It is true, within doors we were warm, the houses being close, the walls thick, the lights small, and the glass all double.  Our food was chiefly the flesh of deer, dried and cured in the season; good bread enough, but baked as biscuits; dried fish of several sorts, and some flesh of mutton, and of buffaloes, which is pretty good beef.  All the stores of provision for the winter are laid up in the summer, and well cured.  Our drink was water mixed with aqua vitae instead of brandy; and, for a treat, mead instead of wine; which, however, they have excellent good.  The hunters, who ventured abroad all weathers, frequently brought us in fresh venison, very fat and good; and sometimes bear’s flesh, but we did not much care for the last.  We had a good stock of tea, with which we treated our friends as above; and, in a word, we lived very cheerfully and well, all things considered.

It was now March, and the days grown considerably longer, and the weather at least tolerable; so other travellers began to prepare sledges to carry them over the snow, and to get things ready to be going; but my measures being fixed, as I have said, for Archangel, and not for Muscovy or the Baltic, I made no motion, knowing very well, that the ships from the south do not set out for that part of the world till May or June; and that if I was there at the beginning of August, it would be as soon as any ships would be ready to go away; and therefore, I say, I made no haste to be gone, as others did; in a word, I saw a great many people, nay, all the travellers, go away before me.  It seems, every year they go from thence to Moscow for trade; viz. to carry furs, and buy necessaries with them, which they bring back to furnish their shops; also others went on the same errand to Archangel; but then they also, being to come back again above eight hundred miles, went all out before me.

In short, about the latter end of May I began to make all ready to pack up; and as I was doing this, it occurred to me, that seeing all these people were banished by the czar of Muscovy to Siberia, and yet, when they came there, were at liberty to go whither they would; why did they not then go away to any part of the world wherever they thought fit? and I began to examine what should hinder them from making such an attempt.

But my wonder was over, when I entreated upon that subject with the person I have mentioned, who answered me thus:  “Consider, first,” said he, “the place where we are; and, secondly, the condition we are in; especially,” said he, “the generality of the people who are banished hither.  We are surrounded,” said he, “with stronger things than bars and bolts:  on the north side is an unnavigable ocean, where ship never sailed, and boat never swam; neither, if we had both, could we know whither to go with them.  Every other way,” said he, “we have above a thousand miles to pass through the czar’s own dominions, and by ways utterly impassable, except by the roads made by the government, and through the towns garrisoned by its troops; so that we could neither pass undiscovered by the road, or subsist any other way:  so that it is in vain to attempt it.”