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Kimes Entry Number
123
Original Date
8-16-1881
Publication
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Aug. 16, 1881
Page/Column
p. 1, col. 2
Recommended Citation
Muir, John, "At East Cape. Ashore-A Siberian Village-The Arctic Hunter's Luxurious Home-Arctic Cemeteries-Botanizing on the Siberian Shore-Tracing the Ice Floods. Steamer Corwin, East Cape, Siberia, July 1, 1881." (1881). John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes (Muir articles 1866-1986). 164.
https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/164
William and Maymie Kimes Annotation
As Muir and a companion go ashore to botanize and hunt ""glacier marks"" they pass through a village that ""consists of about fifty huts built on a small, terminal moraine, and so deeply sunk in the face of the hill that the entire village makes scarcely more show ... than a group of marmot burrows."" Muir describes the chaotic interior of a hut, noting that the dogs lick the eating bowls, then curl up in them to sleep, making a ""kind of squalor that is picturesque and daring beyond conception.� He continues, however, that ""each [hut] contains from one to four luxurious bed-rooms, walls, ceiling and floor of soft reindeer skins .... After hunting all day on the ice, making long, rough, stormy journeys, muffled and hungry, the Tchuchi hunter comes into his burrow, eats his fill ... then strips himself naked and lies down in his closed fur nest in glorious ease, to smoke and sleep.""