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9

until the establishment of a fair winter road. In this small village partly from disappointment, partly from over exertion, and exposure to horrible weather. I was taken ill. Three days after we had resolved to stop at Lessnoi cold weather came on suddenly, the thermometer indicating 44° below freezing, the smaller streams were frozen but there was no snow, except on the environing mountains. Our time could not be wasted, we had to organize everything for a further winter travel, and as I have mentioned before, we had to expect an unusually early winter.  I ordered Dodd to start back to different villages on the Tigil road to hire dogs.  Being hardly able to move on account of terrible rheumatic pains in the legs. I had to stay is Lessnoi and superintend the construction of our sleighs, snow-shoes tc, by the Kamtchadals. Kennan remained with me and when the days work was over, he studied Russian.  He very soon conceived how helpless and useless was a foreigner in this country, without any knowledge of the Russian language, he worked hard and made quite rapid progress.

Teams of dogs hired by Dodd soon began to arrive, he had to go as far as Tigil because every village could not furnish more than two or three teams. Since several years dogs in Kamtchatka and all over the Okhotsk sea coast are very scarce, a sort of epidemical disease

Transcription Notes:
second from last line: correct location is "Okhotsk" also the references in transcription to "Sigil" should read "Tigil" as this is an actual location in this district, and the capital "T" in this penmanship matches other capitals of this letter.