LUXURY ON A DESOLATE ALEUTIAN ISLAND
Both Jalap Coombs and Serge quickly followed Phil’s example so far as
the crabs were concerned, and while these were baking, the lads amused
themselves by roasting and eating the mussels with which the young
hunter had filled his pockets. “My, but aren’t these good!” cried Phil,
smacking his lips over one of the little yellow mussels that he had
just withdrawn steaming hot from its shell and eaten. “I wish we had a
bushel of them.”
“Ef ye had, ye’d be sorry ye ever seen a mussel afore ye’d finished with
’em,” remarked the mate, with a knowing shake of his head. Disdaining to
waste his time over anything so trifling and unsatisfactory as mussels,
he was devoting himself to the spitting of a salmon on a long stick,
which, by the aid of several bits of rock, he so arranged that the fish
was held just above a bed of coals.
“Why?” asked Phil and Serge together.
“Because ye’d be made sicker’n I be of my given name, which seeing as
mussels was the cause of it, I never could abide the pesky things, I
never have et ’em, _and_ never will long’s I kin find anything else to
starve on.”
“How could mussels possibly be the cause of your having so qu――I mean
so distinguished a name?” asked Phil, with undisguised curiosity.
“Waal, I tell ye what. It’s quite a yarn how the hull thing kim about;
but ef you boys will run down to the beach once more for another load
of firewood afore it gets plumb dark, and while I tend to the cooking
of the fish, I’ll spin it to ye after supper.”
Agreeing to this, the lads, tired and hungry as they were, set forth
into the outside darkness and chill, both of which were intensified by
the brief period of firelight and warmth they had just enjoyed. The
wind was howling with such an increase of fury that it was all they
could do to force their way against it, while the fog had given place
to dashes of sleety rain.
Glad enough were they when, their mission accomplished, they once more
regained the barrabkie, bending beneath great loads of wood, which they
flung down with sighs of relief.
How bright and cheery the once despised interior now looked! What a
comfort it was to be sheltered from the tempest, and, above all, what
deliciously tantalizing odors of cooking pervaded the whole place!
The crabs, beautifully baked, had been drawn from the ashes, and with
uplifted claws seemed to beckon the famished lads to come and eat them.
The great salmon was nearly done, and was being basted with its own
drippings caught in a mussel-shell that Jalap Coombs had thrust into
the cleft end of a stick.
No second invitation from the big crabs was needed, for hardly had Phil
and Serge caught sight of them before they pounced upon them with such
ferocity that the mate was obliged to suspend culinary operations for
the time being in order to obtain his share of the first course.
“I always thought that crabs were only good when deviled,” remarked
Phil at length, as he paused in his eating to look for something on
which to crack a big claw. “That’s the way my aunt Ruth cooks them.
It’s an awful bother, though, and why people should take all that
trouble for nothing I can’t imagine. I’m sure these knock any deviled
crabs I ever ate away out of sight.”
Then came the fish, which was rather smoky, to be sure, and was
served on a bit of board, without sauce garnishings, condiments, or
accessories, but which the guests at this wilderness feast pronounced
the very finest and best-cooked salmon they had ever tasted. Jalap
Coombs congratulated his young companions on their splendid appetites,
before which the great fish rapidly disappeared, until nothing was left
but head, tail, and cleanly picked bones, and they complimented him
upon his cooking.
“Wouldn’t it make my aunt Ruth open her eyes, though!” said Phil.
“She’s a good cook, and she knows it too; but she never cooked a salmon
like this――that is, not when I was around. Yes, indeed, Mr. Coombs, you
certainly could give her points.”
If Miss Ruth Ryder could have seen her fastidious nephew at that
moment, seated on the earthen floor of a ruinous Aleutian barrabkie,
and tearing with knife and fingers at a smoky half-cooked salmon,
while in the glow of a drift-wood fire his honest freckled face shone
with a complete satisfaction, she would have marvelled at him. Could
she also have heard his unstinted praise of this rudely served meal,
and his extraordinary comparing of her own dainty cooking with the
rough-and-ready methods of the uncouth sailor-man who sat beside him in
favor of the latter, she would have mourned over him as over one who
had lost his mind, and knew not whereof he spoke.
Could she, however, have known how very, very hungry this same
nephew had been but a few minutes before, and realized the wonderful
properties of the sauce named appetite, she would have rejoiced with
him both in his possession of it and his present opportunity for
ridding himself of it. She might have been shocked at his apparent
forgetfulness of all her teachings in the matter of table manners, but
she would have been comforted by his appearance of perfect content with
his situation and its surroundings.
“I say, isn’t this jolly?” he cried, as, having performed his share
of clearing up by wiping his knife on a wisp of grass, he lay back
luxuriously on his yielding couch of moss and basked in the fireglow.
“I’m sure I don’t know what a fellow could want in the way of camping
out any better than this. We’ve a good shelter, comfortable beds,
plenty to eat, an interesting country to explore, no one to bother us,
the best fishing I ever heard of, and good shooting. You said there was
plenty of game here, didn’t you, Serge?”
“I don’t know that I did,” answered the young Alaskan, “but there is. I
found fresh caribou tracks to-day, and wherever there are caribou there
are big brown bears as well――in fact, I saw what I am sure must be a
bear road.”
