Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

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.