THE ALASKAN SEA-LION. 357 



Old males come out and locate themselves over the narrow belts 

 of rookery-grounds (sometimes, as at St. Paul, on the immediate 

 sea-margin of fur-seal breeding-places), two or three weeks in ad- 

 vance of the females, which arrive later, i.e., between the 1st to the 

 6th of June ; and these females are never subjected to that intense, 

 jealous supervision so characteristic of the fur-seal harem. Big 

 sea-lion bulls, however, fight savagely* among themselves, and 

 turn off from the breeding-ground all younger and weaker males. 



A cow sea-lion is not quite half the size of an adult male ; 

 she will measure from eight to nine feet in length osteologically, 

 with a weight of four or five hundred pounds ; she has the same 

 general cast of countenance and build of the bull ; but, as she 

 does not sustain any fasting period of over a week or ten days con- 

 secutively, she never comes out so grossly fat as he does. With 

 reference to the weight of the latter, I was particularly unfortunate 

 in not being able to get one of those big bulls on the scales before 

 it had been bled, and in bleeding I -know that a flood of blood 

 poured out which should have been recorded in the weight. There- 

 fore I can only estimate this aggregate avoirdupois of one of the 

 finest-conditioned adult male sea-lions at fourteen to fifteen hun- 

 dred pounds ; an average weight, however, might safely be recorded 

 as touching twelve hundred pounds.f 



will unflinchingly face on its station at the rookery any man to the death. The 

 sea-lion bulls certainly fight as savagely and as desperately one with another, 

 as the fur-seal males do. There is no question about that, and their superior 

 strength and size only makes the result more effective in the exhibition of 

 gaping wounds and attendant bloodshed. I have repeatedly seen examples of 

 these old warriors of the sea which were literally scarred from their muzzles 

 to their posteriors so badly and so uniformly as to have fairly lost all the color 

 or general appearance even of hair anywhere on their bodies. 



* I recall in this connection the sight of an aged male sea-lion which had 

 been defeated by a younger and more lusty rival, perhaps. It was hauled 

 upon a lava shelf at Southwest Point, solitary and alone ; the rock around it 

 being literally covered with pools of pus, that was oozing out and trickling 

 down from a score of festering wounds ; the victim stood planted squarely on 

 its torn fore flippers, with head erect and thrown back upon its shoulders; its 

 eyes were closed, and it gently swayed its sore neck and shoulders in a sort of 

 troubled, painful day-dreaming or dozing. Like the fur seal, the sea lion 

 never notices its wounds to nurse and lick them, as dogs do, or other carniv 

 ora ; it never pays the slightest attention to them, no matter how grievously 

 it may be injured. 



f Often when the fur-seal and sea-lion bulls haul up in the beginning of 

 the season examples among them which are inordinately fat will be seen ; 



