cache not more than twenty 
yards off. 
Katrina’s time was much divided between storing 
geese and attention to her baby. The baby, which very 
seldom cried, did so on this day at intervals. Very likely 
because, poor little wretch, the ‘nyaninks’ settled on its 
nose. Katrina danced it up and down in the cradle, con- 
soling it with ‘ Pein-shaw, pein-shaw adski.’ This word 
‘pein-shaw’ they always used on these occasions. What 
it exactly means I do not know, but if you can give to 
it the same tone as an old nurse’s ‘There, there,’ why 
then you have the thing exactly. 
I came across a new flower in the bog to-day, a white 
ranunculus with a powerful scent, half-daphne and half- 
hawthorn. The idea of a sweet ranunculus pleased me 
so much that I kept stopping the sleighs and collecting 
it. I put some in my button-hole, where it smelt as 
