d
they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies. He, with one
Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company. They had spent a
winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their
rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance in a
thousand.

But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship to
ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored
south. All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts
of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the
frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm. Either
the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off,
manned by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to
learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers' gunpowder. South, south they
had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California. Here, it was said,
were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico. He had
had hopes of those Spanish adventurers. Escaping to them, the rest would
have been easy--a year or two, what did it matter more or less--and he
would win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his. But they had
met no Spaniards. Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of
savagery. The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war,
had driven them back from the shores. At last, when one boat was cut off
and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed
back to the north.

The years had passed. He had served under Tebenkoff when Michaelovski
Redoubt was built. He had spent two years in the Kuskokwim country. Two
summers, in the month of June, he had managed to be at the head of
Kotzebue Sound. Here, at this time, the tribes assembled for barter;
here were to be found spotted deerskins from Siberia, ivory from the
Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of the Arctic, strange stone
lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no one knew whence, and,
once, a hunting-knife of English make; and here, Subienkow knew, was the
school in which to learn geography. For he met Eskimos from Norton
Sound, from King Island and St. Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of
Wales, and Point Barrow. Such places had other names, and their
distances were measured in days.

It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster region
from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps a