They leave evidences of their being on these great reproductive

fields, chiefly at the rookeries, in the hundreds of dead carcasses

which mark the last of those animals that had been rendered infirm,

sick, and killed by fighting among themselves in the early part of

the season, or of those which have crawled far away from the scene

of battle to die from death-wounds received in bitter struggles for

a harem. On the rookeries, wherever these lifeless bodies rest, the

living, old and young, clamber and patter backward and forward over

and on the putrid remains: thus such constant stirring up of decayed

matter, gives rise to an exceedingly disagreeable and far-reaching

“funk.” This has been, by all writers who have dwelt on the subject,

referred to as the smell which those animals emit for another

reason—erroneously called the “rutting odor.” If these creatures have

any odor peculiar to them when in this condition, I will frankly

confess that I am unable to distinguish it from the fumes which are

constantly being stirred up and arising out of those putrescent

carcasses so disturbed, as well as from the bodies of the few pups

which have been killed accidentally by heavy bulls fighting over

them, charging back and forth against one another, so much of the

time.

They have, however, a very characteristic and peculiar smell when

they are driven and get heated; their breath-exhalations possess a

disagreeable, faint, sickly odor, and when I have walked within its

influence at the rear of a seal-drive, I could almost fancy, as it

entered my nostrils, that I stood beneath an ailantus-tree in full

bloom; but this odor can by no means be confounded with what is

universally ascribed to another cause. It is also noteworthy that if

your finger is touched ever so lightly to a little fur-seal blubber,

it will smell very much like that which I have appreciated and

described as peculiar to their breath, which arises from them when

they are driven, only it is a little stronger. Both the young and old

fur-seals have this same breath-taint at all seasons of the year.

With the precision of clock-work and the regularity of the precession

of the seasons, fur-seals have adopted and enforced the following

method of life on these islands of Pribylov. In this system millions

of those highly organized animals sustain themselves.

_First._—The earliest bulls land in a negligent, indolent way, at

the opening of the season, soon after the rocks at the water’s edge

are free from ice, frozen snow, etc. This is, as a rule, about the

1st to the 5th of every May. They land from the beginning to the end

of the season in perfect confidence and without fear; they are very

fat, and will weigh on an average five hundred pounds each; some stay

at the water’s edge, some go to the tier back of them again, and

so forth, until the whole rookery is mapped out by them, weeks in

advance of the arrival of the first female.

_Second._—That by the 10th or 12th of June, all the male stations

on the rookeries have been mapped out and fought for, and held in

waiting by the “see-catchie.” These males are, as a rule, bulls

rarely ever under six years of age; most of them are over that age,

being sometimes three, and occasionally doubtless four or five times

as old.

_Third._—That the cows make their first appearance, as a class, on or

after the 12th or 15th of June, in very small numbers, but rapidly

after the 23d and 25th of this month, every year, they begin to flock

up in such numbers as to fill the harems very perceptibly, and by the

8th or 10th of July they have all come, as a rule—a few stragglers

excepted. The average weight of the females now will not be much more

than eighty to ninety pounds each.

_Fourth._—That the breeding season is at its height from the 10th to

the 15th of July every year, and that it subsides entirely at the end

of this month and early in August; also, that its method and system

are confined entirely to the land, never effected in the sea.

_Fifth._—That the females bear their first young when they are three

years old, and that the period of gestation is nearly twelve months,

lacking a few days only of that lapse of time.

_Sixth._—That the females bear a single pup each, and that this is

born soon after landing. No exception to this rule as ever been

witnessed or recorded.

_Seventh._—That the “see-catchie” which have held the harems from

the beginning to the end of the season, leave for the water in a

desultory and straggling manner at its close, greatly emaciated,

and do not return, if they do at all, until six or seven weeks have

elapsed, when the regular systematic distribution of the families

over the rookeries is at an end for this season. A general medley

of young males now are free: they come out of the water, and wander

over all these rookeries, together with many old males, which have

not been on seraglio duty, and great numbers of the females. An

immense majority over all others present are pups, since only about

twenty-five per cent. of the mother-seals are out of the water now at

any one time.

