For a few moments nothing more was seen of either animal, and then, not his own length from the ship, the whale appeared, shooting up as if from a great depth, and flinging almost the whole of his great bulk straight into the air. The orca rose with him, his jaws set in the body of the whale just behind the left flipper. As the monster shook himself in agony, even when reared almost his whole length in the air, and with his great flukes beating the water beneath to foam, the hold of the orca was broken, and he fell back into the water beside the whale, leaving a great three-cornered tear in the whale’s side that dyed the water crimson as with another tremendous leap the wild wolf of the sea was again on his victim.
Again Harry heard that strange half moan, half bellow, as the frenzied humpback ploughed along the surface to windward, beaten by the blows of the orca as he flung himself into the air, and again and again came down like an enormous club on his victim’s back. And thus the unequal contest went on, and Harry watched them till they disappeared in the distance to windward. He was much impressed by the spectacle.
“How do you suppose it will come out?” he asked, as they clambered down from the rigging.
“The killer will get him, sure,” replied Captain Nickerson. “He will hammer him and worry him for miles, till he is completely exhausted. Then he will get a bite in his lip, and it will be all up with Mr. Humpback. By this time to-morrow as much of him as the orca does not want to eat right away will be floating belly up, and the sea birds and sharks will be busy with it.”
Two days afterward great banks of fog, with now and then a white peak gleaming through, showed that they were nearing the Aleutian Islands. The course was changed more to the northward, and the ship sailed into the windy, cloud-tormented reaches of Unalga Pass. Just as they reached the edge of the mists, the clouds lifted for a moment, and showed a scene of surpassing grandeur. The scarred and weather-beaten abrupt cliffs of the mountain sides rose from dark waters, that flashed green and white as they broke against the island sides, varying from dull red to deep crimson, streaked with vivid green of grasses and golden brown with lichens. Above these again swept the bare uplands, golden and olive with the tundra moss that clothes all to the farthest Arctic limits of the north, while over all, majestic and wonderful, lifting its crystal pinnacle eight thousand feet to the heavens, stood the mighty crest of Shishaldin, clothed white with unmelting snows, and tipped with a fluttering banner of smoke from the undying fires within. Shishaldin and Pogromnia, the one white as snow, the other dark with furrowed cliff and frozen lava, are chimneys to the banked fires of Unimak Island, in which slumber still, as they have slumbered since the white men first discovered them nearly two centuries ago, the mighty forces of eruption.
In the baffling currents and gusts of the pass sails were furled, and the ship proceeded under a full head of steam, skirting the lofty cliffs of Akutan. On this island once dwelt many thousand happy, contented Aleuts. They were great whalemen, and when the summer brought the humpback whales in schools to their turbulent waters, they captured many of them by bold but primitive hunting. Wisely, they did not attack the old whales, for the humpback is a famous fighter, and the white whalers rarely attack them in these dangerous waters to-day. Instead they picked out the agashitnak (yearlings) or akhoak (calves), and boldly attacked them in their two-holed bidarkas, made of walrus and seal skin stretched over driftwood framework. In the after-hole sat the paddler, and in the forward one the harpooner with his six-foot driftwood harpoon, tipped with an ivory socket bearing a notched blade of slate. This was thrust deep into the young whale and then withdrawn, leaving the socket and blade in his carcass. The mark of the hunter was scratched deep in this slate blade, that he might know it again. On being thus wounded the whale fled to sea, and there, as the Aleuts used to say, “went to sleep for three days.” Meanwhile watchers lined the cliffs, and watched through the scurrying fog for the currents to drift the carcass back to the island. Once perhaps in twenty times this happened, and then there was a feast and great rejoicing in the villages. The mark of the mighty hunter, inscribed on the blade, was found when the weapon was cut out, and he was honored for his feat during life, and even afterward. After his death, if he had been one of the very great men, his body was preserved, cut up, and rubbed on the blades of the young harpooners, that his valor and good fortune might be thus transmitted.
The villagers were bold sea hunters, but gentle and peaceable in their intercourse with one another, and so large were their villages that to-day the ruins of one of them front for nearly a mile on the beach. Over on Akun—another veritable volcanic mountain rising abruptly from the sea—were other prosperous villages, also of primitive whalemen. Here were boiling springs in which the villagers might cook their meat without fire, and the winter’s cold was in no wise to be feared because of the underground heat.
The humpbacks still school in summer about the islands of Akun and Akutan, and millions of whale birds swoop in black clouds above them. The little auks and parrot-bill ducks, as the sailors call the puffin, swarm upon the cliffs, and breed there as of old; but the Aleuts are gone from their ancient villages, and only a diseased remnant remains in favored spots in the once populous archipelago. On Akutan and Akun there are none. At Unalaska, or Illiluk as they called it, a remnant survives, their blood mingled with that of their exterminators, the Russians, and their sod huts cluster about the beautiful Greek church which they support. While the Bowhead lay at anchor in their harbor, Harry and Joe saw much of them, and found them so shy and gentle that it did not seem possible that they ever had risen in revolt against their fierce Cossack oppressors and swept them from the island; but such they did more than a century ago, only to be conquered and almost exterminated by fresh hordes of the invaders.
HARBOR OF UNALASKA