After a third winter Poyarkov returned to Yakutsk with fewer than a quarter of his 160 men.

ECONOMIST: The Amur River

But an old woman, a shaman, stayed to tell Khabarov of mountains full of gold and gems, and of Dauria's fields of grain enough, he reckoned, to feed 20, 000 and get flour to Yakutsk in two months instead of four years.

ECONOMIST: The Amur River

He has rafted rivers in Yakutsk, dodged grizzly bears and black flies around Great Slave Lake (his record for fly bites is two hundred in a single night), and scouted rock formations on the Skeleton Coast, sometimes hiking more than twenty miles a day.

NEWYORKER: The Martian Chroniclers