CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



203 



and the surprise is often, repeated, sometimes for two or three hours, until the Sea Otter, from in- 

 terrupted respiration, becomes so filled wiih air or gases that he cannot sink, and becomes at once 

 an easy victim. 



" The clubbing is only done in the winter season, and then at infrequent intervals, which occur 

 when tremendous gales of wind from the northward, sweeping down over Saanach, have almost blown 

 themselves out. The natives, the very boldest of them, set out from Saanach, and scud 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 with a short, heavy, wooden club, dispatch the animals one after another without 

 disturbing 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." 



The nets used by the Atka and Attore Aleuts " are from sixteen to eighteen feet long, and six to 



SEA OTTEll. 



ten 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, 

 paralysed, as it were, by fear, and fall in this way easily into the hands of the trappers, who have 

 caught as many as six at one time in one of these small nets, and frequently get three. . . . 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 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."* 



GENERAL RELATIONS OF THE LAND CARNIVORA, RECENT AND FOSSIL. 

 From very obvious reasons we have been compelled to describe the various forms of Land 

 Carnivora of which we have been able to take account, one by one, beginning with Cats, and ending 

 with the Otters. But the reader will already have discovered that a linear arrangement like this gives 

 no true conception of the relations existing between the various families of which the sub-order is 

 composed, or of the various genera which are included in the families. For cross-relationships of the 

 most puzzling and often complicated description are pei'petually turning up : among the ^Eluroids, for 



* H. W. Elliott, quoted by Coues, "Fur-bearing Animals." 