_Eighth._—That the rookeries lose their compactness and definite

boundaries of true breeding limit and expansion by the 25th to the

28th of July every year; then, after this date, the pups begin to

haul back, and to the right and left, in small squads at first, but

as the season goes on, by the 18th of August, they depart without

reference to their mothers; and when thus scattered, the males,

females and young swarm over more than three and four times the area

occupied by them when breeding and born on the rookeries. The system

of family arrangement and uniform compactness of the breeding classes

breaks up at this date.

_Ninth._—That by the 8th or 10th of August the pups born nearest the

water first begin to learn to swim; and that by the 15th or 20th of

September they are all familiar, more or less, with the exercise.

_Tenth._—That by the middle of September the rookeries are entirely

broken up; confused, straggling bands of females are seen among

bachelors, pups, and small squads of old males, crossing and

recrossing the ground in an aimless, listless manner. The season is

now over.

_Eleventh._—That many of the seals do not leave these grounds of St.

Paul and St. George before the end of December, and some remain even

as late as the 12th of January; but that by the end of October and

the beginning of November every year, all the fur-seals of mature

age—five and six years, and upward—have left the islands. The younger

males go with the others; many of the pups still range about the

islands, but are not hauled to any great extent on the beaches or the

flats. They seem to prefer the rocky shore-margin, and to lie as high

up as they can get on such bluffy rookeries as Tolstoi and the Reef.

By the end of this month, November, they are, as a rule, all gone.

I now call the attention of the reader to another very remarkable

feature in the economy of the seal-life on these islands. The great

herds of “holluschickie,”[123] numbering from one-third to one-half,

perhaps, of the whole aggregate of near five million seals known to

the Pribylov group, are never allowed by the old “seecatchie” (which

threaten frightful mutilation or death) to put their flippers on or

near the rookeries.

By reference to my map, it will be observed that I have located a

large extent of ground—markedly so on St Paul—as that occupied by

the seals’ “hauling-ground”; this area, in fact, represents those

portions of the island upon which the “holluschickie” roam in heavy

squadrons, wearing away and polishing the surface of the soil,

stripping every foot, which is indicated on the chart as such, of its

vegetation and mosses, leaving a margin as sharply defined on those

bluffy uplands and sandy flats as it is on the map itself.

The reason that so much more land is covered by the “holluschickie”

than by the breeding seals—ten times as much at least—is due to

the fact that, though not as numerous, perhaps, as the breeding

seals, yet they are tied down to nothing, so to speak—are wholly

irresponsible, and roam hither and thither as caprice and the weather

may dictate. Thus they wear off and rub down a much larger area than

the rookery seals occupy; wandering aimlessly, and going back, in

some instances, notably at English Bay, from one-half to a whole mile

inland, not travelling in desultory files along winding, straggling

paths, but sweeping in solid platoons, they obliterate every spear of

grass and rub down nearly every hummock in their restless marching.

All the male seals, under six years of age, are compelled to herd

apart by themselves and away from the breeding grounds, in many cases

far away; the large hauling-grounds at Southwest Point being about

two miles from the nearest rookery. This class of seals is termed

“holluschickie” or the “bachelors” by the people: a most fitting and

expressive appellation.

The seals of this great subdivision are those with which the

natives on the Pribylov group are the most familiar: naturally and

especially so, since they are the only ones, with the exception of

a few thousand pups, and occasionally an old bull or two, taken

late in the fall for food and skins, which are driven up to the

killing-grounds at the village for slaughter. The reasons for this

exclusive attention to the “bachelors” are most cogent, and will be

given hereafter when the “business” is discussed.

Since the “holluschickie” are not permitted by their own kind to

land on the rookeries and stop there, they have the choice of two

methods of locating, one of which allows them to rest in the rear of

the rookeries, and the other on the free beaches. The most notable

illustration of the former can be witnessed on Reef Point, where a

pathway is left for their ingress and egress through a rookery—a

path left by common consent, as it were, between the harems. On these

trails of passage they come and go in steady files all day and all

night during the season, unmolested by the jealous bulls which guard

the seraglios on either side as they travel—all peace and comfort

to the young seal if he minds his business and keeps straight on up

or down, without stopping to nose about right or left; all woe and

destruction to him, however, if he does not, for in that event he

will be literally torn in bloody gripping, from limb to limb, by

vigilant “see-catchie.”

