FOOTNOTES:
[47] With the exception of Prince of Wales Island in the Sitkan archipelago, Kadiak is the largest Alaskan island. There is not much difference between these two islands in landed area; the former, however, is the bigger.
[48] These “galiots” where characteristically named by Shellikov’s spiritual advisers, viz.: The Three Saints; The Archangel Michael and Simeon, the Friend of God; and Anna the Prophetess. Bad weather and poor navigation caused the vessels to separate, so that Shellikov was compelled to winter on Bering Island; but during the following year the little fleet was reorganized, and it reached Oonalashka, where repairs again were necessary.
[49] Shellikov says that this man returned the following day and refused to leave the Russian camp; that he not only accompanied and served him in all his voyages thereafter, but often warned the party of hostile ambuscades and hidden dangers by land and sea.
[50] Cleanliness and comfort, however, were but little regarded by the Russian fur-traders, who gave their surroundings of residence no sanitary attention whatever. Even Baranov himself was supremely indifferent, and when the Imperial Commissioner, Resanov, called on him at Sitka in 1805, the chief manager of the Russian American Company was living in a mere hut, “in which the bed was often afloat,” and a leak in the roof too small a matter to notice!
[51] On Wood Island, however, a small field of rye, oats, or barley, is planted every year for the use of the horses kept there; here a plough is employed. These cereals never ripen, but are cut green, and fed as fodder. Corn is a total failure everywhere, even as fodder. No cereals have been ripened in Alaska; the attempt, however, has been made a thousand times.
[52] The first cattle brought into Alaska were taken to Kadiak in 1795, and from this central station the stock was distributed—so that by 1833 it had increased to a herd of over two hundred and twenty. At the present writing it is very doubtful whether there are sixty head in the whole region. Every season it is the habit of traders and others to send upon steamers as they go, a few head of beef-steers, which are turned out at Sitka, Kadiak, and Oonalashka to fatten during the summer, and then are slaughtered when winter ensues. Pigs thrive here, but live too much on the sea-refuse for the good of their flesh. So they are not favored.
[53] The church records show that the people of the Kadiak district have decreased as follows: 1796—6,510; 1818—3,430; 1819—3,252; 1822—2,819; 1863—2,217; 1880—1,813. Small-pox, measles, and other imported diseases have caused this.
[54] The little girls, as a rule, receive the earliest garments, generally nothing but a cotton shift and a torn blanket.
[55] La Pérouse, who touched on this coast in 1786 at Litooya Bay, under the flanks of Mount Fairweather, declares that he saw marks of the small-pox on the savages who were there then; most likely what he saw was the scar of scrofulous sores. In 1843-44 another small-pox outbreak on the Aleutian Islands took place, but the people had been vaccinated in the meantime, and nothing serious came of it.
[56] Grigoria Shellikova Stransvovania, or Shellikov’s Journeys, from 1783 to 1787. Published, St. Petersburg, 1792-93. 12mo. 2 vols.
[57] Oncorynchus nerka. The fishing is done entirely with seines, floating across the river twenty to twenty-five fathoms in length, three fathoms in depth, with a three-and-a-half-inch mesh. The whole native population is also employed in this fishery during the summer.
[58] The true reason for this hegira of the convicts is a most amusing one. It is as follows: Shortly after the transfer, in 1869, General Thomas made an extended inspection of the Alaskan posts on a steamer detailed for that work. He was accompanied by a certain representative of a Protestant Board of Missions. The vessel accidentally ran across Ookamok Island when making her way to the westward from Kadiak and touched there, where, ignorant of the fact that the people were convicts and their descendants, moved by their pitiful tales of privation, a large amount of ship’s stores were landed upon the beach to satisfy the “suffering” natives: they ate, drank, and were merry, and lived sumptuously for several months afterward. But an end to these good things came at last; the reaction in the settlement was terrible. So, urged by its pangs, the penal colony determined to pack up and move to the nearest point possible, where, when living, they could again meet, and often too, their kind benefactors! Hence that startling journey to find those generous Americans. Lately, however, the traders at Kadiak have taken many of these people back to Ookamok, where they begged to be allowed to go and end their lives. This is the most desolate island, perhaps, in all the range of that vast Aleutian archipelago.
[59] Literally “beaver.” The Russians always called this animal the “sea-beaver,” but shortened from “morskie-bobear” to the simple name.
[60] This church was finished in 1882—begun in 1880, it cost $7,000, every cent being freely contributed by the natives.
[61] Trailing tendrils of the Empetrum nigrum.
[62] From the record made in the ship’s log it would seem most likely that he landed on either Popov Island, or else Nogai; the description will fit either locality.
