sledge runners and skis.
'No good?'
They were surprised.
'But it's strong wood, it will last a hundred years.'
They even dragged up a chair-back, which had found its way into the
tundra God knows how. Our future navigator brought a god-a real idol,
decorated with bits of coloured cloth, with a bullet-head and a nail
driven in where a man has his navel.
'No good? But it's strong wood, it will last a hundred years.'
To tell the truth, I felt ashamed of my primus when I saw this Nenets,
after saying something sharply to his poor, tearful wife, bring out a tin-
bound chest, which was evidently the show-piece in an otherwise empty
choom. He came up to me, looking very pleased and deposited the chest
in the snow.
'Take this chest,' the doctor translated. 'It has four strong planks. I
am a Komsomol member, I don't need anything, I spit on your primus!'
I'm not sure the doctor translated this last sentence correctly. In any
case, it was a fine action, and I wrung a young man's hand.
Have you ever felt your mind occupied by a single idea to the
exclusion of all else, and then, all of a sudden, a storm bursts upon your
life and you instantly forget what you were striving after only a moment
ago with all your soul?
That was what happened to me when I saw an old brass-tipped boat-
hook lying in the snow among some poles which were used to build tent
dwellings.
Of course, the whole thing was bizarre, beginning from the moment
that I started my lecture on the primus with the Nentsi listening to me
gravely, and between us, as in a dream, a column of smoke rising up
straight as though made of long grey ribbons.
Strange were those wooden household articles lying in the snow
round the aeroplane. Strange, that sixty-year-old Nenets with his pipe in
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his mouth who issued a command to an old woman, and she brought
out to us a piece of walrus bone.
But strangest of all was this boat-hook. There was hardly a thing in
the world stranger than this.
At that moment Luri put his head out of the cockpit and hailed me,
and I answered him from somewhere away, from that distant world into
which this thing had suddenly transported me.
What was this boat-hook, then? Nothing much! Just an old brass
hook on a pole. But on this old brass, now turned green, were clearly
engraved the words: 'Schooner St. Maria'.
I looked back. Luri was still looking out of the cockpit, and he was
undoubtedly Luri, with that beard of his, which I made fun of every day
because he had grown it in imitation of the well-known Arctic airman F.,
and it did not in the least suit his young, vivacious face.
Some distance away, outside the farthest choom, stood the doctor,
surrounded by the Nentsi.
Everything was in its place, just as it had been a moment ago. But
before me lay the boat-hook with the words 'Schooner St. Maria'
engraved upon it.
'Luri,' I said with deadly calm, 'come here.'
'Found something?' Luri shouted from the cockpit.
He jumped down, came up to me and started blankly at the boat-hook.
'Read that!'
Luri read it.
'It's from a ship,' he said. 'The schooner St. Maria.'
'That can't be! It can't be, Luri!'
I picked up the boat-hook, cradling it in my arms like a child, and Luri
must have thought I had gone mad, because he muttered something and
ran to the doctor as fast as his legs could carry him. The doctor came up
with an anxious look, took my head between slightly trembling hands
and gazed into my eyes.
'Oh, go to hell!' I said with annoyance. 'You think I'm off my rocker?
Nothing of the sort. Doctor, this boat-hook is from off the St. Maria'.'
The doctor removed his spectacles and began to study the boat-hook.
'The Nentsi must have found it on Severnaya Zemlya,' I went on
excitedly. 'Not on Severnaya Zemlya, of course, but somewhere along
the coast. Do you realise what this means, Doctor?'
By this time the Nentsi had gathered around, looking on impassively.
This might have been the thousandth time they were seeing me showing
the boat-hook to the doctor, shouting and getting worked up.
The doctor asked whose hook it was, and an old Nenets with an
inscrutable, deeply-lined face, which looked as though carved out of
wood, stepped forward and said something in Nenets.
'What does he say. Doctor? Where did he get this boat-hook?'
'Where did you get this boat-hook?' the doctor asked in Nenets.
The Nenets answered.
'He says he found it.'
'Where?'
'In a boat,' the doctor translated.
'In a boat? Where did he find the boat?'
'On the beach,' the doctor translated.
'What beach?'
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'The Taimyr.'
'Doctor, the Taimyr!' I yelled in such a voice that it brought the old
anxious look back into his face. 'Taimyr! The coast nearest to Severnaya
Zemlya! And where's the boat?'
'There is no more boat,' the doctor translated. 'Only a bit of it.'
'What bit?'
'A bit of boat.'
'Show me!'
Luri drew the doctor aside and they stood whispering together while
the old man went to fetch the bit of boat. Apparently Luri still believed