Since the two and three year old “holluschickie” come up in small

squads with the first bulls in the spring, or a few days later,

such common highways as those between the rookery ground and the

sea are travelled over before the arrival of the cows, and get well

defined. A passage for the “bachelors,” which I took much pleasure

in observing day after day at Polavina, another at Tolstoi, and two

on the Reef, in 1872, were entirely closed up by the “sea-catchie”

and obliterated when I again searched for them in 1874. Similar

passages existed, however, on several of the large rookeries of St.

Paul. One of those at Tolstoi exhibits this feature very finely, for

here the hauling-ground extends around from English Bay, and lies up

back of the Tolstoi rookery, over a flat and rolling summit, from

one hundred to one hundred and twenty feet above the sea-level. The

young males and yearlings of both sexes come through and between the

harems at the height of the breeding season on two of these narrow

pathways, and before reaching the ground above, are obliged to climb

up an almost abrupt bluff, which they do by following and struggling

in the water-runs and washes that are worn into its face. As this

is a large hauling-ground, on which, every favorable day during the

season, fifteen or twenty thousand commonly rest, a view of skilful

seal-climbing can be witnessed here at any time during that period;

and the sight of such climbing as this of Tolstoi is exceedingly

novel and interesting. Why, verily, they ascend over and upon

places where a lively man might, at first thought, say with great

positiveness that it was utterly impossible for him to climb!

[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF THE FUR SEAL MILLIONS

Holluschickie hauling on Lukannon Sands: Myriads come out from the

Sea in a single cool foggy night by this manner of progression]

The other method of coming ashore, however, is the one most followed

and favored. In this case they avoid the rookeries altogether, and

repair to unoccupied beaches between them; and then extend themselves

out all the way back from the sea, as far from the water, in some

cases, as a quarter and even half of a mile. I stood on the

Tolstoi sand-dunes one afternoon, toward the middle of July, and had

under my eyes, in a straightforward sweep from my feet to Zapadnie,

a million and a half of seals spread out on those hauling-grounds.

Of these I estimated that fully one-half, at that time, were pups,

yearlings, and “holluschickie.” The rookeries across the bay, though

plainly in sight, were so crowded that they looked exactly as I have

seen surfaces appear upon which bees had swarmed in obedience to

that din and racket made by the watchful apiarian when he desires to

secure a hive of restless honey-makers.

The great majority of yearlings and “holluschickie” are annually

hauled out, scattered thickly over the sand-beach and upland

hauling-grounds which lie between the rookeries on St. Paul Island.

At St. George there is nothing of this extensive display to be seen,

for here is only a tithe of the seal-life occupying St. Paul, and no

opportunity whatever is afforded for an amphibious parade.

Descend with me from this sand-dune elevation of Tolstoi, and walk

into that drove of “holluschickie” below us. We can do it. You do not

notice much confusion or dismay as we go in among them. They simply

open out before us and close in behind our tracks, stirring, crowding

to the right and left as we go, twelve or twenty feet away from us

on each side. Look at this small flock of yearlings—some one, others

two, and even three years old—which are coughing and spitting around

us now, staring up in our faces in amazement as we walk ahead. They

struggle a few rods out of our reach, and then come together again

behind us, showing no further sign or notice of ourselves. You could

not walk into a drove of hogs at Chicago without exciting as much

confusion and arousing an infinitely more disagreeable tumult; and

as for sheep on the plains, they would stampede far quicker. Wild

animals, indeed! You can now readily understand how easy it is for

two or three men, early in the morning, to come where we are, turn

aside from this vast herd in front of and around us two or three

thousand of the best examples, and drive them back, up, and over

to the village. That is the way they get the seals. There is no

“hunting,” no “chasing,” no “capturing” of fur-seals on these islands.

While the young male seals undoubtedly have the power of going for

lengthy intervals without food, they, like the female seals on

the breeding grounds, certainly do not maintain any long fasting

periods on land. Their coming and going from the shore is frequent

and irregular, largely influenced by the exact condition of the

weather from day to day. For instance, three or four thick, foggy

days seem to call them out from the water by hundreds of thousands

upon the different hauling-grounds (which the reader observes

recorded on my map). In some cases I have seen them lie there so

close together that scarcely a foot of ground, over whole acres, is

bare enough to be seen. Then a clear and warmer day follows, and

this seal-covered ground, before so thickly packed with animal life,

will soon be almost deserted—comparatively so, at least—to be filled

up immediately as before, when favorable weather shall again recur.

