January, 1921 
FOREST AND STREAM 
9 
of a stream for miles; but the greater 
part -of their travelling is in the water 
where most of their food is procured. 
The long flattened tail is a powerful 
propeller and the large webbed hind feet 
give additional paddle surface for easy 
and rapid progress through the water. 
While on dry land their motions are 
comparatively slow and awkward ; in 
the water they are rapid, lithe and seal- 
like, almost as easy and graceful and 
even more rapid than those of many 
fish. Fish are pursued and caught ap- 
parently in fair chase and with great 
ease, though it is perhaps not safe to 
say that all kinds are an easy prey. 
Otters seem to be about equally active 
night or day, but most so in the morn- 
ing and evening hours.” 
I N 1918, shipments of Land Otter from 
Alaska totalled 1,647. Of the 1,613 
sold in the spring auctions of New 
York in 1920 prices ran from $7 to $66 
— $7 being for unprime, which ought to 
be a crime. Of the 4800 sold in St. 
Louis in the spring sales, prices ran 
about the same as in New York but 
not so high as in Montreal, because the 
best otter in the world come direct to 
Montreal from Labrador. London’s 
spring sales numbered about 5400 Land 
Otter, which it may be guessed — came 
from the Canadian market. The pelts 
sold in these spring sales would repre- 
sent about a third of the world’s yearly 
catch in Otter; and with prices off ow- 
ing to the close of the Russian buying 
market, prices are not likely to go high- 
er, which is a good thing for one of 
the rarest and most beautiful of the 
Canadian and Russian furs. It seems 
almost a pity that some government fur 
farm for Land Otter cannot be set up 
now, when breeding stock is plentiful 
enough to begin well, either in Alaska, 
or Labrador, or British Columbia, to do 
for the Land Otter, what the U. S. Gov- 
ernment has done for the Alaska Seal, 
; or the Canadian Government for the 
buffalo, or the Prince Edward Island 
ranchers for the silver fox. Nothing 
can ever take the place of Land Otter 
as a fur. It could be multiplied now 
into a great staple of the rare furs in 
the same class as Persian Lamb and 
Alaska Seal; and now is the time to do 
it and not when it reaches the status 
of the Sea Otter. 
For trade purposes, Land Otter is 
classified in several varieties, chiefly as 
to habitat. Darkest fur is from the re- 
gion of East Main in Western Labra- 
dor; largest pelts from British Colum- 
bia; thickest fur from Alaska, etc., etc. 
Ten such land specimens are so classi- 
fied. Then comes classification as to 
quality and three sortings as to size. 
W HEN you come to Sea Otter, you 
are dealing with one of the trag- 
edies of the fur world — a fur 
rare and beautiful as the finest jewel, 
durable as shoe leather, and plentiful 
almost as the sands of the sea, reduced 
so close to extermination that what sold 
in the hundreds of thousands a century 
ago, 2,369 in 1891, yielded all told in 
1912 only 202 pelts, in 1920, only 1 pelt 
for sale in St. Louis and 3 in New York 
and 15 in London. Prices for Sea Otter 
used to run from $500 to $1,000. Prices 
this year, when the pelts were not of 
first grade, two or three having been 
taken from bodies found dead off the 
Islands of Alaska, ran from $1,700 in 
St. Louis to $2,000 a pelt in London. 
To-day a white man may not kill a 
Sea Otter under penalty of $500. Na- 
tive Aleuts only are permitted to hunt 
them; but the danger is that remedies 
have come too late as in the case of the 
extermination of the beautiful wild pig- 
eon. Fur farming except in its native 
habitat of Alaska will not help ; for Sea 
Otters in captivity like Seals in captiv- 
ity are subject to pneumonia; and its 
wide range from Southern Polar Seas to 
Northern Polar Seas renders treaty pro- 
tection such as saved the Alaska Seal al- 
most impossible. It looks to-day as if 
five years would see the last Sea Otter 
taken from the wild Northern ocean 
waves, where it was cradled for so many 
centuries. Two factors sealed the Sea 
Otter’s doom. When Russia decided to 
sell Alaska, which she did many years 
before the United States bought the 
Territory — in fact, Sir George Simpson, 
Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Com- 
pany, had considered such purchase 
The Sea Otter 
away back between 1826 and 1838— she 
turned her Aleut hunters loose to hunt 
to the point of leaving only an empty 
shell for the next owners of the country. 
