AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 337 



too, that salt-houses be erected, and killing-grounds established 

 contiguous to all of the great hauling-grounds, two miles dis- 

 tant from the village on St. Paul Island, should the business ever 

 be developed above the present limit, or should the exigencies of 

 the future require a quota from all these places in order to make 

 up the hundred thousand which may be lawfully taken. 



As matters are to-day, one hundred thousand seals alone on St. 

 Paul can be taken and skinned in less than forty working days, 

 within a radius of one mile and a half from the village, and from 

 the salt-house at Northeast Point ; hence the driving, with the ex- 

 ception of two experimental droves which I witnessed in 1872, has 

 never been made from longer distances than Tolstoi to the east- 

 ward, Lukannon to the northward, and Zoltoi to the southward of 

 the killing-grounds at St. Paul village. Should, however, an ab- 

 normal season recur, in which the larger portion of days during 

 the right period for taking the skins be warmish and dry, it might 

 be necessary, in order to get even seventy-five thousand seals with- 

 in the twenty-eight or thirty days of their prime condition, for 

 drives to be made from the other great hauling-grounds to the 

 westward and northward, which are now, and have been for the 

 last ten years, entirely unnoticed by our sealers.* 



The seals, when finally driven up on those flats between the east 

 landing and the village, and almost under the windows of the 

 dwellings, are herded there until cool and rested. Such drives are 

 usually made very early in the morning, at the first breaking of 

 day, which is half -past one to two o'clock of June and July in these 

 latitudes. They arrive, and cool off on the slaughtering-grounds, 



* The fur-seal, like all of the pinnipeds, has no sweat-glands ; hence, when 

 it is heated, it cools off by the same process of panting which is so character- 

 istic of the dog, accompanied by the fanning that I have hitherto fully de- 

 scribed ; the heavy breathing and low grunting of a tired drove of seals, on a 

 warmer day than usual, can be heard several hundred yards away. It is sur- 

 prising how quickly the hair and fur will come out of the skin of a blood- 

 heated seal literally rubs bodily of at a touch of the finger. A fine speci- 

 men of a three-year-old " holluschak '' fell in its tracks at the head of the 

 lagoon while being driven to the village killing-grounds. I asked that it be 

 skinned with special reference to mounting ; accordingly a native was sent for, 

 who was on the spot, knife in hand, within less than thirty minutes from the 

 moment that this seal fell in the road, yet soon after he had got fairly to work 

 patches of the fur and hair came off here and there wherever he chanced to 

 clutch the skin. 



