Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

They have, however, a very characteristic and peculiar smell when they are driven and get heated; their breath-exhalations possess a disagreeable, faint, sickly odor, and when I have walked within its influence at the rear of a seal-drive, I could almost fancy, as it entered my nostrils, that I stood beneath an ailantus-tree in full bloom; but this odor can by no means be confounded with what is universally ascribed to another cause. It is also noteworthy that if your finger is touched ever so lightly to a little fur-seal blubber, it will smell very much like that which I have appreciated and described as peculiar to their breath, which arises from them when they are driven, only it is a little stronger. Both the young and old fur-seals have this same breath-taint at all seasons of the year.

With the precision of clock-work and the regularity of the precession of the seasons, fur-seals have adopted and enforced the following method of life on these islands of Pribylov. In this system millions of those highly organized animals sustain themselves.

First.—The earliest bulls land in a negligent, indolent way, at the opening of the season, soon after the rocks at the water’s edge are free from ice, frozen snow, etc. This is, as a rule, about the 1st to the 5th of every May. They land from the beginning to the end of the season in perfect confidence and without fear; they are very fat, and will weigh on an average five hundred pounds each; some stay at the water’s edge, some go to the tier back of them again, and so forth, until the whole rookery is mapped out by them, weeks in advance of the arrival of the first female.

Second.—That by the 10th or 12th of June, all the male stations on the rookeries have been mapped out and fought for, and held in waiting by the “see-catchie.” These males are, as a rule, bulls rarely ever under six years of age; most of them are over that age, being sometimes three, and occasionally doubtless four or five times as old.

Third.—That the cows make their first appearance, as a class, on or after the 12th or 15th of June, in very small numbers, but rapidly after the 23d and 25th of this month, every year, they begin to flock up in such numbers as to fill the harems very perceptibly, and by the 8th or 10th of July they have all come, as a rule—a few stragglers excepted. The average weight of the females now will not be much more than eighty to ninety pounds each.

Fourth.—That the breeding season is at its height from the 10th to the 15th of July every year, and that it subsides entirely at the end of this month and early in August; also, that its method and system are confined entirely to the land, never effected in the sea.

Fifth.—That the females bear their first young when they are three years old, and that the period of gestation is nearly twelve months, lacking a few days only of that lapse of time.

Sixth.—That the females bear a single pup each, and that this is born soon after landing. No exception to this rule as ever been witnessed or recorded.

Seventh.—That the “see-catchie” which have held the harems from the beginning to the end of the season, leave for the water in a desultory and straggling manner at its close, greatly emaciated, and do not return, if they do at all, until six or seven weeks have elapsed, when the regular systematic distribution of the families over the rookeries is at an end for this season. A general medley of young males now are free: they come out of the water, and wander over all these rookeries, together with many old males, which have not been on seraglio duty, and great numbers of the females. An immense majority over all others present are pups, since only about twenty-five per cent. of the mother-seals are out of the water now at any one time.

Eighth.—That the rookeries lose their compactness and definite boundaries of true breeding limit and expansion by the 25th to the 28th of July every year; then, after this date, the pups begin to haul back, and to the right and left, in small squads at first, but as the season goes on, by the 18th of August, they depart without reference to their mothers; and when thus scattered, the males, females and young swarm over more than three and four times the area occupied by them when breeding and born on the rookeries. The system of family arrangement and uniform compactness of the breeding classes breaks up at this date.