62 ALASKA. 



each with a short, heavy, wooden club, dispatch the animals, 

 one after another, without alarming the whole body, and in this 

 way two Aleuts, brothers, were known to have slain seventy- 

 eight in less than an hour and a half. 



There is no driving these animals out upon land. They are 

 fierce and courageous, and, when surprised by a man between 

 themselves and the water, they will make for the sea, straight 

 without any regard for the hunter, their progress, by a succes- 

 sion of short leaps, being very rapid for a small distance. The 

 greatest care is taken by the sea-otter hunters on Saanach. 

 They have lived in the dead of a severe winter six weeks at a 

 time without kindling a fire, and with certain winds they never 

 light one. They do not smoke, nor do they scatter or empty 

 food-refuse on the beaches. Of all this I am assured by one 

 who is perhaps the first white eye-witness of this winter-hunt- 

 ing, as he lived on the island through that of 1872-'73, and 

 could not be induced to repeat it. 



The hunting by use of nets calls up the strange dissimilarity 

 existing now, as it has in all time past, between the practice of 

 the Atka and Attou Aleuts and that of those of Ounalashka and 

 the eastward, as given above. These people capture the sea- 

 otter in nets, from 16 to 18 feet long and 6 to 10 feet wide, with 

 coarse meshes, made nowadays of twine, but formerly of 

 sinew. 



On the kelp-beds these nets are spread out, and the natives 

 withdraw and watch. The otters come to sleep or rest on these 

 places, and get entangled in the meshes of the nets, seeming to 

 make little or no effort to escape, paralyzed as it were by fear, 

 and fall in this way easily into the hands of the trappers, who 

 tell me that they have caught as many as six at one time in one 

 of these small nets, and frequently get three. They also watch 

 for surf -holes or caves in the bluffs, and, when one is found to 

 which a sea-otter is in the habit of resorting, they set this net 

 by spreading it over the entrance, and usually capture the an- 

 imal. 



No injury whatever is done to these frail nets by the sea- 

 otters, strong animals as they are ; only stray sea-lions destroy 

 them. The Atka people have never been known to hunt sea- 

 otters without nets, while the people of Ounalashka and the 

 eastward have never been known to use them. The salt-water 

 and kelp seem to act as a disinfectant to the net, so that the 

 smell of it does not repel or alarm the shy animal. 