They must frequently eat when here, because the first yearlings and

“holluschickie” that appear in the spring are no fatter, sleeker, or

livelier than they are at the close of the season. In other words,

their condition, physically, seems to be the same from the beginning

to the end of their appearance here during the summer and fall. It is

quite different, however, with the “see-catch.” We know how and where

it spends two to three months, because we find it on the ground at

all times, day or night, during that period.

A small flock of the young seals, one to three years old generally,

will often stray from these hauling-ground margins up and beyond

over the fresh mosses and grasses, and there sport and play one

with another just as little puppy-dogs do: but, when weary of this

gambolling, a general disposition to sleep is suddenly manifested,

and they stretch themselves out and curl up in all the positions

and all the postures that their flexible spines and ball-and-socket

joints will permit. They seem to revel in the unwonted vegetation,

and to be delighted with their own efforts in rolling down and

crushing the tall stalks of grasses and umbelliferous plants. One

will lie upon its back, hold up its hind flippers, and lazily wave

them about, while it scratches, or rather rubs, its ribs with the

fore-hands alternately, the eyes being tightly closed during the

whole performance. The sensation is evidently so luxurious that

it does not wish to have any side-issue draw off its blissful

self-attention. Another, curled up like a cat on a rug, draws its

breath, as indicated by the heaving of its flanks, quickly, but

regularly, as though in heavy sleep. Another will lie flat upon its

stomach, its hind flippers covered and concealed, while it tightly

folds its fore-feet back against its sides, just as a fish carries

its pectoral fins, and so on to no end of variety, according to the

ground and the fancy of the animals.

These “bachelor” seals are, I am sure, without exception, the most

restless animals, in the whole brute creation, which can boast of a

high organization. They frolic and lope about over the grounds for

hours without a moment’s cessation, and their sleep after this is

exceedingly short, and it is ever accompanied by nervous twitchings

and uneasy muscular movements. They seem to be fairly brimful and

overrunning with spontaneity, to be surcharged with fervid, electric

life.

Another marked feature observed among the multitudes of

“holluschickie” which have come under my personal observation and

auditory, and one very characteristic of this class, is that nothing

like ill-humor appears in all of their playing together. They never

growl or bite or show even the slightest angry feeling, but are

invariably as happy, one with another, as can be imagined. This is a

very singular trait. They lose it, however, with astonishing rapidity

when their ambition and strength develops and carries them in due

course of time to the rookery.

The pups and yearlings have an especial fondness for sporting on

rocks which are just at the water’s level and awash, so as to be

covered and uncovered as the surf rolls in. On the bare summit of

these wave-worn spots they will struggle and clamber, in groups of

a dozen or two at a time, throughout the whole day in endeavoring

to push off that one of their number which has just been fortunate

enough to secure a landing. The successor has, however, but a brief

moment of exultation in victory, for the next roller that comes

booming in, together with that pressure by its friends, turns the

table, and the game is repeated, with another seal on top. Sometimes,

as well as I could see, the same squad of “holluschickie” played for

an entire day and night, without a moment’s cessation, around such a

rock as this off “Nah Speel” rookery; still, in this observation I

may be mistaken, because those seals could not be told apart.

That graceful unconcern with which fur-seals sport safely in, among,

and under booming breakers, during the prevalence of numerous wild

gales at the islands, has afforded me many consecutive hours of

spell-bound attention to them, absorbed in watching their adroit

evolutions within the foaming surf, that seemingly every moment

would, in its fierce convulsions, dash these hardy swimmers, stunned

and lifeless, against those iron-bound foundations of the shore which

alone checked the furious rush of the waves. Not at all. Through

the wildest and most ungovernable mood of a roaring tempest and

storm-tossed waters attending its transit I never failed, on creeping

out and peering over the bluffs in such weather, to see squads of

these perfect watermen, the most expert of all amphibians, gambolling

in the seething, creamy wake of mighty rollers which constantly

broke in thunder-tones over their alert, dodging heads. The swift

succeeding waves seemed every instant to poise those seals at the

very verge of death; yet the _Callorhinus_, exulting in his skill and

strength, bade defiance to their wrath and continued his diversions.

[Illustration: Fur-seals rising to breathe and look around.

