5 8 HUNTING THE SEA OTTER. 



then at infrequent intervals, which occur when tremendous 

 gales of 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 scud 

 down on the tail of a 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, each armed 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 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 

 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. 



" 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 Atton Aleuts and that of those 

 of Ounalashka and the eastward tribes. The former capture 

 the sea otter in nets from i6ft. to i8ft. long and 6ft. to 

 i oft. 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 those places and get entangled in the meshes of the 

 nets, seeming to make little or no efforts to escape, 

 paralysed, as it were, by fear, and fall in this way easily 

 into the hands of the trappers, who tell me that they have 



