110 
THK VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
the hard labour which must have been required for preparing 
the thread and making the net. The nets are also sometimes 
used as drift-nets. The fishing-rod consists of a shaft only 
thirty centimetres long, to which is fixed a short line made of 
sinews. The extreme end of the line passes through a large 
sinker of ivory, to which are attached two or three tufts each 
with its hook of bone only, or of hone and copper, or bone and 
iron. The hook has three or four points projecting in different 
directions. I have before described how the hook is used in 
autumn in fishing for roach, also how the productive fishing 
goes on in the neighbourhood of Tjapka. 
Even for the coast Chukch reindeer flesh appears to form an 
important article of food. He probably purchases his stock of 
it from the reindeer-Chukches for train-oil, skin straps, walrus 
tusks, and perhaps fish. I suppose that part of the frozen 
reindeer blood, which the inhabitants of the villages at our 
winter station used for soup, had been obtained in the same 
way. Wild reindeer, or reindeer that had run wild, were 
hunted with the lasso. Such animals, however, do not appear 
now to be found in any large numbers on the Chukch peninsula. 
Besides fish and flesh the Chukches consume immense quanti¬ 
ties of herbs and other substances from the vegetable kingdom.^ 
The most important of these are the leaves and young branches 
of a great many different plants (for instance Salix, Rhodiola, 
&c.) which are collected and after being cleaned are preserved 
in seal-skin sacks. Intentionally or unintentionally the contents 
of the sacks sour during the course of the summer. In autumn 
they freeze together to a lump of the form of the stretched 
seal-skin. The frozen mass is cut in pieces and used with flesh, 
much in the same way as we eat bread. Occasionally a vegetable 
1 An exhaustive treatise on tlie food-substances which the Chukches 
gather from the vegetable kingdom, written by Dr. Kjellman, is to be 
found in The Scienfific Work of the Vega Expedition. Popov already states 
that the Chukches eat many berries, roots, and herbs {Milller, iii. p. 59). 
