ferent directions. I have before described how the
hook is used in autumn in fishing for roach, also how the productive
fishing goes on in the neighbourhood of Tjapka.

Even for the coast Chukch reindeer flesh appears to form an
important article of food. He probably purchases his stock of it
from the reindeer-Chukches for train-oil, skin straps, walrus tusks,
and perhaps fish. I suppose that part of the frozen reindeer blood,
which the inhabitants of the villages at our winter station used for
soup, had been obtained in the same way. Wild reindeer, or reindeer
that had run wild, were hunted with the lasso. Such animals,
however, do not appear now to be found in any large numbers on the
Chukch peninsula.

Besides fish and flesh the Chukches consume immense quantities of
herbs and other substances from the vegetable kingdom.[283] The most
important of these are the leaves and young branches of a great many
different plants (for instance Salix, Rhodiola, &c.) which are
collected and after being cleaned are preserved in seal-skin sacks.
Intentionally or unintentionally the contents of the sacks sour
during the course of the summer. In autumn they freeze together to a
lump of the form of the stretched seal-skin. The frozen mass is cut
in pieces and used with flesh, much in the same way as we eat bread.
Occasionally a vegetable soup is made from the pieces along with
water, and is eaten warm. In the same way the contents of the
reindeer stomach is used. Algae and different kinds of roots are
also eaten, among the latter a kind of wrinkled tubers, which, as
already stated (Vol. I., p. 450) have a very agreeable taste.

In summer the Chukches eat cloud-berries, red bilberries, and other
berries, which are said to be found in great abundance in the
interior of the country. The quantity of vegetable matter which is
collected for food at that season of the year is very considerable,
and the natives do not appear to be very particular in their choice,
if the leaves are only green, juicy, and free from any bitter taste.
When the inhabitants, in consequence of scarcity of food, removed in
the beginning of February from Pitlekaj, they carried with them
several sacks of frozen vegetables, and there were still some left
in the cellars to be taken away as required. In the tents at St.
Lawrence Bay there lay heaps of leaf-clad willow-twigs and sacks
filled with leaves and stalks of Rhodiola. The writers who quote the
Chukches as an e