For provisions, he has brought very little from the ship. He will depend on the winds driving in a dead whale, or on the fish of the shore, or on the eggs of the sea-birds that nest on these rocks millions upon millions—such myriads of birds they seem to crowd each other for foot room, and the noise of their wings is like a great wind.[2] The Aleut himself is what any race of men {73} would become in generations of such a life. His skin is more like bronze than leather. His chest is like a bellows, but his legs are ill developed from the cramped posture of knees in the manhole. Indeed, more than knees go under the manhole. When pressed for room, the Aleut has been known to crawl head foremost, body whole, right under the manhole and lie there prone between the feet of the paddlers with nothing between him and the abysmal depths of a hissing sea but the parchment keel of the bidarka, thin as paper.
How do these thin skin boats escape wreckage on a sea where tide-rip washes over the reefs all summer and ice hummocks sweep out from the shore in winter tempest? To begin with, the frost that creates the ice clears the air of fog, and the steel-shod pole either sheers the bidarka off from the ice, or the ice off from the bidarka. Then, when the fog lies knife-thick over the dangerous rocks in summer time, there is a certain signal to these deep-sea plunderers. The huge Pacific walrus—the largest species of walrus in the world—lie in herds of hundreds on these danger rocks, and the walrus snorts through the gray mist like a continual fog-horn. No better danger signal exists among the rocks of the North Pacific than this same snorting walrus, who for all his noise and size is a floundering coward. The great danger to the nutshell skin's is from becoming ice-logged when the sleet storms fall and freeze; and for the rest, the sea makes small matter of a hunter more or less.
{74} No landsman's still-hunt affords the thrilling excitement of the otter hunter's spearing-surrounds. Fifteen or twenty-five little skin skiffs, with two or three men in each, paddle out under a chief elected by common consent. Whether fog or clear, the spearing is done only in calm weather. The long line of bidarkas circles silently over the silver sea. Not a word is spoken, not a paddle blade allowed to click against the bone gun'els of the skiff. Double-bladed paddles are frequently used, so shift of paddle is made from side to side of the canoe without a change of hands. The skin shallops take to the water as noiselessly as the glide of a duck. Yonder, where the boulders lie mile on mile awash in the surf, kelp rafts—forests of seaweed—lift and fall with the rhythmical wash of the tide. Hither the otter hunters steer, silent as shadows. The circle widens, deploys, forms a cordon round the outermost rim of the kelp fields. Suddenly a black object is seen floating on the surface of the waters—a sea-otter asleep. Quick as flash, the steersman lifts his paddle. Not a word is spoken, but so keen is the hearing of the sleeping otter, the drip of the lifted paddle has not splashed into the sea before the otter has awakened, looked and dived like lightning to the bottom of the sea before one of the Aleut hunters can hurl his spear. Silently, not a whisper, the steersman signals again. The hunters deploy in a circle half a mile broad round the place where the sea-otter disappeared; for they know that in fifteen or twenty {75} minutes the animal must come up for breath, and it cannot run farther than half a mile under sea before it reappears.
Suddenly somebody sees a round black-red head poke above water, perhaps close to the line of watchers. With a wild shout, the nearest bidarkas dart forward. Whether the spear-throw has hit or missed, the shout has done enough. The terrified otter dives before it has breath. Over the second diving spot a hunter is stationed, and the circle narrows, for the otter must come up quicker this time. It must have breath. Again and again, the little round head peeps up. Again the shout greets it. Again the lightning dive. Sometimes only a bubble gurgling to the top of the water guides the watchers. Presently the body is so full of gases from suppressed breathing, it can no longer sink, and a quick spear-throw secures the quarry. One animal against, perhaps, sixty men. Is the quest fair? Yonder thunders the surf below beetling precipices. Then the tide wash comes in with a rip like a whirlpool, or the ebb sets the beach combers rolling—lashing billows of tumbling waters that crash together and set the sheets of blinding spray shattering. Or the fog comes down over a choppy sea with a whizzing wind that sets the whitecaps flying backward like a horse's mane. The chase may have led farther and farther from land. As long as the little black head comes up, as long as the gurgling bubble tells of a struggling breather below, the hunters follow, be it {76} near or far, till, at the end of two or three hours, the exhausted sea-otter is taken. Perhaps forty men have risked their lives for a single pelt for which the trader cannot pay more than forty dollars; for he must have his profit, and the skin must be dressed, and the middlemen must have their profit; so that if it sells even for eleven hundred dollars in London—though the average is nearer one hundred and fifty dollars—the Aleut is lucky to receive forty or fifty dollars. Day after day, three months at a time, warm or cold, not daring to light fires on the island, the Aleut hunters go out to the spearing-surround, till the schooner returns for them from the main post; and whether the hunt is harder on man or beast may be judged from the fact that where the hunting battalions used to rally out in companies of thousands, they to-day go forth only in twenties and forties. True, the sea-otter has decreased and is almost extinct in places; but then, where game laws protect it, as in the Commander Islands, it is on the increase, and as for the Aleut hunters—their thousands lie in the bottom of the sea; and of the thousands who rallied forth long ago, often only a few hundred returned.
