“Probably not,” laughed Serge. “Along the southern coast of these very islands is about the only place in the whole world where they are now found, and even here they are rarely seen. I tell you the hunter who gets a sea-otter nowadays is in great luck; and yet the only money or trade goods that the four or five thousand Aleuts of these islands ever see come to them in exchange for sea-otter skins. It is the only paying kind of hunting that is left entirely to the natives, and in which white men do not engage.”
“Why don’t they?”
“Because it is too hard work and too dangerous.”
“Is it any harder or more dangerous than seal-hunting?”
“I should say it was! The sea-otter is one of the shyest and most keen-scented of animals. If the tiniest bit of a fire is lighted to windward of him, even miles away, he will scent it and be off. If a man walks on a beach, many tides must wash out the scent of his footsteps before a sea-otter will approach that place. So when the wind is off shore the hunters have to go without fire, even for cooking, in winter as well as in summer, sometimes for weeks at a time. Then, too, the sea-otter never really comes ashore, but spends most of his time in the water among the great kelp-beds that you have seen floating in the North Pacific. Even their young are born in those floating cradles. The only place you can catch him ashore is on the rocky reefs and half-submerged islands lying twenty or thirty miles off the coast, and as he only lands on them when driven to do so by the severest gales, it is then that he must be hunted.”
“How do they hunt him?” asked Phil, who seemed to follow this investigation to its end.
“If the storm is off shore, like this one, the hunters wait till it shows signs of breaking. Then they launch their bidarkies, fasten their kamleikas tightly around the hatch coamings so that not a drop of water can get in, and run down the gale through seas that would swamp many a larger craft, until they reach the reef, and make a landing under its lee. Then they creep up to windward over the rocks, and generally catch Mr. Otter asleep in the sea-weed, where they kill him with short clubs. The story is told of two native hunters who once got seventy-eight in a single hour by this method.”
“What is a bidarkie? And what is a kamleika?” asked Phil, to whom these were strange terms.
“A bidarkie,” laughed Serge, “is a kyack or skin canoe, such as is used by all Aleuts. It is all covered over, and is absolutely water-tight, except for the round holes or hatches in which its occupants sit. Some bidarkies have three of these holes, some two, and many only one. As a general thing, sea-otter hunters go in couples, and use two-holed bidarkies. A kamleika is a loose water-proof over-garment made of sea-lion intestines. When a hunter, wearing one of these and sitting in a bidarkie, makes its skirts fast to the coaming of his hatch no water can enter his boat, no matter how many seas break over it.”
“Do you mean to say that the only way of hunting sea-otters is to go thirty miles from land, in a gale, with a chance of finding an almost invisible reef of rocks and landing on it, or of being blown out to sea if you don’t happen to hit it?”