“Newack” and “Oogack.”
[St. Lawrence Mahlemoöts: pen portraits made at Poogovellyak, August, 1874.]
I know that it is said by Parry, by Hall, and lately by others, that the flesh of the Atlantic walrus is palatable; perhaps the nature of its food-supply is the cause. We all recognize a wide difference in pork from hogs fed on corn and those fed on beech-mast and oak-acorns, and those which have lived upon the offal of the slaughtering houses, or have gathered the decayed castings of the sea-shore; the sea-horse of Bering Sea lives upon that which does not give a pleasant flavor to its flesh.
The range of our Alaskan walrus now appears to be restricted in the Arctic Ocean to an extreme westward at Cape Chelagskoi, on the Siberian coast, and an extreme eastward between Point Barrow and the region of Point Beechey, on the Alaskan shore. It is, however, substantially confined between Koliutchin Bay, Siberia, and Point Barrow, Alaska. As far as its distribution in polar waters is concerned, and how far to the north it travels from these coasts of two continents, I am unable to present any well-authenticated data illustrative of the subject; the shores of Wrangel Island were found in possession of walrus-herds during the season of 1881.
This walrus has, however, a very wide range of distribution in Alaska, though not near so great as in prehistoric times. They abound to the eastward and southeastward of St. Paul, over in Bristol Bay, where great numbers congregate on the sand-bars and flats, now flooded, now bared by the rising and ebbing of the tide; they are hunted here to a considerable extent for their ivory. No morse are found south of the Aleutian Islands; still, not more than forty-five or fifty years ago, small gatherings of these animals were killed here and there on some islands between Kadiak and Oonimak Pass; the greatest aggregate of them, south of Bering Straits, will always be found in the estuaries of Bristol Bay and on the north side of the peninsula of Alaska.
I have been frequently questioned whether, in my opinion, more than a short space of time would elapse ere the walrus was exterminated, or not, since our whalers had begun to hunt them in Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. To this I frankly make answer that I do not know enough of the subject to give a correct judgment. The walrus spend most of their time in waters that are within reach of these skilful and hardy navigators; and if they (the walrus) are of sufficient value to a whaler, he can and undoubtedly will make a business of killing them, and work the same sad result that he has brought about with the mighty schools of cetacea which once whistled and bared their backs, throughout the now deserted waters of Bering Sea, in perfect peace and seclusion prior to 1842. The returns of the old Russian America Company show that an annual average of ten thousand walrus have been slain by the Eskimo since 1799 to 1867. There are a great many left yet; but, unless the oil of Rosmarus becomes very precious commercially, I think the shoal waters of Bristol Bay and Kuskokvim mouth, together with the eccentric tides thereof, will preserve the species indefinitely. Forty years ago, when the North Pacific was a rendezvous of the greatest whaling-fleet that ever floated, those vessels could not, nor can they now, approach nearer than sixty or even eighty miles of many muddy shoals, sands, and bars upon which the walrus rest in Bristol Bay, scattered in herds of a dozen or so to bodies of thousands, living in lethargic peace and almost unmolested, except in several small districts which are carefully hunted over by the natives of Oogashik for oil and ivory. I have been credibly informed that they also breed in Bristol Bay, and along its coast as far north as Cape Avinova, during seasons of exceptional rigor in the Arctic.
The Death-stroke.
[Mahlemoöts Morse-hunting in the summer.]
The Innuits of St. Lawrence, and all of their race living above them, hunt the walrus without any excitement other than that of securing such quarry. They never speak of real danger. When they do not shoot them as these beasts drift in sleepy herds on ice-floes, then they surprise them on the beaches or reefs and destroy a herd by spearing and lancing. When harpooned or speared, a head of the weapon is so made as to detach itself from its shank, and by thus sticking in the carcass a line of walrus-hide is made fast to the plethoric body of Rosmarus. When this brute has expended its surplus vitality by towing the natives a few miles in a mad, frenzied burst of swimming, their bidarrah is quietly drawn up to its puffing form close enough to permit of a coup by an ivory-headed lance; it is then towed to a beach at high water. When the ebb is well out, the huge carcass is skinned by its dusky butchers, who out it up into large square chunks of flesh and blubber, which are deposited in queer little “Dutch-oven” caches of each family that are made especially for its reception.