THE ALASKAN SEA-LION. 369 



pers, touching the heart with a single lunge. It is an unparalleled 

 spectacle, dreadfully cruel and bloody.* 



This surrounding of the cows is, perhaps, the strangest proced- 

 ure on the islands. To fully appreciate this subject the reader must 

 first call to his mind's eye the fact that these female sea-lions, 

 though small beside the males, are yet large animals ; seven and 

 eight feet long and weighing each as much as any four or five 

 average men. But, in spite of their strength and agility, fifteen or 

 twenty Aleutes, with rough, iron-tipped lances in their hands, will 

 suiTound a drove of fifty or one hundred and fifty of them by form- 

 ing a noisy, gesticulating circle, gradually closing up, man to man, 

 until the sea-lions are literally piled in a writhing, squirming, 

 struggling mass, one above the other, three or four deep, heads, 

 flippers, bellies, backs, all so woven and interwoven in this panic- 

 stricken heap of terrified creatures that it defies adequate descrip- 

 tion. The natives spear those cows on top, which, as they sink in 



* When slowly sketching, by measurements, the outlines of a fine adult 

 bull sea-lion which the ball from Booterin's rifle had just destroyed, an old 

 ' starooka " came up abruptly ; not seeming to see me, she deliberately threw 

 down a large, greasy, skin meat-bag, and whipping out a knife, went to work 

 on my specimen. Curiosity prompted me to keep still, in spite of the first 

 sensations of annoyance, so that I might watch her choice and use of the ani- 

 mal's carcass. She first removed the skin, being actively aided in this opera- 

 tion by an uncouth boy ; she then cut off the palms to both fore flippers ; the 

 boy at the same time pulled out its mustache-bristles ; she then cut out its 

 gullet, from the glottis to its junction with the stomach, carefully divested it 

 of all fleshy attachments and fat ; she then cut out the stomach itself, and 

 turned it inside out, carelessly scraping its gastric walls free of copious biliary 

 secretions, the inevitable bunch of ascaris ; she then told the boy to take hold 

 of the duodenum end of the small intestine, and, as he walked away with it, 

 she rapidly cleared it of its attachments, so that it was thus uncoiled to its 

 full length of at least sixty feet ; then she severed it and then it was re-coiled 

 by the "melchiska,'' and laid up with the other members just removed, ex- 

 cept the skin, which she had nothing more to do with. She then cut out the 

 liver and ate several large pieces of that workhouse of the blood before drop- 

 ping it into her meat-pouch. She then raked up several handfuls of the 

 *' leaf-lard," or hard, white fat that is found in moderate quantity around the 

 viscera of all these pinnipeds, which she also dumped into the flesh-bag ; she 

 then drew her knife through the large heart, but did not touch it otherwise, 

 looking at it intently, however, as it still quivered in unison with the warm 

 flesh of the whole carcass. She and the boy then poked their fingers into the 

 tumid lobes of the immense lungs, cutting out portions of them only, which 

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