Then came the perfection of long range 
firearms; and the Sea Otter herd quick- 
ly disappeared before the world awak- 
ened to the loss. 
It is one of the great tragedies of the 
fur world; and the finding of the Sea 
Otter and the hunting of it are two of 
the most romantic pages in American 
history. First, the Sea Otter, itself, is 
“a child of the ocean”. It is born at sea 
in a sea weed bed called “kelp”. It is 
rocked on the waves. It plays in the 
sea. It sleeps in the sea. It floats or 
submerges, coming up only at intervals 
to breathe. It was formerly found from 
Lower California to Bering Sea. It is 
now found only as a rarity, or freak. 
It measures 3% to 4 feet with tail 11 
inches long; but a full grown Sea Otter 
was larger than a man is tall. The cov- 
eted fur is dense with over hair and 
denser in pelage. It is finer in texture 
than Land Otter, shimmering and lus- 
trous as light on water, black in color 
with a tinge of purplish silver like the 
light on the sea. 
It was always the favorite fur of the 
Chinese mandarins and speedily became 
the fashionable fur of the Russian no- 
bility. The story is romantic and well 
worth pondering by conservationists. 
r 
W HEN Vitus Bering’s castaways 
looked about on the barren 
islands, where they were ma- 
rooned for the winter of 1741, they 
found the swampy weedy salt marshes 
of surf and rock alive with a medium 
sized animal, for which the Russians 
knew no other name but “sea beaver”. 
Mad with hunger, the desperate sailors 
fell on the kelp beds clubbing right and 
left. The Sea Otter did not know 
enough to be afraid and fell easy vic- 
tims. Seizing the raw flesh for food, 
the castaways used the pelts for cloth- 
ing, blankets, rugs, in their sand caves. 
Like “Caesar’s brains”, Sea Otter was 
now used to chink the cracks of huts 
and keep out the cold. When in spring 
the sailors rigged up a crazy skiff to 
return to Asiatic shores, they carried 
with them a thousand peltries; and to 
their amazement they found that Chi- 
nese merchants would pay for these 
skins $150 to $200. 
Henceforth, Sea Otter hunting became 
a gold stampede; and to it rushed such 
riff-raff as always follow the lode-star 
of quick fortune by a gamble. All the 
capital needed was a boat and food for 
a six months’ hunt; and this, merchants 
of Russia were easily persuaded to ad- 
vance on shares to any leader who would 
take out a company of hunters. Young 
Russian noblemen saw a chance to make 
easy money as the young French nobil- 
ity had with beaver. They did not go 
out with hunters, themselves, but they 
obtained royal concessions or licenses on 
shares for merchants, who would outfit 
companies of riff-raff criminals and ad- 
venturers for the hunt. 
When Captain Cook’s crews came to 
the Pacific thirty years later, they, too, 
obtained skins in barter for beads and 
baubles, which they afterwards sold in 
China for a fortune. Just as the little 
beaver led exploration up the St. Law- 
rence to the Pacific and the Arctic, so 
now the Sable and the Sea Otter lured 
the adventurers of Europe Eastward 
across Siberia and round the world in 
exploration of the Pacific Coast of 
America. 
Of the fur, itself, the great beauty 
consisted in its ebony shimmer, inter- 
spersed with silver. Six feet the pelt 
measured from tip to tail. The face 
was beaver shaped. The teeth were like 
a cat. The feet were webbed. Only one 
pup was born at a time, and it was 
“cradled in the deep, sleeping on its back 
in the water”, or tossing up seaweed in 
play, or going ashore among the rocks 
to arrange its hair like a cat. It had to 
come above water to breathe and when 
the weather was stormy, it had to come 
ashore to sleep. Its favorite sleeping 
bed was the kelp, where it could bury its 
head and think itself hidden. 
Storms and gales drove it ashore; so 
storms and gales, day or night, were the 
seasons for hunting. It was the wildest 
page in the history of the American fur 
trade and I have told it elsewhere in 
“Vikings of the Pacific” and “Conquest 
of the Great North West”. Some 5,000 
pelts a year were an easy catch for each 
of several of the Aleutian Islands. Mul- 
tiply that by $100 to $200 a pelt, and 
you will see what profit there was for 
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