[63] Captain F. W. Beechey in his voyage of the Blossom, 1825-27, discovered and located at Cape Beaufort, in the Arctic Ocean and on the Alaskan coast, a vein of coal; this has been subsequently revisited and mined to a small extent by the officers of the Revenue marine cutters of our Government, who pronounce it very satisfactory for steaming purposes. Its situation, however, is so remote that it has no economic significance, and no harbor is there for a vessel of any kind.
CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE OTTER.
Searching for the Otter.—Exposure and Danger in Hunting Sea-otters.—The Fortitude, Patience, and Skill of the Captor.—Altasov and his Band of Cruel Cossacks.—Feverish Energy of the Early Russian Sea-otter Traders.—Their Shameful Excesses.—Greed for Sea-otter Skins Leads the Russians to Explore the Entire Alaskan Coast, 1760-1780.— Great Numbers of Sea-otters when they were First Discovered in Alaska.—Their Partial Extermination in 1836-40.—More Secured during the Last Five Years than in all the Twenty Years Preceding.—What is an Otter?—A Description of its Strange Life.—Its Single Skin sometimes Worth $500.—The Typical Sea-otter Hunter.—A Description of Him and his Family.—Hunting the Sea-otter the Sole Remunerative Industry of the Aleutians.—Gloomy, Storm-beaten Haunts of the Otter.—Saanak, the Grand Rendezvous of the Hunters.—The “Surround” of the Otter.—“Clubbing” the Otter.—“Netting” the Otter.—“Surf-shooting” Them.
Little does my lady think, as she contemplates the rich shimmer of the ebony sea-otter trimming to her new seal-skin sacque, that the quest of the former has engaged thousands of men during the last century in exhaustive deeds of hazardous peril and extreme daring, and does to-day—that the possession of the sea-otter’s coat calls for more venturesome labor and inclement exposure on the part of the hunter than is put forth in the chase of any other fur-bearing or economic animal known to savage or civilized man. No wonder that it is costly; what abundant reason that it should be rare!
The rugged, storm-beaten resorts of the sea-otter, its wariness and cunning, and the almost incredible fortitude and patience, skill and bravery, of its semi-civilized captor, have so impressed the writer that he feels constrained to rearrange his notes and touch up his field-sketches made upon the subject-matter of this chapter several years ago, while cruising in Alaskan waters, so that he may give to the readers of this work the first full or fair idea of the topic ever put into type and engraving.
Feodor Altasov, with a band of Russian Cossacks[64] and Tartar “promishlyniks,” were the pioneers of civilized exploration in Eastern Siberia, and finally arrived at the head of the great Kamchatkan Peninsula, toward the end of the seventeenth century. Here they found, first of all their race, the rare, and to them the exceedingly valuable, fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing this pelage then was abundant on that coast, and not prized above the seals and sea-lions by the natives who displayed their peltries to the ardent Russians, and who in barter asked little or nothing extra from the white men in return. The feverish eagerness of the Slavonians, quickly displayed, to secure these choice skins, so excited the natives as to result very soon in the practical extirpation of the “kahlan,” as they termed it, from the entire region of the Kamschadales. The greedy fur-hunters then rifled graves and stripped the living of every scrap of the precious object of their search, and, for the time being, searched in vain for other haunts of the otter.
Along by the close of 1743, the survivors of Bering’s second voyage of exploration and Tscherikov brought back to Petropaulovsk an enormous number of skins which they had secured on the Aleutian and Commander Islands, until then unknown to the Kamchatkans or the Russians. In spite of the rude appliances and scanty resources at the command of these eager men, they fitted out rude wooden shallops and boldly pushed themselves over dark and tempestuous seas to the unknown and rumored resorts of the sea-otter. In this manner and by this impulse the discovery of the Aleutian Islands and the mainland of Alaska was fully determined, between 1745 and 1763. In this enterprise some twenty-five or thirty different individuals and companies, with quite a fleet of small vessels and hundreds of men, were engaged; and so thorough and energetic were they in their search and stimulated capture of the coveted animal, that, along by the period of 1772-74, the catch of this unhappy beast had dwindled down from thousands and tens of thousands at first, to hundreds and tens of hundreds at last. When the Russian traders opened up the Aleutian Islands they found the natives commonly wearing sea-otter cloaks, which they willingly parted with at first for trifles, not placing any especial value upon the otter, as they did upon the bodies of the hair-seal and sea-lion, the flesh and skins of which were vastly more palatable to them and serviceable. But the fierce competition and raised bidding of the greedy traders soon fired the savages into hot and incessant hunting. During the first decade or two of pursuit the numbers of these animals taken all along the Aleutian chain and down the entire northwest coast as far as Oregon, were so great that they appear fabulous in comparison with the exhibit made now.[65]
The result of this warfare upon sea-otters, with ten hunters then where there is one to-day, was not long delayed. Everywhere throughout the whole coast-line frequented by them, a rapid and startling diminution set in; so much so, that it soon became difficult to get from places where a thousand were easily taken, as many as twenty-five or thirty. When the region known as Alaska came into our possession, the Russians were taking between four and five hundred sea-otters annually from the Aleutian Islands and South of the Peninsula and Kadiak, with perhaps one hundred and fifty more from Cook’s Inlet, Yakootat, and the Sitkan district, the Hudson Bay traders and others getting some two hundred more from the coasts of Queen Charlotte’s and Vancouver’s Islands, and Gray’s Harbor, Washington Territory.
