THE FUE SEAL: SPEEDY BIETH. 109 



feeding-places, yet they reach this land-speck in Bering Sea just in season for instant delivery after 

 arrival !i 



Pai^gs of impending parturition AiiONE PROMPT FEMALES TO LAND. — The females do 

 not land until they are obliged to by the precipitation of this event of parturition. They land 

 upon the breeding-grounds of Saint Paul just as they come in contact with the shore— guided and 

 influenced at the moment of approach to the islands by only one ruling thought, and that is, to 

 reach as near as possible the locality upon which they resided in former years. Soon after landing, 

 which I have heretofore described, the birth of the young takes place, and in this wise : the cow 

 shows, an hour Or so prior to delivery, great nervous agitation; she trembles all over; her eyes 

 blinking, and flippers twitching; rolling, stretching, and thoroughly uneasy, until the labor-pains. 

 If the ground where she happens to rest is rocky, she manages to lie upon the top of a bowlder, 

 her hind-flippers working spasmodically with a wavy, fan-like motion backward and forward, as 

 she rests full upon her stomach, with the fore-flippers alternately pressed tightly to the rook or 

 closely to her sides, like pectoral fins ; she sways her head, her eyes are partly closed and her 

 mouth slightly opened in panting, during the fifteen or twenty minutes which usually ensue 

 between the first contraction of the uterus, until the expulsion of the intrauterine life takes place. 

 These labor-pains are not, in my opinion, at all very severe or abnormal in anj'^ respect. The pup 

 carries with it, at the moment of birth, the entire placental pouch or "after-birth." This envelope 

 is broken, usually by the mother, in forcing the labor and during the first expulsion of the pup's 



head, which is always presented in advance. The little "Kotick" may be said to fairly drop upon 



^^ 



' If there is any one faculty better developed than the others in the brain of the intelligent Callorhirtus, it must be 

 its "bump " of locality. The unerring directness with which it pilots its annual course back through thousands of 

 miles of watery waste to these spots of its birth — small fly-dots of land in the map of Bering Sea and the North 

 Pacific — is a very remarkable exhibition of its skill in navigation. While the Russians were established at Bodega 

 and Ross, California, sixty years ago, they frequently shot Fur Seals at sea, when hunting the Sea Otter off the coast 

 between Fuca Straits and the Farallones. Many of these animals, late iu May and early in June, were so far advanced 

 in pregnancy that it was deemed certain by their captors that some shore must be close at hand upon which the near 

 impending birth of the pup took place ; thereupon, the Russians searched over every rod of the coast-line of the main- 

 land and the archipelago, between California and the peninsula of Alaska, vainly seeking everywhere there for a fur- 

 seal rookery. They were slow to understand how animals, so close to the throes of parturition, could strike out into 

 broad ocean to swim fifteen hundred or two thousand miles within a week or ten days ere they landed on the Pribylov 

 group, and almost immediately after gave birth to their offspring. 



There is no record made whicb shows that the Fur Seals have any regular or direct course of travel up or down the 

 northwest coast. They are principally seen in the open sea, eight or ten miles from land, outside the heads of the 

 Straits of Fuca, and from there as far north as Dixon Sound. During May and June they are aggregated in gro.itest 

 numbers here, though examples are reported the whole year around. The only Fur Seal which I saw, or which was 

 noticed by the crew of the Reliance, in her cruise, June 1 to 9, from Port Townsend to Sitka, was a solitary "Hollu- 

 schack " that we disturbed at sea well out from the lower end of Queen Charlotte's Island ; then, from Sitka to Kadiak, 

 we saw nothing of the Fur Seal until we hauled off from Point Greville, and coming down by Ookamok Islet, a squad 

 of agile "Hollusohickie" suddenly appeared among a school of hump-back whales, sporting in the most extravagant 

 manner around, under, and even leaping over the wholly indifferent cetacea. From this eastern extremity of Kadiak 

 Island clear up to the Pribylov group we daily saw them here and there in small bands, or also as lonely voyageurs, 

 all headed for one goal. We were badly outsailed by them ; indeed, the chorus of a favorite "South Sea pirate's" 

 song, as incessantly sung on the cutter's " 'tween decks," seemed to have special adaptation to them : 



"For they bore down fi-om the ■windwi'ard, 

 A eailln' seven ^nots to our fonr'n." 



The ancient Greeks seemed to have been impressed somewhere by rookery odors, for old Homer says — 



"The weh-footed seals forsalce the stormy swell, 

 And, sleeping in herds, exhale nauseous smell." 



Where this illustrious bard sniffed up this characteristic unpleasantness of breeding-seals, I am at loss to say. 

 The Pribylov Islands and the great Antarctic grounds were as far from that poet then as the moon is from us to-day. 

 He must have been introduced to it within the confines of the Caspian Sea, or else credibly informed, by trustworthy 

 authority, of this peculiarity of the large herds of Phoddai in those waters. Small bands, however, of Hair Seals breed 

 now, as they bred then, in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. He may have stumbled upon a few of them while 

 provoking his muse in lonely travels over Grecian pelagic shores. 



