324 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



Zapadnie and the village, yet in 1872 eleven different drives across 

 the island of four hundred to five hundred seals each were made in 

 the short four weeks of that season. 



The peculiarly rough character to this trail is given by large, 

 loose, sharp-edged basaltic boulders which are strewn thickly over 

 all those lower levels that bridge the island between the high 

 bluffs at Starry Arteel and the slopes of Ahluckeyak Hill. The 

 summits of the two broader, higher plateaux, east and west respec- 

 tively, are comparatively smooth and easy to travel over, and so is 

 the sea-level flat at Zapadnie itself. On the map of St. George a 

 number of very small ponds will be noticed. They are the fresh- 

 water reservoirs of the island. The two largest of these are near 

 the summit of this rough divide. The seal-trail from Zapadnie to 

 the village runs just west of them and comes out on the north shore, 

 a little to the eastward of the hauling-grounds of Starry Arteel, 

 where it forks and unites with that path. A direct line between 

 the village and Zapadnie, though nearly a mile shorter on the chart, 

 is equal to five miles more of distance by reason of its superlative 

 rocky inequalities. 



One question is always sure to be asked in this connection. The 

 query is : "At the present rate of killing seals it will not be long 

 ere they are exterminated how much longer will they last ? " My 

 answer is now as it was then : "Provided matters are conducted on 

 the Seal Islands in the future as they are to-day, 100,000 male seals 

 under the age of five years and over one may be safely taken every 

 year from the Pribylov Islands without the slightest injury to the reg- 

 ular birth-rate or natural increase thereon ; provided also that the 

 fur-seals are not visited by plagues or by pests, or any such abnormal 

 cause for their destruction, which might be beyond the control of 

 men, and to which, like any other great body of animal life, they 

 must ever be subjected to the danger of." * From my calculations 



* The thought of what a deadly epidemic would effect among these vast 

 congregations of Pinnipedia was one that was constant in my mind when on 

 the ground and among them. I have found in the " British Annals" (Flem- 

 ing's), on page 17, an extract from the notes of Dr. Trail: "In 1833 I in- 

 quired for my old acquaintances, the seals of the Hole of Papa Westray, and was 

 informed that about four years before they had totally deserted the island, and 

 had only within the last few months begun to reappear. . . . About fifty 

 years ago multitudes of their carcasses were cast ashore in every bay in the 

 north of Scotland, Orkney, and Shetland, and numbers were found at sea in 

 a sickly state." This note of Trail is the only record which I can find of a 



