6o 



JOHN BURROUGHS 



SEAL HUNTERS' CAMP, YAKUTAT BAY. (STRETCHED 

 SKINS OF HAIR SEALS IN FOREGROUND.) 



The next day we left Russell Fiord and anchored be- 

 fore an Indian encampment below Haenke Island, on the 

 south side of the head of Yakutat Bay. The Indians 



had come up from 

 their village below, 

 and some of them, 

 we were told, from 

 as far away as Sitka. 

 They were living 

 here in tents and 

 bark huts and hunt- 

 ing the hair seal amid 

 the drifting icebergs 

 that the Turner and 

 the Hubbard cast 

 off. This was their 

 summer camp; they were laying in a supply of skins and 

 oil against their winter needs. In July they go to the 

 salmon streams and secure their stores of salmon. Dur- 

 ing these excursions their village at Yakutat is nearly de- 

 serted. 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 tents and 

 huts. The women and girls were 

 skinning them and cutting out the 

 blubber and trying it out in pots 

 over smouldering fires, while the crack of the Win- 

 chesters of the men could be heard out amid the ice. 

 Apparently their only food at such times is seal meat, 

 with parts of the leaf or stalk of a kind of cow parsnip, a 

 coarse rank plant that grows all about. The Indian 

 women frowned upon our photographers and were very 



YAKUTAT INDIANS PADDLING. 



