where the finest otter hunters in the
world lived, or on the south shore of Oonalaska, or in Cook's Inlet
where the rip of the tide runs a mill-race, or just off Kadiak on the
Saanach coast, where twenty miles of beach boulders and surf waters and
little islets of sea-kelp provide ideal fields for the sea-otter. Here
the sweeping tides and {70} booming back-wash keep up such a roar of
tumbling seas, the shy, wary otter, alert as an eagle, do not easily
get scent or sound of human intruder. Surf washes out the scent of the
man track. Surf out-sounds noise of the man killer; and no fires are
lighted, be it winter or summer, unless the wind is straight from the
southward; for the sea-otter always frequent the south shores. The
only provisions on the carrying schooner are hams, rancid butter or
grease, some rye bread and flour; the only clothing, what the Aleut
hunters wear.

No sooner has the schooner sheered off the hunting-grounds, than the
Aleuts are over decks with the agility of performing monkeys, the
schooner captain wishing each good luck, the eager hunters leaping into
their bidarkas following the lead of a chief. The schooner then
returns to the home harbor, leaving the hunters on islands bare as a
planed board for two, three, four months. On the Commander Group,
otter hunters are now restricted to the use of the net alone, but
formerly the nature of the hunting was determined entirely by the
weather. If a tide ran with heavy surf and wind landward to conceal
sound and sight, the hunters lined alongshore of the kelp beds and
engaged in the hunt known as surf-shooting. Their rifles would carry a
thousand yards. Whoever saw the little round black head bob above the
surface of the water, shot, and the surf wash carried in the dead body.
If the weather was dead calm, fog or clear, bands of twenty {71} and
thirty men deployed in a circle to spear their quarry. This was the
spearing-surround. Or if such a hurricane gale was churning the sea so
that gusty spray and sleet storm washed out every outline, sweeping the
kelp beds naked one minute, inundating them with mountainous rollers
that thundered up the rocks the next, the Aleut hunters risked life,
scudded out on the back of the raging storm, now riding the rollers,
now dipping to the trough of the sea, now scooting with lightning
paddle-strokes right through the blasts of spray athwart wave wash and
trough--straight for the kelp beds or rocky boulders, whe