But while the spearing-surround was chiefly followed in battalions under the direction of a trading company, the clubbing was done by the individuals—the dauntless hunters, who scudded out in twos and threes in the wake of the blast, lost themselves in the shattering sheets of spray, with the wind screaming mad riot in their ears {77} and the roily rollers running a mill-race against tide and wind. How did they steer their cockle-shell skiffs—these Vikings of the North Pacific; or did they steer at all, or only fly before the gale on the wings of the mad north winds? Who can tell? The feet of man leave earth sometimes when the spirit rides out reckless of land or sea, or heaven or hell, and these plunderers of the deep took no reckoning of life or death when they rode out on the gale, where the beach combers shattered up the rocks, and the creatures of the sea came huddling landward to take refuge among the kelp rafts.
Tossing the skin skiffs high and dry on some rock, with perhaps the weight of a boulder to keep them from blowing away, the hunters rushed off to the surf wash armed only with a stout stick.
The otters must be approached away from the wind, and the noise of the surf will deaden the hunter's approach; so beating their way against hurricane gales—winds that throw them from their feet at times—scrambling over rocks slippery as glass with ice, running out on long reefs where the crash of spray confuses earth and air, wading waist-deep in ice slush, the hunters dash out for the kelp beds and rocks where the otter are asleep. Clubbing sounds brutal, but this kind of hunting is, perhaps, the most merciful of all—to the animal, not the man. The otter is asleep. The gale conceals the approaching danger. One blow of the gaff, and the otter never awakes. In this way have three hunters killed as many as a hundred otter {78} in two hours; and in this way have the thousands of Aleutian otter hunters, who used to throng the inlets of the northern islands, perished and dwindled to a population of poverty stricken, scattered men.
What were the rewards for all this risk of life? A glance at the records of the old fur companies tells why the Russian and American and English traders preferred sea-otter to the gold mines of the Spaniards in Mexico. Less than ten years after Cook's crew had sold their sea-otter for ten thousand dollars, the East India Company sold six hundred sea-otter for from sixty to one hundred dollars each. Two years later, Portlock and Dixon sold their cargo for fifty-five thousand dollars; and when it is remembered that two hundred sea-otter—twelve thousand dollars' worth at the lowest average—were sometimes got from the Nootka tribes for a few dollars' worth of old chisel iron—the profit can be estimated.
In 1785 five thousand sea-otter were sold in China for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. A capital of fifty thousand usually yielded three hundred thousand dollars; that is—if the ships escaped the dangers of hostile Indians and treacherous seas. What the Russians made from sea-otter will probably never be known; for so many different companies were engaged in the trade; and a hundred years ago, as many as fifteen thousand Indian hunters went out for the Russians yearly. One ship, the year after Bering's wreck, {79} is known to have made half a million dollars from its cargo. By definite figures—not including returns not tabulated in the fur companies—two hundred thousand sea-otter were taken for the Russians in half a century. Just before the United States took over Alaska, Russia was content with four hundred sea-otter a year; but by 1875 the Americans were getting three thousand a year. Those gathered at Kadiak have totalled as many as six thousand in a year during the heyday of the hunt, at Oonalaska three thousand, on the Prybilofs now noted for their seal, five thousand. In 1785 Cook's Inlet yielded three thousand; in 1812, only one hundred. Yakutat gave two thousand in 1794, only three hundred, six years later. Fifteen thousand were gathered at Sitka in 1804, only one hundred and fifty thirty years later. Of course the Russians obtained such results only by a system of musket, bludgeon, and outrage, that are repellent to the modern mind. Women were seized as hostages for a big hunt. Women were even murdered as a punishment for small returns. Men were sacrificed like dogs by the "promyshleniki"—riffraff blackguard Russian hunters from the Siberian exile population; but this is a story of outrageous wrong followed by its own terrible and unshunnable Nemesis which shall be told by itself.
[1] The price of the sea-otter varied, falling in seasons when the market was glutted to $40 a pelt, selling as high, in cases of rare beauty, as $1000 a pelt.