AMPIIIBIAN MILLIONS. 



345 



favor. The natives are, however, very partial to the liver ; but 

 though they like the tongues, yet they are too lazy to prepare them. 

 A few of them, in obedience to pressing and prayerful aj^peals from 

 relatives at Oonalashka, do exert themselves enough every season 

 to undergo the extra labor of putting up several barrels of fresh 

 salted seal-meat, which, being carried down to lUoolook by the 

 company's vessels, affords a delightful variation to the steady and 

 monotonous codfish diet of those Aleutian Islanders. 



The final acts of curing and shipping pelts of fur-seals from the 

 ■warehouses of the villages, rapidly follow work upon the killing- 

 grounds. The skins are taken from the field to the salt-house, 



Interior of Salt House, Village of St. Paul. 

 [Shoicinff the method of receiving, selecting, keiiching and salting '■'green "fur-seal sliins.] 



where they are laid out, after being again carefully examined, one 

 uj^on another, "hair to fat," like so many sheets of paper, with salt 

 profusely spread upon the fleshy sides as thej- are piled up in the 

 "kenches," or bins. The salt-house is a large barn-like frame 

 structure, so built as to aftbrd one-third of its width in the centre, 

 from end to end, clear and open as a passage-way : while on each 

 side are rows of stanchions, with sliding planks, which are taken 

 down and put up in the form of deep bins or boxes — "kenches," 

 the sealers call them. As the j^ile of skins is laid up from the bot- 

 tom of an empty "kench" and salt thrown in on the outer edges, 

 these planks are also put in place, so that the salt may be kept in- 

 tact until that bin is filled as high up as a man can toss the skins. 

 After lying two or three weeks in this style they become "pickled," 



