of holluschickie on the hauling-grounds? If the sun were to come out now, in half an hour there wouldn't be a seal on the entire flat. All disappear into the sea. Absolutely!"
"What is that group over there?" asked Colin, pointing to a small cluster a short distance ahead of them, near some rough frame buildings.
"That's the drive," the agent answered. "The killing-grounds are always near the salt-houses. What's that? The smell? Worst smell in the world, I thought, when I first came here. You can't kill seals in the same place year after year and just leave the flesh to rot without having a frightful odor. One gets used to it after a while."
"It seems to me that you're running the risk of starting up a plague or something!"
"No," was the reply, "it has never caused any sickness here. Then the drive is small now to what it used to be. Time was when three or four thousand seals would be driven, where we only take a couple of hundred now. Fallen off terribly! Fifty years ago, every available inch of all the beach was rookery, settled as thick as in the rookery you saw just now. The holluschickie were here in uncounted millions. These hills, now overgrown with grass, show the soil matted with
fine hair and fur where the seals shed their coats for hundreds of years. Now a few scattered rookeries are all that remain."
"Do you suppose the seal herd will ever be as big again?" the boy asked.
The agent shook his head.
"I'm afraid not. The governments interested won't keep up the international agreement long enough," he said regretfully. "It would take thirty or forty years. Yet it would be worth it. You see," he continued, "this is absolutely the only place in the world where the true Alaskan fur seal—the sea bear, as it used to be called, because it isn't a seal at all—can be found. The fur seals on the Russian islands are a different species. Those on the Japanese islands are different from both."
"You say a fur seal isn't a seal at all?" asked Colin. "What's the difference?"