Now during the last year, instead of less than seven hundred skins taken as above specified, our traders have secured more than four thousand. This immense difference is not due to the fact of a proportionate increase of sea-otters—that is not evident—but it is due to the keen competition of our people, who have reanimated the organization anew of old-fashioned hunting-parties, after the style of Baranov’s bateaux. As matters are now conducted, the hunting-parties do not let the sea-otter have a day’s rest during the whole year: parties relieve each other in orderly, steady succession, and a continual warfare is maintained. Stimulated by our people, this persistence is rendered still more deadly to the kahlan by the use of rifles of our best make, which, in the hands of the young and ambitious natives, in spite of the warnings of their old sires, must result in the virtual extermination of that marine beast.[66]
This is the more important because all the world’s supply comes from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and upon its continuance between four thousand and five thousand semi-civilized natives of Alaska depend absolutely and wholly for the means by which they are enabled to live beyond simple barbarism; its chase and the proceeds of its capture furnish the only employment offered by their country, and the revenue by which they can feed and clothe themselves as they do, and, by so doing, appear to all intents and purposes much superior to their Indian neighbors of Southeastern Alaska, or their Eskimo cousins of Bering Sea.
The sea-otter, like the fur-seal, is another striking illustration of an animal long known and highly prized in the commercial world, yet respecting the life and habits of which nothing definite has been ascertained or published. The reason for this is obvious, for, save the natives who hunt them, no one properly qualified to write has ever had an opportunity of observing the Enhydra so as to study it in a state of nature, inasmuch as of all the shy, sensitive beasts upon the capture of which man sets any value whatever, this creature is the most keenly on the alert and difficult to obtain; and, also, like the fur-seal, it possesses, to us, the enhancing value and charm of being principally confined in its geographical distribution to our own shores of the Northwest. A truthful account of the strange, vigilant life of the sea-otter, and the hardships and the perils of its human hunters, would surpass, if we could give it all, the novelty and the interest of a most weird and attractive work of fiction.
The Kahlan or Sea-otter.
The sea-otter is widely removed from close relationship to our common land-otter. Unlike this latter example, it seldom visits the shore, and then only when the weather is abnormally stormy at sea. Instead of being a fish-eater, like Lutra canadensis, it feeds almost wholly upon clams, crabs, mussels, and echinoderms, or “sea-urchins,” as might be inferred from its peculiar flat molars of dentition. It is, when adult, an animal that will measure from three and a half to four and a half feet in length from nose to root of its short, stumpy tail. The general contour of the body is strongly suggestive of the beaver, but the globose shape and savage expression of the creature’s head are peculiar to it alone. The small, black, snaky eyes gleam with the most wild and vindictive light when the owner is startled; the skin lies over its body in loose folds, so that when taken hold of in lifting the carcass out of the water, it is slack and draws up like the elastic hide on the nape of a young dog. This pelt, when removed in skinning, is cut only at the posteriors, and the body is drawn forth, turning the skin inside out, and in that shape it is partially stretched, air-dried, and is so lengthened by this process that it gives the erroneous impression of having been taken from an animal the frame of which was at least six feet in length, with the proportionate girth and shape of a mink or weasel.
There is no sexual dissimilarity in color or size, and both male and female manifest the same intense shyness and aversion to man, coupled with the greatest solicitude for their young, which they bring into existence at all seasons of the year, for the natives capture young pups in every calendar month. As the hunters never have found the mothers and their offspring on the rocks or beaches, they affirm that the birth of a sea-otter takes place on the numerous floating kelp-beds which cover large areas of the ocean south of the Aleutian chain and off the entire expanse of the northwest coast. Here, literally “rocked in the cradle of the deep,” the young kahlan is brought forth and speedily inured to the fury of fierce winds and combing seas. Upon these algoid rafts the Aleutes often surprise them sporting one with the other, for they are said to be very playful, and one old hunter told the writer that he had watched a sea-otter for half an hour as it lay upon its back in the rollers and tossed a bit of sea-weed up into the air from paw to paw, apparently taking great delight in catching it before it fell into the water.
