istance ahead of them, near some rough frame buildings.

"That's the drive," the agent answered. "The killing-grounds are always
near the salt-houses. What's that? The smell? Worst smell in the world,
I thought, when I first came here. You can't kill seals in the same
place year after year and just leave the flesh to rot without having a
frightful odor. One gets used to it after a while."

"It seems to me that you're running the risk of starting up a plague or
something!"

"No," was the reply, "it has never caused any sickness here. Then the
drive is small now to what it used to be. Time was when three or four
thousand seals would be driven, where we only take a couple of hundred
now. Fallen off terribly! Fifty years ago, every available inch of all
the beach was rookery, settled as thick as in the rookery you saw just
now. The holluschickie were here in uncounted millions. These hills, now
overgrown with grass, show the soil matted with fine hair and fur where
the seals shed their coats for hundreds of years. Now a few scattered
rookeries are all that remain."

"Do you suppose the seal herd will ever be as big again?" the boy asked.

The agent shook his head.

"I'm afraid not. The governments interested won't keep up the
international agreement long enough," he said regretfully. "It would
take thirty or forty years. Yet it would be worth it. You see," he
continued, "this is absolutely the only place in the world where the
true Alaskan fur seal--the sea bear, as it used to be called, because it
isn't a seal at all--can be found. The fur seals on the Russian islands
are a different species. Those on the Japanese islands are different
from both."

"You say a fur seal isn't a seal at all?" asked Colin. "What's the
difference?"

"Not the same at all. Different, entirely. Don't even belong to the same
group of animal. They look differently. Their habits are unlike. Oh,
they're dissimilar in every way."

"Just how?" asked Colin curiously.

"In the first place, the sexes of the hair or common seal are the same
size, not like the fur seal, where the sea-catch is four or five times
bigger than the female. Then they don't breed in harems and the male
hair seal does not stay on shore. A fur seal swims with his fore
flippers, a true seal with his hind flippers. A fur seal stands upright
on his fore flippers, a hair seal lies supine. A fur seal has a neck, a
hair seal has practically none. A fur seal naturally has fur, t