Kodiak is a charming little village. The natives are lazy and spend most of their time in fishing and hunting. We hired a couple of Aliutes, who owned a schooner, to take our equipment to the camping ground. Our course lay around the northeastern end of Kodiak Island, thence westward. After starting, we were becalmed for some time to leeward of the rocky coast. Along came a couple of natives, who towed us out a few hundred feet from behind the island, and presently the sails began to fill. As though it were human, the schooner responded to the gentle breezes and away we went toward the open seas. We had to round a distant point in order to get into another bay. With a fair southeast wind we dropped anchor at six o’clock some thirty miles west of Kodiak. We followed the shore line with its picturesque scenery of snow-clad hills covered with scrubby trees, mostly cottonwood and spruce. Here and there the tundra, like a great meadow fringed with alder, added charm and interest to the surroundings. The waters of Shellicoff Straits threw their breakers far up on the beach, and an occasional whale would spout in the distance. We passed an island covered with different species of gulls nesting on the rocks; it was just the beginning of the nesting season for aquatic birds.
Gull Island
Forget-me-nots
After several days of these interesting sights, the sailboat entered a beautiful little fiord, where we cast anchor for the night. On the following day we landed our equipment, dismissed the Indians with their boat, and pitched our tent in a little sheltered nook among the cottonwoods, where we expected to spend several weeks in hunting and photographing the great Kadiak bear (Ursus middendorff). The snow had disappeared for about a third of the way up the mountain, visible beyond foothills densely overgrown with alder, elder, and other bushes. The rocky shore, treeless, save for a stunted cottonwood here and there, was covered with many varieties of beautiful spring flowers. A cluster of fragrant forget-me-nots among the mosses, another of crowfoot, with the long dry grass of the previous year for a background, and a bunch of pinks with a similar setting added life and color to the rugged surroundings.