IN GREEN ALASKA 



or five species of birds were nesting and in song. 

 The most welcome sight to me was a soUtary barn 

 swallow skimming along as one might have seen it 

 at home, — no barns within hundreds of miles, yet 

 the little swallow seemed quite at her ease. 



While we were anchored here, we had another 

 brief vision of surpassing mountain grandeur. The 

 fair weather divinities brushed aside the veil of 

 clouds, and one of the lofty peaks to the north, 

 probably Vancouver, stood revealed to us. We 

 yielded to its mighty spell for a few moments, and 

 then the cloud curtain again dropped. 



The next day we left Russell Fiord, and anchored 

 before an Indian encampment below Haenke Is- 

 land, on the south side of the head of Yakutat Bay. 

 The Indians had come up from their village below, 

 — some of them, we were told, from as far away 

 as Sitka. They were Hving here in tents and bark 

 huts, and hunting the hair seal amid the drifting ice- 

 bergs that the Turner and the Hubbard cast off. 

 This was their summer camp; they were laying in 

 a supply of skins and oU against their winter needs. 

 In July they go to the salmon streams and secure 

 their stores of salmon. During these excursions 

 their village at Yakutat is nearly deserted. The 

 encampment we visited was upon the beach of a 

 broad, gravelly delta flanked by high mountains. It 

 was redolent of seal oil. The dead carcasses of the 

 seals lay in rows upon the pebbles in front of the 

 63 



