Thrills & chills

To whet your appetite, here is a brief, random excerpt from Tent Camping in Siberia by George F. Kennan.

The winter travel of the Kamtchadals is accomplished entirely upon dog-sledges and in no other pursuit of their lives do they spend more time or exhibit their native skill and ingenuity to greater advantage. They may even be said to have made dogs for themselves in the first place, for the present animal is nothing more than a half-domesticated arctic wolf and still retains all his wolfish instincts and peculiarities . . .

(The sledges) are guided and controlled entirely by the voice and by a lead dog who is especially trained for this purpose. The driver carries no whip, but has instead a thick stick about four feet in length and two in diameter called an oerstel. This is armed at one end with a long iron spike and is used to check the speed of the sledge in descending hills and to stop the dogs when they leave the road, as they frequently do in pursuit of reindeer and foxes. The spiked end is thrust down in front of one of the uprights of the runners and drags in that position through the snow, the upper end being firmly held by the driver . . .

The traveler at first sight imagines that driving a dog-sledge is just as easy as driving a street car . . . After being run away with in the first ten minutes, capsized into a snow drift and his sledge dragged bottom upward a quarter mile from the road the rash experimenter . . . is generally convinced by hard experience that a dog driver, like a poet, is born, not made.

On November first . . .we set out with a train of sixteen sledges, eighteen men, two hundred dogs and forty days provisions for the territory of the wandering Koraks. We were determined to reach Geezhega this time or, as the newspapers, say, perish in the attempt.

Late in the afternoon of November 3rd, just as the long northern twilight was fading into the peculiar steely blue of an arctic night, our dogs toiled slowly up the last summit of the Samanka Mountains, and we looked down from a height of more than two thousand feet upon the dreary expanse of snow which stretched away from the base of the mountains at our feet to the
far horizon. It was the land of the wandering Koraks . . .

The rising moon was just throwing into dark, bold relief the shaggy outlines of the peaks on our right, as we roused up our dogs and plunged into the throat of a dark ravine which led downward to the steppe. The deceptive shadows of night and the masses of rock which choked up the narrow defile made the descent extremely dangerous and it required all the skill of
our practiced drivers to avoid accident. Clouds of snow flew from the spiked poles with which they vainly tried to arrest our downward rush; cries and warning shouts from those in advance multiplied by the mountain echoes, excited our dogs to still greater speed until we seemed as the rock and trees flew past, to be in the jaws of a falling avalanche which was carrying us with breathless rapidity down the dark canyon to certain ruin . . .

Failing to find the (Koraks at the bottom), we were discussing the probability of our having been misdirected when suddenly our leading dogs pricked up their sharp ears, snuffed eagerly at the wind, and with short, excited yelps, made off at a dashing gallop toward a low hill which lay almost at right angles with our previous course. The drivers endeavored in vain to check the sped of the excited dogs; their wolfish instincts were aroused and all discipline was forgotten as the fresh scent came down upon the wind from the herd of reindeer beyond. A moment brought us to the brow of the hill and before us in the clear moonlight stood the conical tents of the Koraks, surrounded by at least four thousand reindeer, whose branching antlers looked like a perfect forest of dry limbs.

The dogs all gave voice simultaneously, like a pack of fox-hounds in view of the game, and dashed tumultuously down the hill, regardless of the shouts of their masters and the menacing cries of three or four dark forms which rose suddenly up from the snow between them and the frightened deer. Above the tumult I could hear Dodd’s voice hurling imprecations in Russian at his yelping dogs, which in spite of his most strenuous efforts, were dragging him and his capsized sledge across the steppe. The vast body of deer wavered a moment and then broke into a wild stampede, with drivers, Korak sentinels and two hundred dogs in full pursuit.