196 Sport and Life. 



occurs in the case of the enhydra, for those who have never seen 

 the sea otter usually take it for granted that he is a close kinsman 

 of the land otter. The two are, however, very dissimilar animals, 

 the sea otter having a body more like the beaver. It is an 

 intensely vicious looking animal, its small, snaky eyes gleaming 

 with a wild and cruel expression. It lives a solitary marine life, is 

 never seen in numbers, rarely even with a mate, and is excessively 

 shy and wary. It rarely lands for any length of time, except to 

 bring forth its young, and, indeed, Indians maintain that it does 

 not even then do so, but that it gives birth on floating beds of 

 seaweed and kelp. Very few white men ever see it alive, 

 for its chase is almost exclusively in the hands of the hardy 

 and wonderfully persevering Aleuts, to whom a single prime pelt 

 means a twelvemonth of plenty. Clad in their waterproof 

 garments, made out of the intestines of the sea lion, of whose 

 hide the " bidarka," in which frail craft they go to sea, is also 

 constructed, and armed with the best rifles money can purchase, 

 for everything depends on clean shooting, they pursue their 

 vigilant game on the rugged reefs girding the North Pacific. 

 Occasionally stray sea otters are heard of much further south, on 

 the coast of Washington, Oregon, and California. The wariness 

 and cunning of this animal, always of the highest order, have, of 

 course, not been decreased by the relentless persistency with 

 which its pursuers have followed it for the last century and a half, 

 and it is only wonderful that an animal whose pelt realises for the 

 lucky captor as much as 50 should not have long ago shared the 

 fate of other animals upon whom fashion had pronounced the death 

 sentence. In the beginning of this century we hear still of single 

 cargoes of 15,000 sea otter skins being sent from Alaska. In 

 1891, according to trade journals, .only 2395 pelts reached the 

 London and Leipzig markets, which practically means the entire 

 catch of the world, and they averaged over 57 each. In 1898 

 only 955 skins reached the market, the best skin fetching 255. 

 Nothing can be done to save the sea otter from extermination. In 

 a decade or two it will have shared the fate of the huge rhytina or 



