262 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



Between May 1st and 5th, usually, a few males will be found 

 scattered over the rookeries pretty close to the water. They are at 

 this time quite shy and sensitive, seeming not yet satisfied with the 

 land, and a great many spend day after day idly swimming out 

 among the breakers a little distance from the shore before they 

 come to it, perhaps somewhat reluctant at first to enter upon the 

 assiduous duties and the grave responsibilities before them of fight- 

 ing for and maintaining their positions in the rookeries. 



The first arrivals are not always the oldest bulls, but may be said 

 to be the finest and most ambitious of their class. They are full 

 grown and able to hold their places on the rookeries or the breed- 

 ing flats, which they immediately take up after corning ashore. 

 Their method of landing is to come collectively to those breeding 

 grounds where they passed the prior season ; but I am not able to 

 say authoritatively, nor do I believe it, strongly as it has been urged 

 by many careful men who were with me on the islands, that these 

 animals come back to and take up the same position on their breed- 

 ing grounds that they individually occupied when there last year. 

 I^rom my knowledge of their action and habit, and from what I 

 have learned of the natives, I should say that very few, if any, of 

 them make such a selection and keep these places year after year. 

 Even did the seal itself intend to come directly from the sea to that 

 spot on the rookery which it left last summer, what could it do if 

 it came to that rookery margin a little later and found that another 

 " see-catch " had occupied its ground ? The bull could do nothing. 

 It would either have to die in its tracks, if it persisted in attaining 

 this supposed objective point, or do what undoubtedly it does do 

 seek the next best locality which it can secure adjacent. 



One aged " see-catch " was pointed out to me at the " Gor- 

 batch " section of the Reef rookery, as an animal that was long 

 known to the natives as a regular visitor, close by or on the same 

 rock, every season during the past three years. They called him 

 " Old John," and they said they knew him because he had one of 

 his posterior digits missing, bitten off, perhaps, in a combat. I 



over wide areas of ocean. Then by June 15th they will have all departed, the 

 first and the latest, en route for the Pribylov Islands. Then, when seen again 

 in this extreme southern range, I presume the unusually early examples of 

 return toward the end of August are squads of the yearlings of both sexes, for 

 this division is always the last to land on and the first to leave the Seal Islands 

 annually. 



