152 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



In the months of June and July the whales begin to make their 

 first inshore visits to the Aleutian bays, where they follow up 

 schools of herring and shoals of Amphipoda, or sea-fleas, upon 

 which they love to feed. These bays of Akootan and Akoon were 

 and are always resorted to more freely by those cetaceans than are 

 any others in Alaska, and here the hunt is continued as late as 

 August. When a calm, clear day occurs the natives ascend the 

 bluffs and locate a school of whales ; then the best men launch their 

 skin-canoes, or bidarkas, and start for the fields. " Two-holed " 

 bidarkas only are used. The hunter himself sits forward with 

 nothing but his whale-spear in his grasp ; his companion, in the 

 after hatch, swiftly urges the light boat over the water in obedi- 

 ence to his order. Carefully looking the whales over, the hunter 

 finally recognizes that yearling, or the calf, which he wishes to 

 strike ; for it is not his desire to attack an old bull or angry cow- 

 whale. He calculates to a nice range where the " akhoak " will rise 

 again from its last point of disappearance, and directs the course 

 of the bidarka accordingly. If he is fortunate he will be within ten 

 or twenty feet of the rising calf or yearling, and as it rounds its 

 glistening back slowly and lazily out from its cover of the wavelets 

 the Aleut throws his spear with all his physical power, so as to 

 bury the head of it just under the stubby dorsal fin of that marine 

 monster ; the wooden shaft is at once detached, but the contortions 

 of the stricken whale only assist to drive and urge the barbed slate- 

 point deeper and deeper into its vitals. Meanwhile the canoe is 

 paddled away as alertly as possible, before the plunging flukes of 

 the tortured animal can destroy it or drown its human occupants. 



As soon as the whale is thus wounded it makes for the open 

 sea, where " it goes to sleep " for three days, as the natives believe ; 

 then death intervenes, and the gases of decomposition cause its 

 carcass to float, and, if the waves and currents are favorable, it will 

 be so drifted as to lodge on a beach at some locality not so very 

 remote from the place where it was struck by the hunter. The 

 business of watching for these expected carcasses then became the 

 great object of everyone's life in that hunters' village ; dusky 

 sentinels and pickets were ranged over long intervals of coast-line, 

 stationed on the brows of the most prominent headlands, where 

 they commanded an extensive range of watery vision. But the 

 caprices of wind and tides are such in these highways and byways 

 of the Aleutian Islands, that on an average not more than one whale 



