gantlet.  The deer strove with frightened bounds to escape from the gradually contracting circle, but the sealskin cord, held at short distances by shouting natives, invariably turned them back, and they streamed in a struggling, leaping throng through the narrow opening between the lines of lassoers.  Ever and anon a long cord uncoiled itself in air, and a sliding noose fell over the antlers of some unlucky deer whose slit ears marked him as trained, but whose tremendous leaps and frantic efforts to escape suggested very grave doubts as to the extent of the training.  To prevent the interference and knocking together of the deer’s antlers when they should be harnessed in couples, one horn was relentlessly chopped off close to the head by a native armed with a heavy sword-like knife, leaving a red ghastly stump from which the blood trickled in little streams over the animal’s ears.  They were then harnessed to sledges in couples, by a collar and trace passing between the forelegs; lines were affixed to small sharp studs in the headstall, which pricked the right or left side of the head when the corresponding rein was jerked, and the equipage was ready.

Bidding good-by to the Lesnoi Kamchadals, who returned from here, we muffled ourselves from the biting air in our heaviest furs, took seats on our respective sledges, and at a laconic “tok” (go) from the taiyon we were off; the little cluster of tents looking like a group of conical islands behind us as we swept out upon the limitless ocean of the snowy steppe.  Noticing that I shivered a little in the keen air, my driver pointed away to the northward, and exclaimed with a pantomimic shrug, “Tam shipka kholodno”—­“There it’s awful cold.”  We needed not to be informed of the fact; the rapidly sinking thermometer indicated our approach to the regions of perpetual frost, and I looked forward with no little apprehension to the prospect of sleeping outdoors in the arctic temperatures of which I had read, but which I had never yet experienced.

This was my first trial of reindeer travel, and I was a little disappointed to find that it did not quite realise the expectations that had been excited in my boyish days by the pictures of galloping Lapland deer in the old geographies.  The reindeer were there, but they were not the ideal reindeer of early fancy, and I felt a vague sense of personal injury and unjustifiable deception at the substitution of these awkward, ungainly beasts for the spirited and fleet-footed animals of my boyish imagination.  Their trot was awkward and heavy, they carried their heads low, and their panting breaths and gaping mouths were constantly suggestive of complete exhaustion, and excited pity for their apparently laborious exertions, rather than admiration for the speed which they really did exhibit.  My ideal reindeer would never have demeaned himself by running with his mouth wide open.  When I learned, as I afterward did, that they were compelled to breathe through their mouths, on account