The sea-otter mother clasps her young to her breast between her fore-paws, and stretches herself at full length on her back in the ocean when she desires to sleep, and she suckles it also in this position. The pup cannot live without its mother, though frequent attempts have been made by hunters to raise them, for the little animals are very often captured alive and wholly uninjured; but, like some other animals, they seem to be so deeply imbued with fear or dislike of man that they invariably die of self-imposed starvation. The enhydra is not polygamous, and it is seldom, indeed, that the natives, when out in search of it, ever see more than one animal at a time. The flesh is very unpalatable, highly charged with a rank taste and odor. A single pup is born, as the rule, about fifteen inches in length and provided with a natal coat of coarse, brownish, grizzled hair and fur, the head and nape being rather brindled, and the nose and cheeks whitish-gray, with the roots of the hair everywhere much darker next to the skin. From this poor condition of fur at birth the otter gradually improves as it grows older, shading darker, finer, thicker, and longer by the time they are two years of age. Then they rapidly pass into prime skins of the most lustrous softness and ebony shimmering, though the creature is not full-grown until it has passed its fourth season. The rufous-white nose and mustache of the pup are not changed in the pelage of the adult, but remain constant through life. The whiskers are short, white, and fine. So much for the biology of the sea-otter. Now we turn to the still more interesting one of its captors.
The typical hunter is an Aleutian Islander or a native of Kadiak. He is not a large man—rather below our standard—say five feet five or six inches in stature. There are notable exceptions to this rule, for some of them are over six feet, while others are veritable dwarfs—resemble gnomes more than anybody else. He wears the peculiar expression of a Japanese more than any other. His hair is long, coarse, and black; face is broad; high, prominent cheek bones, with an insignificant flattened nose; the eyes are small, black, and set wide in his head under faintly marked eyebrows, just a faint suggestion of Mongolian obliquity; the lips are full, the mouth large, and the lower jaw square and prognathous; the ears are small, likewise his feet and hands; his skin in youth is often quite fair, with a faint flush in the cheeks, but soon weathers into a yellowish-brown that again seams into deep flabby wrinkles with middle and old age. He has a full, even set of good teeth, while his body, as might be inferred from his habit of living so much of his life in the cramped “bidarka”[67] or skin boat, is well developed in the chest and arms, but decidedly sprung at the knees, and he is slightly unsteady in his pigeon-toed gait.
The mate of this hunter was when young a very good-looking young woman, who never could honestly be called handsome, yet she was then and is now very far from being hideous or repulsive. She partakes, somewhat mellowed down, of the same characteristics which we have just sketched in the face and form of her husband. As they live to-day, they are married and sustain this relation, sheltered in their own hut or “barrabkie.” They have long, long ago ceased to dress themselves in skins, and now appear in store clothes and cotton gowns, retaining, however, their characteristic water-proof garment known as the “kamlayka,” and the odd boots known as “tarbosars,” in which they are always enveloped in wet weather, or whenever they venture out to sea in their bidarka. They dress themselves up on Sundays, when at home, in boots and shoes and stockings of San Francisco make. He wears a conventional “beaver” or plug hat often, and she affects a gay worsted hood, although, on account of the steady persistence of high winds, he prefers a smart marine-band cap, such as our soldiers on fatigue-duty wear. He is, however, inclined to be quite sober, not giving much attention to display or color, as is the habit of semi-civilized people everywhere else; but he does lavish the greatest care and labor over the decoration of his bidarka, and calls upon his wife to ornament the seams of his water-repellant kamlayka and tarbosars with the gayest embroidery, and tufts of bright hair and feathers, and lines of cunning goose-quill work.
Mrs. Kahgoon, however, is a true woman. She naturally desires all the bright ribbons and cheap jewellery which the artful trader exhibits to her longing eyes in his store, that stands so near and so handy to her barrabkie, and her means only limit the purchase which she makes of these prized desiderata. She dresses her hair in braids, as a rule, and twists them up behind. She seldom wears a bonnet or hat, but has a handkerchief, generally of cotton, sometimes silken, always tied over her head, and when she goes, as she often does, out to call on a neighboring spinster or madam, or to the store, she throws a small woollen shawl over head and shoulders, holding it drawn together under her chin by one hand. As we have intimated, she dresses principally in cotton fabrics, with skirts, overskirts, white stockings, etc.; but when she was a girl, and much more than that, she usually went, with her legs and feet bare, into the teeth of biting winds and over frosty water and wood-paths.
A Barrabkie.
(The characteristic dwelling of Aleutes and Kadiakers.)
