for it must come above water to breathe;
and it must come ashore to sleep where it _can_ breathe; for the ocean
wash in a storm would smother the sleeper. And its favorite sleeping
grounds are in the forests of kelp and seaweed, where it can bury its
head, and like the ostrich think itself hidden. A sound, a whiff--the
faintest tinge--of smoke from miles away is enough to frighten the
sleeper, who leaps up with a fierce courage unequalled in the animal
world, and makes for sea in lightning-flash bounds.

When Bering found the northwest coast of America, the sea-otter
frequented all the way from what is now California to the Commander
Islands, the last link of the chain from America to Asia. Sea-otter
were found and taken in thousands at Sitka Sound, in Yakutat Bay,
Prince William Sound, Cook's Inlet, and all {67} along the chain of
eleven hundred Aleutian Islands to the Commander Group, off Kamchatka.
Where they were found in thousands then, they are seen only in tens and
hundreds to-day. Where they are in hundreds one year, they may not
come at all the next, having been too hard hunted. This explains why
there used to be returns of five thousand in a single year at Kadiak or
Oonalaska or Cook's Inlet; and the next year, less than a hundred from
the same places. Japan long ago moved for laws to protect the
sea-otter as vigorously as the seal; but Japan was only snubbed by
England and the United States for her pains, and to-day the only
adequate protection afforded the diminishing sea-otter is in the tiny
remnant of Russia's once vast American possessions--on the Commander
Islands where by law only two hundred sea-otter may be taken a year,
and the sea-otter rookeries are more jealously guarded than diamond
mines. The decreasing hunt has brought back primitive methods.
Instead of firearms, the primitive club and net and spear are again
used, giving the sea-otter a fair chance against his antagonist--Man.
Except that the hunters are few and now dress in San Francisco clothes,
they go to the hunt in the same old way as when Baranof, head of the
Russian Fur Company, led his battalions out in companies of a thousand
and two thousand "bidarkies"--walrus-skin skiffs taut as a drumhead,
with seams tallowed and an oilskin wound round each of the manholes, so
that the boat {68} could turn a somerset in the water, or be pitched
off a rock into the surf, and come right side up without taking water,
paddler erect.

The firs