HUNTING THE SEA OTTER. 49 



A present of four dollars was at once given to him, and, 

 whenever the chance occurred, as it frequently did, to 

 shoot a few shags or cormorants for him, we never lost the 

 opportunity, for their flesh was as great a delicacy to him 

 as turtle to an alderman. All setting to work with a will, 

 the boats were soon unloaded, hoisted on deck, and lashed 

 in their places. The cargo was safely stowed in hold and 

 magazine ; and the wind favoured our eagerness to leave 

 the inhospitable port, for a good stiff south-westerly breeze 

 set in, and so, with a wet sheet and a feather at the bows, 

 we were soon cleaving the water on our trim north-east 

 course at the rate of eight knots. The wind kept fresh and 

 steady all night, although, as usual, the morning broke cold 

 and foggy ; as day advanced, the haze, concealing the 

 outlines of the islands of Kunashir, which lay on our port 

 bow, lifted like a curtain and revealed a mountainous island, 

 from which rose here and there, like giants of their race, 

 volcanic cones, piercing the heavens with their lofty shafts > 

 and, dominating them all, St. Anthony's Peak towered to the 

 height of seven thousand four hundred feet. As we gazed, 

 the sun, as if at length ashamed of his tardiness, for the 

 morning was now pretty far advanced, emerged from cloud 

 and fog and shed a rosy radiance on the scene. The shore 

 of alternate black rock and shiny sand, the stunted forest 

 growth that formed its background, the snow-clad 

 mountains, here smooth, there jagged in outlines, were all 

 irradiated by the warm, soft light truly an enchanting place 

 for the sportsman or naturalist, smiling just then in all the 

 pride of its new-gotten greenery, smiling but desolate, 

 solitary and unexplored, a land of the eagle, the bear, and 

 the fox. There the wild swan, whose plumage vies in 

 whiteness with the eternal snow on the lofty peaks, rears 

 her downy brood in solitude, mid swamps forest-girdled, 

 unseen save by the hungry fox or the swooping eagle : but 

 she quits the shaded scene, obedient to instinct, ere winter, 

 more fatal than bird or beast of prey, binds in its iron grasp 

 both land and wave. 



E 