The domestic life of this hunter and his wife is all bound up within the shelter of their “barrabkie.” This hut or house of the Aleutian hunter is half under ground, or, in other words, it is an excavation on the village site of a piece of earth ten or fifteen feet square, three or four feet deep, which is laid back up and over upon a wooden frame or whalebone joisting, which is securely built up within and above this excavation, so that a rafter-ceiling is made about six feet in the clear from the earthen floor. A wall of peaty sod is piled up around outside, two and three feet thick. The native architect enters this dwelling through a little hall patched on to that leeward side from the winds prevalent in the vicinity. The door is low, even for Kahgoon, and he stoops as he opens and closes it. If he has been a successful hunter, he will have the floor laid with boards secured from the trader; but if he has been unlucky, then nothing more to stand upon than the earth is afforded. This barrabkie is divided into two rooms, not wholly shut out one from the other, by a half-partition of mats, timber, or some hanging curtains, which conceal the bedroom or “spalniah” from the direct gaze of the living and cook-room. They are very fond of comfortable beds, having adopted the feather-ticks of the Russians. Soap is an expensive luxury, so Kahgoon’s wife is economical of its use for washing in her laundry; and, though she may desire to spread over her sleeping couch the counterpane and fluted shams of our own choice, she has nothing better than a colored quilt which the traders bring up here especially to meet this demand. A small deal-table, two or three empty cracker-boxes from the store, and a rude bench or two constitute all the furniture, while a little cast-iron stove, recently introduced, stands in one corner, and the heating and cooking is created and performed thereon. The table-ware of a hunter’s wife and the household utensils do not require much room or a large cupboard for their reception. A few large white crockery cups, plates, and saucers, with gaudy red and blue designs, and several pewter spoons, will be found in sufficient quantity to entertain with during seasons of festivity. She manifests a marked dislike to tin dishes, probably due to the fact that it is necessary to take care of this ware, or it rusts out. Then, above all the strange odors which arise here in this close, hot little room, we easily detect the smell of kerosene, and, sure enough, it is the oil which is burned in the lamp.
Such a barrabkie built and furnished in this style and occupied by Kahgoon, his wife, two or three children, and a relative or so, is a warm and a thoroughly comfortable shelter to him and his, as long as he keeps it in good repair. It is true that the air seems to us, as we enter, oppressively close, and, in case of sickness, is positively foul; yet on the whole the Alaskan is very comfortable. He never stores up much food against the morrow—the sea and its piscine booty is too near at hand. Whatever he may keep over he does not have in a cellar, but hangs it up outside of his door on an elevated trestle which he calls a “laabas,” beyond the reach of the village dogs, while there is no thought of theft from the hands of his neighbors. He lives chiefly upon fresh fish—cod, halibut, salmon and other varieties, which he secures the year round as they rotate in the sea and streams. He varies that diet according to the success of his hunting, by buying at the store tea, sugar, hard-bread, crackers, flour and divers canned fruits or vegetables. Nature sends him in season the flesh and eggs of sea-fowl, geese, ducks, and a few land birds like willow-grouse.
In this fashion the sea-otter hunter appears to us as we view him now; his children come, grow up, and branch out, to repeat his life and doing, as they show themselves capable of living by their own exertions as hunters and fishermen. He is a peaceful, affectionate, and thoroughly undemonstrative parent, a kind husband, and he imposes no burden upon his wife that he does not fully share, unless he becomes a drunkard, when, in that event, a sad change is made in the man. He gets drunk, and his wife too, by taking sugar, flour, and dried-apples, rice or hops, if he can get them, in certain proportions, puts them into a barrel or cask, with water, bungs it up and waits for fermentation to do its work. Before it has worked entirely clear he draws off a thick, sour liquid which intoxicates him most effectually—he beats his spouse and runs her and children from the house, smashes things, and for weeks afterward the barrabkie is desolate and open as the result of such orgies. If he continues, his health is shattered, he rapidly fails as a hunter, and he suffers the pangs of poverty with his family. It is said upon good authority that the brewing of this liquor was taught to these people by the earliest Russian arrivals in their country, who made it as an anti-scorbutic; but it certainly has not proved to be a blessing in disguise, for it has brought upon them nearly all the misery that they are capable of understanding.
In concluding this brief introduction to the life of the otter-hunter, we may fitly call attention to the fact that Kahgoon and his family are devout members of the Greek Catholic Church, as are all of his people, without a single exception, between Attoo and Kadiak Islands—nearly five thousand souls to-day, living in scattered hamlets all along between.
