HABITS OF THE SEA OTTER. 347 



wind from the northward, sweeping down over Saanach, have 

 about blown themselves out. The natives, the very boldest of 

 them, set out from Saanach, and skud down on the tail of the 

 gale to the far outlying rocks, just sticking out above surf- 

 wash, where they creep up from the leeward to the sea-otters 

 found there at such times, with their heads stuck into the beds 

 of kelp to avoid the wind. The noise of the gale is greater 

 than that made by the stealthy movements of the hunters, 

 who, armed 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 be- 

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

 straight, without any regard for the hunter, their progress, by 

 a succession of short leaps, being very rapid for a small dis- 

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

 Saanack. 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-hunting, as he lived on the island through that of 

 lS72-'73, and could not be induced to repeat it. 



" The hunting by use of nets calls up the strange dissimilar- 

 ity existing now, as it has in all time past, between the prac- 

 tice of the Atka and Attou Aleuts and that of those of Ouna- 

 lashka and the eastward, as given above. These people cap- 

 ture 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 na- 

 tives withdraw and watch. The otters come to sleep or rest 

 on those 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 blufi's, and, 

 when one is found to which a sea-otter is in the habit of re- 



