266 ICE-BOUND ON KOLGUEV 
‘No, Uano, not propalo. Very well,’ say I. For I 
had seen with the glass that the boat was well protected 
by a barrier of grounded ice. 
So then we cooked a goose. Our friends were amazed 
at and enraptured with our oven. 
‘Ah,’ they said, ‘you all stone. Yes, yes. House 
stone, trail stone, fire stone. You very good. Yes, yes.’ 
For we had astonished them much by describing our 
English stone houses and roads. 
The Samoyed word for ‘ yes, yes’ seemed always to me 
the best affirmative I knew. The Russian ‘da, da,’ or 
‘yah,’ or ‘oui,’ or our own ‘yes,’ none of them seemed so 
clinching and so final as the Samoyed ‘drem, drem,’ said 
as they could say it. 
So they ate the goose: and when that was finished I 
made them as dry a seat as the wet tent permitted, and 
gave the old man a pipe, which was always his great joy. 
And then, ‘ Uano,’ said I, ‘what news?’ For I knew 
perfectly well from his face and manner that he had not 
come only to bring the geese. 
‘Ahnglia, Hylum, stay with Uano all winter. Yes, 
yes—choom,’ said he. 
‘No, no, Uano, steamboat come, or Russians come.’ 
‘Steamboat no, no, steamboat gone away,’ he said. 
‘Yes, yes, far away, all ice. Yes, yes’; and he waved 
his hand across the sea. 
There was something more in this, and after much 
patience I wormed it out of him. It appeared that five 