The subtle acumen displayed by the sea-otter in the selection of its habitat can only be fully appreciated by him who has visited the chosen land, reefs, and water of its resort. It is a region so gloomy, so pitilessly beaten by wind and waves, by sleet, rain and persistent fog, that the good Bishop Veniaminov, when he first came among the natives of the Aleutian Islands, ordered the curriculum of hell to be omitted from the church breviary, saying, as he did so, that these people had enough of it here on this earth! The fury of hurricane gales, the vagaries of swift and intricate currents in and out of the passages, the eccentricities of the barometer, the blackness of the fog enveloping all in its dark, damp shroud, so alarm and discomfit the white man that he willingly gives up the entire chase of the sea-otter to that brown-skinned Aleut, who alone seems to be so constituted as to dare and wrestle with these obstacles through descent from his hardy ancestors, who, in turn, have been centuries before him engaged just as he is to-day.
So we find the sea-otter-hunting of the present, as it was in the past, entirely confined to the natives, with white traders here and there vieing in active competition one with the other in bidding for the quarry of those dusky captors. The traders erect small frame dwellings as stores in the midst of the otter-hunting settlements, places like Oonalashka, Belcovsky, Oonga, and Kadiak villages, which are the chief resorts of population and this trade in Alaska. They own and employ small schooners, between thirty and one hundred tons burthen, in conveying the hunting parties to and from these hamlets above mentioned as they go to and return from the sea-otter hunting-grounds of Saanak and the Chernaboor rocks, where five-sixths of all the sea-otters annually taken in Alaska are secured. Why these animals should evince so much partiality for this region between the Straits of Oonimak and the west end of Kadiak Island is somewhat mysterious, but, nevertheless, it is the great sea-otter hunting-ground of the country. Saanak Island, itself, is small, with a coast-circuit of less than eighteen miles. Spots of sand-beach are found here and there, but the major portion of the shore is composed of enormous water-worn boulders, piled up high by the booming surf. The interior is low and rolling, with a central ridge rising into three hills, the middle one some eight hundred feet high. There is no timber here, but an abundant exhibit of grasses, mosses, and sphagnum, with a score of little fresh-water ponds in which multitudes of ducks and geese are found every spring and fall. The natives do not live upon the island, because the making of fires and scattering of food-refuse, and other numerous objectionable matters connected with their settlement, alarm the otters and drive them off to parts unknown. Thus the island is only camped upon by the hunting-squads, and fires are never made unless the wind is from the southward, since no sea-otters are ever found to the northward of the ground. The sufferings—miseries of cold, and even hunger, to which the Aleutes subject themselves here every winter, going for weeks and weeks at a time without fires, even for cooking, with the thermometer below zero in a wild, northerly and westerly gale of wind, is better imagined than portrayed.
To the southward and westward of Saanak, stretching directly from it out to sea, eight or ten miles, is a succession of small, submerged islets, rocky, and bare most of them, at low water, with numerous reefs and stony shoals, beds of kelp, etc. This scant area is the chief resort of the kahlan, together with the Chernaboor Islets, some thirty miles to the eastward, which are identical in character. The otter rarely lands upon the main island, but he is, when found ashore, surprised just out of the surf-wash on the reef. The quick hearing and acute smell possessed by this wary brute are not equalled by any other creatures in the sea or on land. They will take alarm, and leave instantly from rest in a large section, over the effect of a small fire as far away as four or five miles distant to the windward of them. The footstep of man must be washed from a beach by many tides before its trace ceases to scare the animal and drive it from landing there, should it approach for that purpose.
The fashion of capturing the sea-otter is ordered entirely by the weather. If it be quiet and moderately calm, to calm, such an interval is employed in “spearing surrounds.” Then, when heavy weather ensues, to gales, “surf-shooting” is the method; and if a furious gale has been blowing hard for several days without cessation, as it lightens up, the hardiest hunters “club” the kahlan. Let us first follow a spearing party; let us start with the hunters, and go with them to the death.
Our point of departure is Oonalashka village; the time is an early June morning. The creaking of the tackle on the little schooner out in the bay as her sails are being set and her anchor hoisted, cause a swarm of Aleutes in their bidarkies to start out from the beach for her deck. They clamber on board and draw their cockle-shell craft up after them, and these are soon stowed and lashed tightly to the vessel’s deck-rail and stanchions. The trader has arranged this trip and start this morning for Saanak, by beginning to talk it over two weeks ago with these thirty or forty hunters of the village. He is to carry them down to the favored otter-resort, leave them there, and return to bring them back in just three months from the day of their departure this morning. For this great accommodation the Aleutes interested agreed to give the trader-skipper a refusal of their entire catch of otter-skins—indeed many of them have mortgaged their labor heavily in advance by pre-purchasing at his store, inasmuch as the credit system is worked among them for all it is worth. They are adepts in driving a bargain, shrewd and patient. The traders know this now, to the grievous cost of many of them.
