Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The pups sometimes get so thoroughly plastered in these muddy, slimy puddles, that the hair falls off in patches, giving them, at first sight, the appearance of being troubled with scrofula or some other plague: from my investigations directed to this point, I became satisfied that they were not permanently injured, though evidently very much annoyed. With reference to this suggestion as to sickness or distemper among these seals, I gave the subject direct and continued attention, and in no one of the rookeries could I discover a single seal, no matter how old or young, which appeared to be suffering in the least from any physical disorder other than that which they themselves had inflicted, one upon the other, by fighting. The third season, passing directly under my observation, failed to reward my search with any manifestation of disease among the seals which congregate in such mighty numbers on those rookeries of St. Paul and St. George. That remarkable freedom from all such complaints enjoyed by these animals is noteworthy, and a most trenchant and penetrating cross-questioning of the natives also failed to give me any history or evidence of an epidemic in the past.

The observer will, however, notice every summer, gathered in melancholy squads of a dozen to one hundred or so (scattered along the coast where the healthy seals never go), those sick and disabled bulls which have, in the earlier part of the season, been either internally injured or dreadfully scarred by the teeth of their opponents in fighting. Sand is blown by strong wind into their fresh wounds, causing inflammation and sloughing which very often finishes the life of a victim. The sailors term these invalid gatherings “hospitals,” a phrase which, like the most of their homely expressions, is quite appropriate.

Early in August, usually by the 8th or 10th, I noticed one of the remarkable movements of the season. I refer to the pup’s first essay in swimming. Is it not odd—paradoxical—that the young seal, from the moment of his birth until he is a month or six weeks old, is utterly unable to swim? If he is seized by the nape of the neck and pitched out a rod into the water from shore, his bullet-like head will drop instantly below the surface, and his attenuated posterior extremities flap impotently on it. Suffocation is the question of only a few minutes, the stupid little creature not knowing how to raise his immersed head and gain the air again. After they have attained the age indicated above, their instinct drives them down to the margin of the surf, where an alternate ebbing and flowing of its wash, covers and uncovers the rocky or sandy beaches. They first smell and then touch the moist pools, and flounder in the upper wash of the surf, which leaves them as suddenly high and dry as it immersed them at first. After this beginning they make slow and clumsy progress in learning the knack of swimming. For a week or two, when overhead in depth, they continue to flounder about in the most awkward manner, thrashing the water as little dogs do with their fore feet, making no attempt whatever to use the hinder ones. Look at that pup now, launched out for the first time beyond his depth; see how he struggles—his mouth wide open, and his eyes fairly popping. He turns instantly to the beach, ere he has fairly struck out from the point whence he launched in, and, as the receding swell which at first carried him off his feet and out, now returning, leaves him high and dry, for a few minutes he seems so weary that he weakly crawls up, out beyond its swift returning wash, and coils himself immediately to take a recuperative nap. He sleeps a few minutes, perhaps half an hour, then awakes as bright as a dollar, apparently rested, and at his swimming lesson he goes again. By repeated and persistent attempts, this young seal gradually becomes familiar with the water and acquainted with his own power over that element, which is to be his real home and his whole support. Once boldly swimming, the pup fairly revels in a new happiness. He and his brethren have now begun to haul and swarm along the entire length of St. Paul coast, from Northeast Point down and around to Zapadnie, lining the alternating sand-beaches and rocky shingle with their chunky, black forms. How they do delight in it! They play with a zest, and chatter like our own children in the kindergartens—swimming in endless evolutions, twisting, turning, or diving—and when exhausted, drawing their plump, round bodies up again on the beach. Shaking themselves dry as young dogs would do, they now either go to sleep on the spot or have a lazy terrestrial frolic among themselves.

Why an erroneous impression ever got into the mind of any man as to this matter of a pup’s learning to swim, I confess that I am wholly unable to imagine. I have not seen any “driving” of the young pups into the water by the old ones, in order to teach them this process, as certain authors have positively affirmed. There is not the slightest supervision by the mother or father of the pup, from the first moment of his birth, in this respect, until he leaves for the North Pacific, full-fledged with amphibious power. At the close of the breeding season, every year, the pups are restlessly and constantly shifting back and forth over the rookery ground of their birth, in large squads, sometimes numbering thousands upon thousands. In the course of this change of position they all sooner or later come in contact with the sea; they then blunder into the water for the first time, in a most awkward, ungainly manner, and get out as quick as they can; but so far from showing any fear or dislike of this, their most natural element, as soon as they rest from their exertion they are immediately ready for a new trial, and keep at it, provided the sea is not too stormy or rough. During all this period of self-tuition they seem thoroughly to enjoy the exercise, in spite of their repeated and inevitable discomfitures at the beginning.