“What do you mean?” asked Phil, showing his interest by rising into a
sitting posture and gazing at the speaker.
“I mean what I said. A regular bear and caribou road. I never saw one
before, but I have often heard hunters describe the well-beaten trail
that starts away off on the mainland somewhere beyond the head of Cook
Inlet and follows the Kenai peninsula for two or three hundred miles
down to this very Strait of Krenitzin, and so to this island. Every
summer many caribou follow it and come to Oonimak for the sake of the
moss and lichens that grow here more luxuriantly than anywhere else.
Wherever caribou go the bears follow, so I expect there are plenty of
both on the island now.”
“Oh, if I only had a rifle!” sighed Phil. “Is there anything else in
the way of game?”
“Not much; only sea-lions, and hair-seals, and foxes, and any quantity
of sea-fowl, including ducks and geese, and now and then a sea-otter.”
“I call that a pretty fair list. By-the-way, what is a sea-otter? I
don’t remember ever to have seen one.”
“Probably not,” laughed Serge. “Along the southern coast of these very
islands is about the only place in the whole world where they are now
found, and even here they are rarely seen. I tell you the hunter who
gets a sea-otter nowadays is in great luck; and yet the only money or
trade goods that the four or five thousand Aleuts of these islands ever
see come to them in exchange for sea-otter skins. It is the only paying
kind of hunting that is left entirely to the natives, and in which
white men do not engage.”
“Why don’t they?”
“Because it is too hard work and too dangerous.”
“Is it any harder or more dangerous than seal-hunting?”
“I should say it was! The sea-otter is one of the shyest and most
keen-scented of animals. If the tiniest bit of a fire is lighted to
windward of him, even miles away, he will scent it and be off. If a man
walks on a beach, many tides must wash out the scent of his footsteps
before a sea-otter will approach that place. So when the wind is off
shore the hunters have to go without fire, even for cooking, in winter
as well as in summer, sometimes for weeks at a time. Then, too, the
sea-otter never really comes ashore, but spends most of his time in
the water among the great kelp-beds that you have seen floating in the
North Pacific. Even their young are born in those floating cradles.
The only place you can catch him ashore is on the rocky reefs and
half-submerged islands lying twenty or thirty miles off the coast, and
as he only lands on them when driven to do so by the severest gales,
it is then that he must be hunted.”
“How do they hunt him?” asked Phil, who seemed to follow this
investigation to its end.
“If the storm is off shore, like this one, the hunters wait till it
shows signs of breaking. Then they launch their bidarkies, fasten their
kamleikas tightly around the hatch coamings so that not a drop of water
can get in, and run down the gale through seas that would swamp many a
larger craft, until they reach the reef, and make a landing under its
lee. Then they creep up to windward over the rocks, and generally catch
Mr. Otter asleep in the sea-weed, where they kill him with short clubs.
The story is told of two native hunters who once got seventy-eight in a
single hour by this method.”
“What is a bidarkie? And what is a kamleika?” asked Phil, to whom these
were strange terms.
“A bidarkie,” laughed Serge, “is a kyack or skin canoe, such as is used
by all Aleuts. It is all covered over, and is absolutely water-tight,
except for the round holes or hatches in which its occupants sit. Some
bidarkies have three of these holes, some two, and many only one. As
a general thing, sea-otter hunters go in couples, and use two-holed
bidarkies. A kamleika is a loose water-proof over-garment made of
sea-lion intestines. When a hunter, wearing one of these and sitting in
a bidarkie, makes its skirts fast to the coaming of his hatch no water
can enter his boat, no matter how many seas break over it.”
“Do you mean to say that the only way of hunting sea-otters is to go
thirty miles from land, in a gale, with a chance of finding an almost
invisible reef of rocks and landing on it, or of being blown out to sea
if you don’t happen to hit it?”
“That’s just about it,” replied Serge, “though some are shot in the
surf, and some are caught by surrounds in the open water, where they
are driven by a whole fleet of bidarkies until they are out of breath;
for an otter is obliged to come up every now and then to breathe, like
a seal.”
“And what does it all amount to, anyway? I mean, what are the pelts
worth?”
“I have known of a single skin bringing as high as eight hundred
dollars,” was the answer.
“Phe-w-w!” whistled Phil. “No wonder they are hunted. Did you say there
were any left?”
“Not many. They used to be found along the entire American coast as
far south as California, and on the northeast coast of Asia as well;
but now, as I said, they are only to be found in the wilder parts of
Alaska.”
“Who buys the skins?”
“Traders who make that their sole business, and engage the hunters by
the year, paying them fifty, sixty, and even as high as one hundred
dollars a skin.”
“I mean, where do they go finally?”
“Oh, to Russia and China mostly, where they are used to trim military
uniforms and mandarin robes.”
“Well,” said Phil, who had been intensely interested in all this, “I
don’t know of anything I’d rather get a shot at, and if I only had a
rifle I’d try for one, though I suppose I’d have to have a bid――what do
you call it?――too.”
“A bidarkie,” laughed Serge. “No, not necessarily; sea-otters are often
shot in the surf from the beach, and then the hunter waits until the
waves bring the body ashore.”