If everything is auspicious, wind and tide the next morning, after sailing, bring the vessel well upon the ground. The headlands are made out and noted; the natives slip into their bidarkies as they are successively dropped over the schooner’s side while she jogs along under easy way, until the whole fleet of twenty or thirty craft is launched. The trader stands by the rail and shakes the hand of each grimy hunter as he steps down into his kyack, calling him, in pigeon-Russian, his “loobaiznie droög,” or dear friend, and bids him a hearty good-by. Then, as the last bidarka drops, the ship comes about and speeds back to the port which yesterday morning she cleared from, or she may keep on, before she does so, to some harbor at Saanak, where she will leave at a preconcerted rendezvous a supply of flour, sugar, tea, and tobacco for her party.
If the weather be not too foggy, and the sea not very high, the bidarkies are deployed into a single long line, keeping well abreast, at intervals of a few hundred feet between. In this manner they paddle slowly and silently over the water, each man peering sharply and eagerly into the vista of tumbling water just ahead, ready to catch the faintest evidence of the presence of an otter, should that beast ever so slyly present even the tip of its blunt head above for breath and observation. Suddenly an otter is discovered, apparently asleep, and instantly the discoverer makes a quiet signal, which is flashed along the line. Not a word is spoken, not a paddle splashes, but the vigilant, sensitive creature has taken the alarm, and has turned on to its chest, and with powerful strokes of its strong, webbed hind feet, has smote the water like the blades of a propeller’s screw, and down to depths below and away it speeds, while the hunter brings his swift bidarka to an abrupt standstill directly upon the bubbling wake of the otter’s disappearance. He hoists his paddle high in the air, and holds it there, while the others whirl themselves over the water into a large circle around him, varying in size from one-quarter to half a mile in diameter, according to the number of boats engaged in the chase.
THE SURROUND
A fleet of Sea-otter Hunters in the North Pacific, South of Saanak Island: marking the Wake of an Otter at the Moment of its Diving
The kahlan has gone down—he must come up again soon somewhere within reach of the vision of that Aleutian circle on the waters over its head; fifteen or twenty minutes of submergence, at the most, compel the animal to rise, and instantly as its nose appears above the surface, the native nearest it detects the movement, raises a wild shout, and darts in turn toward it; the yell has sent the otter down again far too quickly for a fair respiration, and that is what the hunter meant to do, as he takes up his position over the spot of the animal’s last diving, elevates his paddle, and the circle is made anew, with this fresh centre of formation. In this method the otter is continually made to dive and dive again without scarcely an instant to fully breathe, for a period, perhaps, of two or even three hours, until, from interrupted respiration, it finally becomes so filled with air or gases as to be unable to sink, and then falls at once an easy victim. During this contest the Aleutes have been throwing their spears whenever they were anywhere within range of the kahlan, and the hunter who has stricken the quarry is the proud and wealthy possessor, beyond all question or dispute.
In this manner the fleet moves on, sometimes very fortunate in finding the coveted prey; again, whole weeks pass away without a single surround. The landings at night are made without any choice or selection, but just as the close of the day urges them to find the nearest shore. The bidarkies are hauled out above surf-wash, and carefully inspected; if it is raining or very cold, small A-tents are pitched, using the paddles and spears for poles and pegs, into which the natives crowd for sleep and warmth, since they carry no blankets or bed-clothes whatever, and unless the wind is right they dare not make a fire, even to prepare the cherished cup of tea, which they enjoy more than anything else in the world, not excepting tobacco. After ninety or a hundred days of such employment, during which time they have been subjected to frequent peril of life in storm, and fog-lost, they repair to the rendezvous agreed upon between the trader and themselves, ready and happy to return for a resting-spell, to their wives, children, and sweethearts in the village whence we saw them depart. They may have been so lucky as to have secured forty or fifty otters, each skin worth to them at least fifty to sixty dollars, and if so, they will have a prolonged season of festivity at Oonalashka, when they get back. Perhaps the weather has been so inclement that this party will not have taken a half-dozen pelts; then gloomy, indeed, will be the reception at home.
While the “spearing surround” of the Aleutian hunter is orthodoxy, the practice, now universal, of surf-shooting the otter, is heterodoxy, and is so styled among these people, but it has only been in vogue for a short time, and it is primarily due to our traders, who, in their active struggle to incite the natives to a greater showing of skins, have loaned and have given, to the young hunters in especial, the best patterns of rifles. With these firearms the shores of many of the Aleutian channels, Saanak, and the Chernaboors, are patrolled during heavy weather, and whenever a sea-otter’s head is seen in the surf, no matter if a thousand yards out, the expert, patient marksman shoots seldom in vain, and if he does miss the mark, he has a speedy chance to try again, for the great distance, and thunderous roar of the breakers prevent the kahlan from hearing or taking alarm in any way until it is hit by the rifle-bullet: nine times out of ten, when the otter is thus struck, it is in the head, which is all that the creature usually exposes. Of course such a shot is instantly fatal, so that the hunter has reason to sit himself down with a long landing-gaff and wait serenely for the surf to gradually heave the prized carcass within his ready reach.
