Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Mrs. Kahgoon, however, is a true woman. She naturally desires all the bright ribbons and cheap jewellery which the artful trader exhibits to her longing eyes in his store, that stands so near and so handy to her barrabkie, and her means only limit the purchase which she makes of these prized desiderata. She dresses her hair in braids, as a rule, and twists them up behind. She seldom wears a bonnet or hat, but has a handkerchief, generally of cotton, sometimes silken, always tied over her head, and when she goes, as she often does, out to call on a neighboring spinster or madam, or to the store, she throws a small woollen shawl over head and shoulders, holding it drawn together under her chin by one hand. As we have intimated, she dresses principally in cotton fabrics, with skirts, overskirts, white stockings, etc.; but when she was a girl, and much more than that, she usually went, with her legs and feet bare, into the teeth of biting winds and over frosty water and wood-paths.

A Barrabkie.

(The characteristic dwelling of Aleutes and Kadiakers.)

The domestic life of this hunter and his wife is all bound up within the shelter of their “barrabkie.” This hut or house of the Aleutian hunter is half under ground, or, in other words, it is an excavation on the village site of a piece of earth ten or fifteen feet square, three or four feet deep, which is laid back up and over upon a wooden frame or whalebone joisting, which is securely built up within and above this excavation, so that a rafter-ceiling is made about six feet in the clear from the earthen floor. A wall of peaty sod is piled up around outside, two and three feet thick. The native architect enters this dwelling through a little hall patched on to that leeward side from the winds prevalent in the vicinity. The door is low, even for Kahgoon, and he stoops as he opens and closes it. If he has been a successful hunter, he will have the floor laid with boards secured from the trader; but if he has been unlucky, then nothing more to stand upon than the earth is afforded. This barrabkie is divided into two rooms, not wholly shut out one from the other, by a half-partition of mats, timber, or some hanging curtains, which conceal the bedroom or “spalniah” from the direct gaze of the living and cook-room. They are very fond of comfortable beds, having adopted the feather-ticks of the Russians. Soap is an expensive luxury, so Kahgoon’s wife is economical of its use for washing in her laundry; and, though she may desire to spread over her sleeping couch the counterpane and fluted shams of our own choice, she has nothing better than a colored quilt which the traders bring up here especially to meet this demand. A small deal-table, two or three empty cracker-boxes from the store, and a rude bench or two constitute all the furniture, while a little cast-iron stove, recently introduced, stands in one corner, and the heating and cooking is created and performed thereon. The table-ware of a hunter’s wife and the household utensils do not require much room or a large cupboard for their reception. A few large white crockery cups, plates, and saucers, with gaudy red and blue designs, and several pewter spoons, will be found in sufficient quantity to entertain with during seasons of festivity. She manifests a marked dislike to tin dishes, probably due to the fact that it is necessary to take care of this ware, or it rusts out. Then, above all the strange odors which arise here in this close, hot little room, we easily detect the smell of kerosene, and, sure enough, it is the oil which is burned in the lamp.

Such a barrabkie built and furnished in this style and occupied by Kahgoon, his wife, two or three children, and a relative or so, is a warm and a thoroughly comfortable shelter to him and his, as long as he keeps it in good repair. It is true that the air seems to us, as we enter, oppressively close, and, in case of sickness, is positively foul; yet on the whole the Alaskan is very comfortable. He never stores up much food against the morrow—the sea and its piscine booty is too near at hand. Whatever he may keep over he does not have in a cellar, but hangs it up outside of his door on an elevated trestle which he calls a “laabas,” beyond the reach of the village dogs, while there is no thought of theft from the hands of his neighbors. He lives chiefly upon fresh fish—cod, halibut, salmon and other varieties, which he secures the year round as they rotate in the sea and streams. He varies that diet according to the success of his hunting, by buying at the store tea, sugar, hard-bread, crackers, flour and divers canned fruits or vegetables. Nature sends him in season the flesh and eggs of sea-fowl, geese, ducks, and a few land birds like willow-grouse.

