IN SIGHT OF LAND 
197 
“Might be, might be, perhaps,” he replied. 
Evidently he was still dubious about its being 
Siberia. He had been satisfied by the chart the 
night before; at Shipwreck Camp and again at 
Wrangell Island I had explained the charts to him, 
had shown him where we were going, what we were 
going to do with the charts, how far away Siberia 
was and how far we should have to travel to meet 
Eskimo, expressing the distances by comparing 
them with the distance from Point Barrow to the 
deer camp, for instance, or down to Cape Lisburne, 
trips that were familiar to him. Now, however, 
he still appeared skeptical of the identity of the 
land we were looking at. He said it was not Si¬ 
beria. When I asked why, he replied that he had 
been told by his people that Siberia was low land. 
I explained to him that the shore was, it was true, 
low in many places, running out for miles into the 
sea. This low fore-shore was known as the tundra; 
owing to the distance we could see only the hinter¬ 
land behind it, which was high. Kataktovick lis¬ 
tened to my explanation and then shook his head. 
It might be an island, he said; Alaskan Eskimo on 
the Siberian shore, so he had been told, are always 
set upon and killed by the Eskimo there. I told 
him as best I could that the Siberian Eskimo were 
just as kindly disposed towards wayfarers as the 
Alaskan Eskimo and that he had nothing to fear. 
