Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Young Adult Male and Female Old Bull Roaring

[Eumetopias stelleri: a Life Study made at St. Paul’s Island. July 16, 1872]

The bulk and power of the adult sea-lion male will be better appreciated when I say that it has an average length of ten and eleven feet osteologically, with an enormous girth of eight to nine feet around the chest and shoulders; but while the anterior parts of its frame are as perfect and powerful on land as in sea, those posterior are ridiculously impotent when the huge beast leaves its favorite element. Still, when hauled up beyond the reach of the brawling surf, as it rears itself, shaking the spray from its tawny chest and short grizzly mane, it has a leonine appearance and bearing, greatly enhanced as the season advances by a rich golden-rufous color of its coat; the savage gleam of its expression is due probably, to the sinister muzzle, and cast of its eye. This optical organ is not round and full, soft and limpid, like the fur-seal’s, but it is an eye like that of a bull-dog: it is small and clearly shows under its heavy lids the white or sclerotic coat, with a light-brown iris. Its teeth gleam and glisten in pearly whiteness against a dark tongue and the shadowy recesses of its wide, deep mouth. The long, sharp, broad-based canines, when bared by the wrathful snarling of its gristled lips, glittered more wickedly, to my eye, than the keenest sword ever did in the hand of man.

With these teeth alone, backed by the enormous muscular power of a mighty neck and broad shoulders, the sea-lion confines its battles to its kind, spurred by terrible energy and heedless and persistent brute courage. No animals that I have ever seen in combat presented a more savage or more cruelly fascinating sight than did a brace of old sea-lion bulls which met under my eyes near the Garden Cove at St. George.

Here was a sea-lion rookery the outskirts of which I had trodden upon for the first time. Two aged males, surrounded by their meek, polygamous families, were impelled towards each other by those latent fires of hate and jealousy which seemed to burst forth and fairly consume the angry rivals. Opening with a long, round, vocal prelude, they gradually came together, as the fur-seal bulls do, with averted heads, as though the sight of each other was sickening—but fight they must. One would play against the other for an unguarded moment in which to assume the initiative, until it had struck its fangs into the thick skin of its opponent’s jowl; then, clinching its jaws, was not shaken off until the struggles of its tortured victim literally tore them out, leaving an ugly, gaping wound—for the sharp eye-teeth cut a deeper gutter in the skin and flesh than would have held my hand; fired into almost supernatural rage, the injured lion retaliated, quick as a flash, in kind; the hair flew from both of them into the air, the blood streamed down in frothy torrents, while high above the boom of the breaking waves, and shrill deafening screams of water-fowl over head, rose the ferocious, hoarse, and desperate roar of these combatants.

Though provided with flippers, to all external view, as the fur-seal is, the sea-lion cannot, however, make use of them at all in the same free manner. The fur-seal may be driven five or six miles in twenty-four hours under the most favorable conditions of cool, moist weather; the “seevitchie,” however, can only go two miles, the weather and roadway being the same. When driven, a sea-lion balances and swings its long and heavy neck, as a lever, to and fro, with every hitching up behind of its posterior limbs, which it seldom raises from the ground, drawing them up after the fore-feet with a sliding drag over the grass or sand and rocks, as the case may be, ever and anon pausing to take a sullen and savage survey of the field and the natives who are urging it.

The sea-lion is polygamous, but it does not maintain any regular system and method in preparing for and attending to its harem, like that so finely illustrated on the breeding-grounds of the fur-seal; and it is not so numerous, comparatively speaking. There are not, according to my best judgment, over ten or twelve thousand of these animals altogether on the breeding-grounds of the Pribylov Islands. It does not haul more than a few rods anywhere or under any circumstances back from the sea. It cannot be visited and inspected by men as the fur-seals are, for it is so shy and suspicious that on the slightest warning of such an approach, a stampede into the water is sure to result.

That noteworthy, intelligent courage of a fur-seal, though it does not possess half the size nor one-quarter of the muscular strength of a sea-lion, is entirely wanting in the huge bulk and brain of the Eumetopias. A boy with a rattle or a pop-gun could stampede ten thousand sea-lion bulls in the height of a breeding-season to the water, and keep them there for the rest of the time.[137]

Old males come out and locate themselves over the narrow belts of rookery-grounds (sometimes, as at St. Paul, on the immediate sea-margin of fur-seal breeding-places), two or three weeks in advance of the females, which arrive later, i.e., between the 1st to the 6th of June; and these females are never subjected to that intense, jealous supervision so characteristic of the fur-seal harem. Big sea-lion bulls, however, fight savagely[138] among themselves, and turn off from the breeding-ground all younger and weaker males.

A cow sea-lion is not quite half the size of an adult male; she will measure from eight to nine feet in length osteologically, with a weight of four or five hundred pounds; she has the same general cast of countenance and build of the bull; but, as she does not sustain any fasting period of over a week or ten days consecutively, she never comes out so grossly fat as he does. With reference to the weight of the latter, I was particularly unfortunate in not being able to get one of those big bulls on the scales before it had been bled, and in bleeding I know that a flood of blood poured out which should have been recorded in the weight. Therefore I can only estimate this aggregate avoirdupois of one of the finest-conditioned adult male sea-lions at fourteen to fifteen hundred pounds; an average weight, however, might safely be recorded as touching twelve hundred pounds.[139]