Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Ninth.—That by the 8th or 10th of August the pups born nearest the water first begin to learn to swim; and that by the 15th or 20th of September they are all familiar, more or less, with the exercise.

Tenth.—That by the middle of September the rookeries are entirely broken up; confused, straggling bands of females are seen among bachelors, pups, and small squads of old males, crossing and recrossing the ground in an aimless, listless manner. The season is now over.

Eleventh.—That many of the seals do not leave these grounds of St. Paul and St. George before the end of December, and some remain even as late as the 12th of January; but that by the end of October and the beginning of November every year, all the fur-seals of mature age—five and six years, and upward—have left the islands. The younger males go with the others; many of the pups still range about the islands, but are not hauled to any great extent on the beaches or the flats. They seem to prefer the rocky shore-margin, and to lie as high up as they can get on such bluffy rookeries as Tolstoi and the Reef. By the end of this month, November, they are, as a rule, all gone.

I now call the attention of the reader to another very remarkable feature in the economy of the seal-life on these islands. The great herds of “holluschickie,”[123] numbering from one-third to one-half, perhaps, of the whole aggregate of near five million seals known to the Pribylov group, are never allowed by the old “seecatchie” (which threaten frightful mutilation or death) to put their flippers on or near the rookeries.

By reference to my map, it will be observed that I have located a large extent of ground—markedly so on St Paul—as that occupied by the seals’ “hauling-ground”; this area, in fact, represents those portions of the island upon which the “holluschickie” roam in heavy squadrons, wearing away and polishing the surface of the soil, stripping every foot, which is indicated on the chart as such, of its vegetation and mosses, leaving a margin as sharply defined on those bluffy uplands and sandy flats as it is on the map itself.

The reason that so much more land is covered by the “holluschickie” than by the breeding seals—ten times as much at least—is due to the fact that, though not as numerous, perhaps, as the breeding seals, yet they are tied down to nothing, so to speak—are wholly irresponsible, and roam hither and thither as caprice and the weather may dictate. Thus they wear off and rub down a much larger area than the rookery seals occupy; wandering aimlessly, and going back, in some instances, notably at English Bay, from one-half to a whole mile inland, not travelling in desultory files along winding, straggling paths, but sweeping in solid platoons, they obliterate every spear of grass and rub down nearly every hummock in their restless marching.

All the male seals, under six years of age, are compelled to herd apart by themselves and away from the breeding grounds, in many cases far away; the large hauling-grounds at Southwest Point being about two miles from the nearest rookery. This class of seals is termed “holluschickie” or the “bachelors” by the people: a most fitting and expressive appellation.

The seals of this great subdivision are those with which the natives on the Pribylov group are the most familiar: naturally and especially so, since they are the only ones, with the exception of a few thousand pups, and occasionally an old bull or two, taken late in the fall for food and skins, which are driven up to the killing-grounds at the village for slaughter. The reasons for this exclusive attention to the “bachelors” are most cogent, and will be given hereafter when the “business” is discussed.

Since the “holluschickie” are not permitted by their own kind to land on the rookeries and stop there, they have the choice of two methods of locating, one of which allows them to rest in the rear of the rookeries, and the other on the free beaches. The most notable illustration of the former can be witnessed on Reef Point, where a pathway is left for their ingress and egress through a rookery—a path left by common consent, as it were, between the harems. On these trails of passage they come and go in steady files all day and all night during the season, unmolested by the jealous bulls which guard the seraglios on either side as they travel—all peace and comfort to the young seal if he minds his business and keeps straight on up or down, without stopping to nose about right or left; all woe and destruction to him, however, if he does not, for in that event he will be literally torn in bloody gripping, from limb to limb, by vigilant “see-catchie.”

Since the two and three year old “holluschickie” come up in small squads with the first bulls in the spring, or a few days later, such common highways as those between the rookery ground and the sea are travelled over before the arrival of the cows, and get well defined. A passage for the “bachelors,” which I took much pleasure in observing day after day at Polavina, another at Tolstoi, and two on the Reef, in 1872, were entirely closed up by the “sea-catchie” and obliterated when I again searched for them in 1874. Similar passages existed, however, on several of the large rookeries of St. Paul. One of those at Tolstoi exhibits this feature very finely, for here the hauling-ground extends around from English Bay, and lies up back of the Tolstoi rookery, over a flat and rolling summit, from one hundred to one hundred and twenty feet above the sea-level. The young males and yearlings of both sexes come through and between the harems at the height of the breeding season on two of these narrow pathways, and before reaching the ground above, are obliged to climb up an almost abrupt bluff, which they do by following and struggling in the water-runs and washes that are worn into its face. As this is a large hauling-ground, on which, every favorable day during the season, fifteen or twenty thousand commonly rest, a view of skilful seal-climbing can be witnessed here at any time during that period; and the sight of such climbing as this of Tolstoi is exceedingly novel and interesting. Why, verily, they ascend over and upon places where a lively man might, at first thought, say with great positiveness that it was utterly impossible for him to climb!