teen miles from here."

"Do they live on the tundra as they used to?"

"Yes."

"Are there many of them?"

"Not now. Many, one time. Now very few. Not many reindeer. Too much
not moss. Plenty starve. Plenty die."

"Ask the Chukche," Marian said eagerly, "if I may go home with him to
see his people."

The boy spoke for a moment with the grave-visaged stranger.

"He say, that one, he say yes," smiled the boy.

"Tell him I will be back quick." Marian was away like a shot.

Tearing into their igloo she drove Lucile into a score of activities.
The medicine chest was filled and closed, paints stowed in their box,
garments packed, sleeping-bags rolled up. Then they were away.

Ere she knew it, Lucile was tucked in behind a fleet-footed reindeer,
speeding over the low hills.

"Now, please tell me where we are going," she asked with a smile.

"We are going to visit the most unique people in all the world--the
Reindeer Chukches. They are almost an extinct race now, but the time
was when every clump of willows that lined the banks of the rivers of
the far north in Siberia hid one of their igloos, and every hill and
tundra fed one of their herds.

"Long before the Eskimos of Alaska thought of herding the reindeer,
short-haired deerskin and soft, spotted fawn-skins were traded across
Bering Straits and far up along the Alaskan coast. These skins came
from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches of Siberia. Many years ago the
Mikado of Japan, in the treasure of furs with which he decorated his
royal family, besides the mink, ermine and silver fox, had skins of
rare beauty, spotted skins, brown, white and black. These were
fawn-skins traded from village to village until they reached Japan.
They came from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches. And now we are to
see them as they were many years ago, for they have not changed. And I
am to paint them! Paint them! Think of it!"

"Yes, but," Lucile smiled doubtfully, "supposing the ice gets solid
while we're gone. Suppose Phi takes a fancy to cross without us? What
then?"

Marian's face sobered for a moment. But the zeal of a born artist and
explorer was upon her.

"Oh, fudge!" she exclaimed, "it won't. He won't. I--I--why, I'll
hurry. We'll be back at East Cape in no time at all."

No wildest nomadic dream could have exceeded the life which the two
girls lived in the weeks that followed.

Trailing a reindeer herd over hills and tundra; camping now in a c