STARVED PUPS ON BERING ISLAND. 105 



dead pups, mating a distinction between those in good condition and those in an 

 advanced stage of decay. I had gone abont halfway round and counted about 200 of 

 the former class and 150 of the latter, when the starshena arrived, and said he had 

 orders from the kossak, Nicolai Selivanof, to ask me to leave the rookery at once. 



It was evident later that Selivanof was uneasy because he thought that the number 

 of dead pups might in some way become charged against the management, for he tried 

 to make the whole thing a small afifair, and explained to me that the number of dead 

 pups was due to their being trampled upon by the sikatchi. But for three very good 

 reasons this theory does not hold: (1) There are now very few sikatchi on the rookery 

 at all, entirely too few to be able by any possibility to even kill a small fraction of 

 the pujis which have recently died; (2) if this trampling caused the death of so many 

 pups, how many might we not expect in a drive like the one to-day, in which hundreds 

 were trampled upon, not once, but over and over again, yet not a single dead pup was 

 found in the wake of the drive; (3) this explanation does not account for the emaciated 

 condition of the bodies of the dead ones. 



Seeing the necessity of complying with the order to leave the rookery, I could not 

 finish my count. I am pretty positive, however, that the following estimate is not 

 much out of the way. 1 may preface it by saying that the number of dead bodies on 

 the east side appeared to be about double that on the west side : 



Dead pups on west side, counted, abont 350 



Dead pups on east side, estimated, about 700 



Dead pups on high ground, estimated, about 200 



Total , 1,250 



In leaving the rookery I took from the high ground two bodies, which seemed quite 

 fresh and from which, therefore, it would seem possible to determine the cause of 

 death. In lifting the second body up by the hind flippers I was somewhat startled 

 to find it still gasping, though it was much too weak to give any signs of life when 

 lying on the ground. I carried it up to the killing ground, where the rest of the 

 company had congregated, but the pup had died before I reached them. The other 

 pup had died apparently during the previous night. 



The doctor on board the Porpoise, Surgeon Lloyd Thomas, kindly consented to 

 attend the post-mortem. On viewing the opened bodies he agreed with me that death 

 was due to inanition — lack of food. They were starved to death. There was not 

 a trace of fat left in the tissues under the skin nor on the muscles. The extreme 

 leanness of the carcasses was very noticeable. Both of us afterwards commented 

 upon the plumpness of the average pups as they appeared in the drive. 



I satisfied myself while on the rookery that the fresh bodies in the windrow were 

 in the same condition, and the fact that they were thus thrown up on the beach by the 

 sea signifies nothing, for we had had no severe weather as yet, and it is therefore 

 impossible that these pups could have been killed by any "surf nip." 



It may be well to remark right here that the fact that these bodies were found in 

 a windrow at high-water mark does not imply that they died in the water or were 

 killed by the sea. I have explained above that at low water a long stretch of beach 

 is bared, upon which the pups roam about and play. Naturally, a good many of the 

 starving pups died there at ebb tide, and their emaciated bodies were thrown up by 

 the rising tide. It may even be reasonably supposed that these hungry pups would 



