ky to receive forty or fifty dollars. Day after day, three
months at a time, warm or cold, not daring to light fires on the
island, the Aleut hunters go out to the spearing-surround, till the
schooner returns for them from the main post; and whether the hunt is
harder on man or beast may be judged from the fact that where the
hunting battalions used to rally out in companies of thousands, they
to-day go forth only in twenties and forties. True, the sea-otter has
decreased and is almost extinct in places; but then, where game laws
protect it, as in the Commander Islands, it is on the increase, and as
for the Aleut hunters--their thousands lie in the bottom of the sea;
and of the thousands who rallied forth long ago, often only a few
hundred returned.

But while the spearing-surround was chiefly followed in battalions
under the direction of a trading company, the clubbing was done by the
individuals--the dauntless hunters, who scudded out in twos and threes
in the wake of the blast, lost themselves in the shattering sheets of
spray, with the wind screaming mad riot in their ears {77} and the
roily rollers running a mill-race against tide and wind. How did they
steer their cockle-shell skiffs--these Vikings of the North Pacific; or
did they steer at all, or only fly before the gale on the wings of the
mad north winds? Who can tell? The feet of man leave earth sometimes
when the spirit rides out reckless of land or sea, or heaven or hell,
and these plunderers of the deep took no reckoning of life or death
when they rode out on the gale, where the beach combers shattered up
the rocks, and the creatures of the sea came huddling landward to take
refuge among the kelp rafts.

Tossing the skin skiffs high and dry on some rock, with perhaps the
weight of a boulder to keep them from blowing away, the hunters rushed
off to the surf wash armed only with a stout stick.

The otters must be approached away from the wind, and the noise of the
surf will deaden the hunter's approach; so beating their way against
hurricane gales--winds that throw them from their feet at
times--scrambling over rocks slippery as glass with ice, running out on
long reefs where the crash of spray confuses earth and air, wading
waist-deep in ice slush, the hunters dash out for the kelp beds and
rocks where the otter are asleep. Clubbing sounds brutal, but this
kind of hunting is, perhaps, the most merciful of all--to the animal,
not the man. The otter