LONELY NORTHERN WASTES. 425 



teen or twenty feet These small rounded conifers, scattered in 

 clumps over the green and russet tundra, an absence of under- 

 brush, and the dark-green lines of stunted willows and birches that 

 fill the ravines on the sloping sides of gently rising hills, suggest 

 the parking of an old-country place where the orchards are sepa- 

 rated by hedges. 



The beaches everywhere are profusely Uttered with drift-logs 

 from the Yukon, twenty to forty feet in length, thickly strewn. 

 They are pushed high above tides by the ice-floes in winter. What 

 the result would be of failure to gain that abundant supply of fuel, 

 now so easy of attainment, upon the natives of this entire region, is 

 not difficult to determine. As they live to-day they are steadily, 

 rapidly diminishing in number. The whalemen have substantially 

 exterminated their chief sources of life the whale and the walrus. 

 Seals are not as abundant as on the Greenland coasts, and if, in 

 addition to their extra labor of securing food-supply, they were 

 obliged to do without wood, a practical depopulation of the Alas- 

 kan coast of Bering Straits and the Arctic Ocean would be effected 

 soon. 



As the trader shapes his course from St. Michael's for Port 

 Clarence and Kotzebue Sound, his little vessel skirts the low north 

 shore of Norton's Sound very closely. He may stop for an hour or 

 two, if the weather permits, at Sledge Islet, standing "off and 

 on " while the Innuits come out to the schooner in their skin " oomi- 

 aks" or bidarrahs. This barren rock was so named by Captain 

 Cook, who, when he landed on it, found nothing but a native's 

 hand-sled. Its inhabitants were all sojourning on the mainland, 

 berrying. It is only about a mile in its greatest length, less than 

 half a mile wide, and raised almost perpendicularly from the sea to 

 a height of five or six hundred feet. When the modicum of walrus- 

 oil and ivory which these natives have to barter has been hoisted 

 on board, the schooner shapes her course for another islet the 

 curious " Ookivok," or King's Island which stands, a mere rock 

 as it were, in the flood that sweeps through Bering Straits. It is 

 rugged, and strewn with immense quantities of basaltic fragments, 

 scoriae, and rises so precipitately from the sea tnat no place for a 

 beach-landing can be found. 



Here on the south side, clinging like nests of barn-swallows, are 

 the summer houses of the Ookivok walrus-hunters. They are from 

 fifty to one hundred feet above the brawling surf that breaks in- 