That “podding” of these young pups in the rear of the great rookeries of St. Paul, is one of the most striking and interesting phases of this remarkable exhibition of highly-organized life. When they first bunch together they are all black, for they have not begun to shed the natal coat; they shine with an unctuous, greasy reflection, and grouped in small armies or great regiments on the sand-dune tracts at Northeast Point, they present a most extraordinary and fascinating sight. Although the appearance of the “holluschickie” at English Bay fairly overwhelms the observer with an impression of its countless multitudes, yet I am free to declare that at no one point in this evolution of the seal-life, during its reproductive season, have I been so deeply impressed by a sense of overwhelming enumeration, as I have when, standing on the summit of Cross Hill, I looked down to the southward and westward over a reach of six miles of alternate grass and sand-dune stretches, mirrored upon which were hundreds of thousands of these little black pups, spread in sleep and sport within this restricted field of vision. They appeared as countless as the grains of that sand upon which they rested!

By September 15th, all the pups born during the year have become familiar with the water; they have all learned to swim, and are now nearly all down by the water’s edge, skirting in large masses the rocks and beaches hitherto unoccupied by seals of any class this year. Now they are about five or six times their original weight, or, in other words, they are thirty to forty pounds avoirdupois, as plump and fat as butter-balls, and they begin to take on their second coat, shedding their black pup-hair completely. This second coat does not vary in color, at this age, between the sexes. They effect such transformation in dress very slowly, and cannot, as a rule, be said to have ceased their moulting until the middle or 20th of October.

That second coat, or sea-going jacket, of the pup, is a uniform, dense, light gray over-hair, with an under-fur which is slightly grayish in some, but is, in most cases, of a soft light brown hue. The over-hair is fine, close and elastic, from two-thirds of an inch to an inch in length, while the fur is not quite half an inch long. Thus the coarser hair shingles over and conceals the soft under-wool completely, giving the color by which, after the second year, the sex of the animal is recognized. A pronounced difference between the sexes is not effected, however, by color alone until the third year of the animal’s life. This over-hair of the pup’s new jacket on its back, neck, and head, is a dark chinchilla-gray, blending into stone-white, just tinged with a grayish tint on the abdomen and chest. The upper lip, upon which the whiskers or mustaches take root, is covered with hair of a lighter gray than that of the body. This mustache consists of fifteen or twenty longer or shorter bristles, from half an inch to three inches in length, some brownish, horn-colored, and others whitish-gray and translucent, on each side and back and below the nostrils, leaving the muzzle quite prominent and hairless. The nasal openings and their surroundings are, as I have before said when speaking of this feature, hairless and similar to those of a dog.[122]

The most attractive feature about the fur-seal pup, and that which holds this place as it grows on and older, is the eye. That organ is exceedingly clear, dark, and liquid, with which, for beauty and amiability, together with real intelligence of expression, those of no other animal that I have ever seen, or have ever read of, can be compared; indeed, there are few eyes in the orbits of men and women which suggest more pleasantly the ancient thought of their being “windows to the soul.” The lids to that eye are fringed with long, perfect lashes, and the slightest irritation in the way of dust or sand, or other foreign substances, seems to cause them exquisite annoyance, accompanied by immoderate weeping. This involuntary tearfulness so moved Steller that he ascribed it to the processes of a mind, and declared that seal-mothers actually “shed tears”!

I do not think a seal’s range of vision on land, or out of the water, is very great. I have frequently experimented with adult fur-seals, by allowing them to catch sight of my person, so as to distinguish it as of foreign character, three and four hundred paces off, taking the precaution of standing quietly to the leeward when the wind was blowing strong, and then walking unconcernedly up to them. I have invariably noticed that they would allow me to approach quite close before recognizing my strangeness; then, as it occurred to them, they at once made a lively noise, a medley of coughing, spitting, snorting, and blaating, and plunged in spasmodic lopes and shambled to get away from my immediate neighborhood. As to the pups, they all stupidly stare at the form of a human being until it is fairly on them, when they also repeat in miniature these vocal gymnastics and physical efforts of the older ones, to retreat or withdraw a few rods, sometimes only a few feet, from the spot upon which you have cornered them, after which they instantly resume their previous occupation of either sleeping or playing, as though nothing had happened. Perhaps it is safe to say that the greatest activity displayed by any one of the five senses of the seal is evidenced in its power of scent. This faculty is all that can be desired in the line of alertness. I never failed to awaken an adult seal from the soundest sleep, when from a half to a quarter of a mile distant, no matter how softly I proceeded, if I got to the windward, though they sometimes took alarm when I was a mile off.

They leave evidences of their being on these great reproductive fields, chiefly at the rookeries, in the hundreds of dead carcasses which mark the last of those animals that had been rendered infirm, sick, and killed by fighting among themselves in the early part of the season, or of those which have crawled far away from the scene of battle to die from death-wounds received in bitter struggles for a harem. On the rookeries, wherever these lifeless bodies rest, the living, old and young, clamber and patter backward and forward over and on the putrid remains: thus such constant stirring up of decayed matter, gives rise to an exceedingly disagreeable and far-reaching “funk.” This has been, by all writers who have dwelt on the subject, referred to as the smell which those animals emit for another reason—erroneously called the “rutting odor.” If these creatures have any odor peculiar to them when in this condition, I will frankly confess that I am unable to distinguish it from the fumes which are constantly being stirred up and arising out of those putrescent carcasses so disturbed, as well as from the bodies of the few pups which have been killed accidentally by heavy bulls fighting over them, charging back and forth against one another, so much of the time.