68 ALASKA. 



THE HABITS OF THK SEA-OTTEii, (Enkydra marina.) 



I have bad a number of interesting interviews with several 

 very intelligent traders, and an English hunter who had spent 

 an entire wiuter on Saanach Island, shooting sea-otters, and 

 enduring, while there, bitter privation and hardship ; and 

 chiefly from their accounts, aided by my own observation, I 

 submit the following: 



Saanach Island, Islets, and Beefs, is the great sea-otter ground 

 of this country. The island itself is small, with a coast-line 

 circuit of about eighteen miles. Spots of sand- beach are found 

 here and there, but the major portion of it is composed of enor- 

 mous water-worn bowlders piled up by the surf. The interior 

 is low and rolling, with a ridge rising into three hills, the mid- 

 dle one some 800 feet in height. There is no timber on it, but 

 abundant grass, moss, &c., with a score of little fresh-water 

 lakes, in which multitudes of ducks and geese are found every 

 spring and fall. The natives do not live upon the island, 

 because the making of fires and scattering of food-refuse alarms 

 the otters, driving them off to sea; so that it is only camped 

 upon, and fires are never built unless the wind is from the 

 southward, for no sea-otters are ever fcuiid to the north of the 

 island. The sufferings to which the native hunters subject 

 themselves every winter on this island, going for many weeks 

 without fires, even for cooking, with the thermometer down to 

 zero, in a northerly gale of wind, is better imagined than de- 

 scribed. 



To the southward and westward, and stretching directly out 

 to sea, some five to eight miles from Saanach Island, is a suc- 

 cession of small islets, bare, most of them, at low water, but 

 with numerous reefs and rocky shoals, beds of kelp, &c. This 

 is the great sea-otter ground of Alaska, together with the 

 Cherrobour Islets, to the eastward ; bout thirty miles, which 

 are similar to it. 



The sea-otter rarely lands upon the main island, but it is 

 found just out of water on the reef rocks and islets above men- 

 tioned, in certain seasons, and at a little distance at sea during 

 calm and pleasant weather. 



The adult sea-otter is an animal that will measure from three 

 and a half to four feet at most, from nose to tip of tail, which is 

 short and stumpy. The general contour of the body is closely 

 like that of the beaver, with the skin lying in loose folds, so 

 that when taken hold of iu lifting the body out from the water, 



