THE QUEST OF THE OTTER. 137 



made in the man. He gets drunk, and his wife too, by taking 

 sugar, flour, and dried-apples, rice or hops, if he can get them, in 

 certain proportions, puts them into a barrel or cask, with water, 

 bungs it up and waits for fermentation to do its work. Before it has 

 worked entirely clear he draws off a thick, sour liquid wjiich in- 

 toxicates him most effectually he beats his spouse and runs her 

 and children from the house, smashes things, and for weeks after- 

 ward the barrabkie is desolate and open as the result of such orgies. 

 If he continues, his health is shattered, he rapidly fails as a hunter, 

 and he suffers the pangs of poverty with his family. It is said 

 upon good authority that the brewing of this liquor was taught to 

 these people by the earliest Russian arrivals in their country, who 

 made it as an anti-scorbutic ; but it certainly has not proved to be 

 a blessing in disguise, for it has brought upon them nearly all the 

 misery that they are capable of understanding. 



In concluding this brief introduction to the life of the otter- 

 hunter, we may fitly call attention to the fact that Kahgoon and his 

 family are devout members of the Greek Catholic Church, as are 

 all of his people, without a single exception, between Attoo and 

 Kadiak Islands nearly five thousand souls to-day, living in scat- 

 tered hamlets all along between. 



The subtle acumen displayed by the sea-otter in the selection of 

 its habitat can only be fully appreciated by him who has visited the 

 chosen land, reefs, and water of its resort. It is a region so gloomy, 

 so pitilessly beaten by wind and waves, by sleet, rain and persistent 

 fog, that the good Bishop Veniaminov, when he first came among 

 the natives of the Aleutian Islands, ordered the curriculum of hell 

 to be omitted from the church breviary, saying, as he did so, that 

 these people had enough of it here on this earth ! The fury of 

 hurricane gales, the vagaries of swift and intricate currents in and 

 out of the passages, the eccentricities of the barometer, the black- 

 ness of the fog enveloping all in its dark, damp shroud, so alarm 

 and discomfit the white man that he willingly gives up the entire 

 chase of the sea-otter to that brown-skinned Aleut, who alone 

 seems to be so constituted as to dare and wrestle with these ob- 

 stacles through descent from his hardy ancestors, who, in turn, 

 have been centuries before him engaged just as he is to-day. 



So we find the sea-otter-hunting of the present, as it was in the 

 past, entirely confined to the natives, with white traders here and 

 there vieing in active competition one with the other in bidding for 