Last, but most exciting and recklessly venturesome of all human endeavor in the chase of a wild animal is the plan of “clubbing.” You must pause with me for a brief interval on Saanak to understand, even imperfectly, the full hazard of this enterprise. We cannot walk, for the wind blows too hard—note the heavy seas foaming, chasing and swiftly rolling by, one after the other—hear the keen whistle of the gale as it literally tears the crests of the breakers into tatters, and skurries on in sheets of fleecy vapor, whirring and whizzing away into the darkness of that frightful storm which has been raging in this tremendous fashion, coming from the westward, during the last three or four days without a moment’s cessation. Look at those two Aleutes under the shelter of that high bluff by the beach. Do you see them launch a bidarka, seat themselves within and lash their kamlaykas firmly over the rims to the man-holes? And now observe them boldly strike out beyond the protection of that cliff and plunge into the very vortex of the fearful sea, and scudding, like an arrow from the bow, before the wind, they disappear almost like a flash and a dream in our eyes!
ALEUTES CLUBBING SEA OTTERS
During a furious gale on the Chernaboor Rocks
Yes, it looks to you like suicide; but there is this method to their madness. These men have, by some intuition, arrived at an understanding that the storm will not last but a few hours longer at the most, and they know that some ten or twenty or even thirty miles away, directly to the leeward from where they pushed off, lies a series of islets, and rocks awash, out upon which the long-continued fury of this gale has driven a number of sea-otters that have been so sorely annoyed by the battle of the elements as to crawl there above the wash of the surf, and, burying their globose heads in heaps of sea-weed to avoid the pelting of the wind, are sleeping and resting in great physical peace until the weather shall change: then they will at once revive and plunge back into the ocean without the least delay. So our two hunters, perhaps the only two souls among the fifty or sixty now camped on Saanak, who are brave enough, have resolved to scud down on the tail of this howling gale, run in between the breakers to the leeward of this rocky islet ahead of them, and sneak from that direction over the land and across to the windward coast, so as to silently and surely creep up and on to the kelp-bedded victims, when, in the fury of the storm, the fast falling footsteps of the hunter are not heard by the active yet somnolent animal ere a deadly whack of his short club falls upon its unconscious head. The noise of such a tempest is far greater than that made by the stealthy movements of these venturesome natives, who, plying their heavy, wooden bludgeons, despatch the animals one after another without alarming the whole number. In this way, two Aleutian brothers are known to have slain seventy-eight otters in less than one hour!
If these hardy men, when they pushed off from Saanak in that gale, had deviated a paddle’s length from their true course for the islet which they finally struck, after scudding twenty or thirty miles before the fury of wind and water, they would have been swept on and out into a vast marine waste and to certain death from exhaustion. They knew it perfectly when they ventured, yet at no time could they have seen ahead clearly, or behind them, farther than a thousand yards! Still, if they waited for the storm to abate, then the otters would all be back in the water ere they could even reach the scene. By doing what we have just seen them do they fairly challenge our admiration for their exhibit of nerve and adroit calculation, under the most trying of all natural obstruction, for the successful issue of their venture.
In conclusion, the writer calls attention to a strange habit of the Aleutian otter-hunters of Attoo, who live on the extreme westernmost island of the grand Alaskan archipelago. Here the kahlan is captured in small nets,[68] which are spread out over the floating kelp-beds or “otter-rafts,” the natives withdrawing and watching from the bluffs. The otters come out to sleep or rest or sport on these places, get entangled in the meshes, and seem to make little or no effort to escape, being paralyzed, as it were, by fear. Thus they fall an easy prey into the hands of the captors, who say that they have caught as many as six at one time in one of these nets, and that they frequently get three. The natives also watch for surf-holes or caves awash below the bluffs: and, when one is found to which a sea-otter is in the habit of going, they set this net by spreading it over the entrance, and usually capture the creature, sooner or later.
No injury whatever is done to these frail nets by the sea-otters, strong animals as they are; only stray sea-lions and hair-seals destroy them. There is no driving an otter out upon land if it is surprised on the beach by man between itself and the water; it will make for the sea with the utmost fearlessness, with gleaming eyes, bared teeth and bristling hair, not paying the slightest regard to the hunter. The Attoo and Atkah Aleutes have never been known to hunt sea-otters without nets, while the people of Oonalashka, and those eastward of them, have never been known to use such gear. Salt-water and kelp appear to act as disinfectants for the meshes, so that the smell of them does not repel or alarm the shy, suspicious animal.