WE EXCOUNTER NATIVES. 
345 
tliat direction, we beheld a party of live persons, among 
whom we recognised Hartman and another of our mess- 
mates, while the remainder ■were buckskin-clad natives, 
who apparently had been pressed into their service as 
guides. These latter we found to consist of a father and 
two sons, the former of whom carried a smooth-bore 
llint-rifle, to which was attached a permanent rest in the 
shape of a wooden prong, pivoted at its vertex to the 
stock near the muzzle, while in his belt was stuck a 
short knife, and down his right leg, outside, in a socket 
worked in his leggings, a very long one. His sons \vere 
I’igged out in a similar style, with the exception of 
having no gun ; and they gave us to understand that 
wdien the old gentleman wounded a bear with his gun 
they drew their long knives to assist him in the conflict 
which followed. The short ones they used for cutting 
and eating. 
As they joined us, we regarded them as curiously as 
they did us, for they were the first of their kind wm had 
seen, though we had read much of their habits and seen 
many engravings of Kamtchadales in such works as 
])r. Pritchard’s “ISTatural History.” I was surprised to 
find them entirely differing from those engravings; and 
my surprise lasted until we reached Ayan, when “ old 
Frybark” — the Kussian officer in command — explained 
it all away. 
The Kamtchadales proper, he said, were mostly con- 
fined to the interior and east coast of the peninsula, while 
the few people found on the west coast (where we were) 
were a mongrel-breed, springing from Pussians and the 
Ee-ah-couts Indians, and presenting the ethnologist with 
