We stopped for the night at the house of a Russian peasant who lived on the bank of the Gizhiga River, about fifteen versts east of the settlement.  While we were drinking tea a special messenger arrived from the village, bringing two frozen blueberry pies as a parting token of regard from the Major, and a last souvenir of civilisation.  Pretending to fear that something might happen to these delicacies if we should attempt to carry them with us, Dodd, as a precautionary measure, ate one of them up to the last blueberry; and rather than have him sacrifice himself to a mistaken idea of duty by trying to eat the other, I attended to its preservation myself and put it for ever beyond the reach of accidental contingencies.

On the following day we reached the little log yurt on the Malmofka, where we had spent one night on our way to Gizhiga; and as the cold was still intense we were glad to avail ourselves again of its shelter, and huddle around the warm fire which Yagor kindled on a sort of clay altar in the middle of the room.  There was not space enough on the rough plank floor to accommodate all our party, and our men built a huge fire of tamarack logs outside, hung over their teakettles, thawed out their frosty beards, ate dry fish, sang jolly Russian songs, and made themselves so boisterously happy, that we were tempted to give up the luxury of a roof for the sake of sharing in their out-door amusements and merriment.  Our thermometers, however, marked 35 deg. below zero, and we did not venture out of doors except when an unusually loud burst of laughter announced some stupendous Siberian joke which we thought would be worth hearing.  The atmosphere outside seemed to be just cool enough to exert an inspiriting influence upon our lively Cossacks, but it was altogether too bracing for unaccustomed American constitutions.  With a good fire, however, and plenty of hot tea, we succeeded in making ourselves very comfortable inside the yurt, and passed away the long evening in smoking Circassian tobacco and pine bark, singing American songs, telling stories, and quizzing our good-natured but unsophisticated Cossack Meranef.

It was quite late when we finally crawled into our fur bags to sleep; but long afterward we could hear the songs, jokes, and laughter of our drivers as they sat around the camp-fire, and told funny stories of Siberian travel.

We were up on the following morning long before daylight; and, after a hasty breakfast of black-bread, dried fish, and tea, we harnessed our dogs, wet down our sledge-runners with water from the teakettle to cover them with a coating of ice, packed up our camp equipage, and, leaving the shelter of the tamarack forest around the yurt, drove out upon the great snowy Sahara which lies between the Malmofka River and Penzhinsk Gulf.  It was a land of desolation.  A great level steppe, as boundless to the weary eye as the ocean itself, stretched away in every direction to the far horizon, without a single tree or bush to relieve its white, snowy surface.  Nowhere did we see any sign of animal or vegetable life, any suggestion of summer or flowers or warm sunshine, to brighten the dreary waste of storm-drifted snow.