In this fashion the sea-otter hunter appears to us as we view him now; his children come, grow up, and branch out, to repeat his life and doing, as they show themselves capable of living by their own exertions as hunters and fishermen. He is a peaceful, affectionate, and thoroughly undemonstrative parent, a kind husband, and he imposes no burden upon his wife that he does not fully share, unless he becomes a drunkard, when, in that event, a sad change is made in the man. He gets drunk, and his wife too, by taking sugar, flour, and dried-apples, rice or hops, if he can get them, in certain proportions, puts them into a barrel or cask, with water, bungs it up and waits for fermentation to do its work. Before it has worked entirely clear he draws off a thick, sour liquid which intoxicates him most effectually—he beats his spouse and runs her and children from the house, smashes things, and for weeks afterward the barrabkie is desolate and open as the result of such orgies. If he continues, his health is shattered, he rapidly fails as a hunter, and he suffers the pangs of poverty with his family. It is said upon good authority that the brewing of this liquor was taught to these people by the earliest Russian arrivals in their country, who made it as an anti-scorbutic; but it certainly has not proved to be a blessing in disguise, for it has brought upon them nearly all the misery that they are capable of understanding.

In concluding this brief introduction to the life of the otter-hunter, we may fitly call attention to the fact that Kahgoon and his family are devout members of the Greek Catholic Church, as are all of his people, without a single exception, between Attoo and Kadiak Islands—nearly five thousand souls to-day, living in scattered hamlets all along between.

The subtle acumen displayed by the sea-otter in the selection of its habitat can only be fully appreciated by him who has visited the chosen land, reefs, and water of its resort. It is a region so gloomy, so pitilessly beaten by wind and waves, by sleet, rain and persistent fog, that the good Bishop Veniaminov, when he first came among the natives of the Aleutian Islands, ordered the curriculum of hell to be omitted from the church breviary, saying, as he did so, that these people had enough of it here on this earth! The fury of hurricane gales, the vagaries of swift and intricate currents in and out of the passages, the eccentricities of the barometer, the blackness of the fog enveloping all in its dark, damp shroud, so alarm and discomfit the white man that he willingly gives up the entire chase of the sea-otter to that brown-skinned Aleut, who alone seems to be so constituted as to dare and wrestle with these obstacles through descent from his hardy ancestors, who, in turn, have been centuries before him engaged just as he is to-day.

So we find the sea-otter-hunting of the present, as it was in the past, entirely confined to the natives, with white traders here and there vieing in active competition one with the other in bidding for the quarry of those dusky captors. The traders erect small frame dwellings as stores in the midst of the otter-hunting settlements, places like Oonalashka, Belcovsky, Oonga, and Kadiak villages, which are the chief resorts of population and this trade in Alaska. They own and employ small schooners, between thirty and one hundred tons burthen, in conveying the hunting parties to and from these hamlets above mentioned as they go to and return from the sea-otter hunting-grounds of Saanak and the Chernaboor rocks, where five-sixths of all the sea-otters annually taken in Alaska are secured. Why these animals should evince so much partiality for this region between the Straits of Oonimak and the west end of Kadiak Island is somewhat mysterious, but, nevertheless, it is the great sea-otter hunting-ground of the country. Saanak Island, itself, is small, with a coast-circuit of less than eighteen miles. Spots of sand-beach are found here and there, but the major portion of the shore is composed of enormous water-worn boulders, piled up high by the booming surf. The interior is low and rolling, with a central ridge rising into three hills, the middle one some eight hundred feet high. There is no timber here, but an abundant exhibit of grasses, mosses, and sphagnum, with a score of little fresh-water ponds in which multitudes of ducks and geese are found every spring and fall. The natives do not live upon the island, because the making of fires and scattering of food-refuse, and other numerous objectionable matters connected with their settlement, alarm the otters and drive them off to parts unknown. Thus the island is only camped upon by the hunting-squads, and fires are never made unless the wind is from the southward, since no sea-otters are ever found to the northward of the ground. The sufferings—miseries of cold, and even hunger, to which the Aleutes subject themselves here every winter, going for weeks and weeks at a time without fires, even for cooking, with the thermometer below zero in a wild, northerly and westerly gale of wind, is better imagined than portrayed.