[_Characteristic pelagic attitude of the “holluschickie.”_]]

The “holluschickie” are the champion swimmers of all the seal tribe;

at least, when in the water around the islands, they do nearly every

fancy tumble and turn that can be executed. The grave old males

and their matronly companions seldom indulge in any extravagant

display, as do these youngsters, which jump out of the water like

so many dolphins, describing beautiful elliptic curves sheer above

its surface, rising three and even four feet from the sea, with the

back slightly arched, the fore flippers folded tightly against the

sides, and the hinder ones extended and pressed together straight

out behind, plumping in head first, to reappear in the same manner,

after an interval of a few seconds of submarine swimming, swift as

the flight of a bird on its course. Sea-lions and hair-seals never

leap in this manner.

All classes will invariably make these dolphin-jumps when they are

surprised or are driven into the water, curiously turning their heads

while sailing in the air, between the “rises” and “plumps,” to take

a look at the cause of their disturbance. They all swim rapidly,

with the exception of the pups, and may be said to dart under the

water with the velocity of a bird on the wing. As they swim they are

invariably submerged, running along horizontally about two or three

feet below the surface, guiding their course with the hind flippers,

as by an oar, and propelling themselves solely by the fore feet,

rising to breathe at intervals which are either very frequent or else

so wide apart that it is impossible to see the speeding animal when

he rises a second time.[124]

How long they can remain under water without taking a fresh breath

is a problem which I had not the heart to solve, by instituting a

series of experiments at the island; but I am inclined to think that,

if the truth were known in regard to their ability of going without

rising to breathe, it would be considered astounding. On this point,

however, I have no data worth discussing, but will say that in all

their swimming which I have had a chance to study, as they passed

under the water, mirrored to my eyes from the bluff above by the

whitish-colored rocks below the rookery waters at Great Eastern

rookery, I have not been able to satisfy myself how they used their

long, flexible hind-feet, other than as steering media. If these

posterior members have any perceptible motion, it is so rapid that my

eye is not quick enough to catch it; but the fore flippers, however,

can be most distinctly seen as they work in feathering forward and

sweeping flatly back, opposed to the water, with great rapidity and

energy. They are evidently the sole propulsive power of the fur-seal

in the water, as they are its main fulcrum and lever combined for

progression on land. I regret that the shy nature of the hair-seal

never allowed me to study its swimming motions, but it seems to be

a general point of agreement among authorities on the _Phocidæ_,

that all motion in water by them arises from that power which they

exert and apply with the hind-feet. So far as my observations on the

hair-seal go, I am inclined to agree with this opinion.

All their movements in water, no matter whether travelling to some

objective point or merely in sport, are quick and joyous, and nothing

is more suggestive of intense satisfaction and pure physical comfort

than is that spectacle which we can see every August a short distance

at sea from any rookery, where thousands of old males and females are

idly rolling over in the billows side by side, rubbing and scratching

with their fore and hind flippers, which are here and there stuck

up out of the water by their owners, like so many lateen-sails of

Mediterranean feluccas, or, when their hind flippers are presented,

like a “cat-o’-nine tails.” They sleep in the water a great deal,

too, more than is generally supposed, showing that they do not come

ashore to rest—very clearly not.

How fast the fur-seal can swim, when doing its best, I am naturally

unable to state. I do know that a squad of young “holluschickie”

followed the _Reliance_, in which I was sailing, down from the

latitude of the Seal Islands to Akootan Pass with perfect ease;

playing around the vessel while she was logging, straight ahead,

fourteen knots to the hour.

When the “holluschickie” are up on land they can be readily separated

into their several classes, as to age, by the color of their coats

and size, when noted: thus, as yearlings, two, three, four, and five

years old males. When the yearlings, or the first class, haul out,

they are dressed just as they were after they shed their pup-coats

and took on the second covering, during the previous year in

September and October; and now, as they come out in the spring and

summer, one year old, the males and females cannot be distinguished

apart, either by color or size, shape or action; the yearlings of

both sexes have the same steel-gray backs and white stomachs, and are

alike in behavior and weight.

Next year those yearling females, which are now trooping out with

these youthful males on the hauling-grounds, will repair to the

rookeries, but their male companions will be obliged to return alone

to this same spot.

About the 15th and 20th of every August they have become perceptibly

“stagey,” or, in other words, their hair is well under way in

shedding. All classes, with the exception of the pups, go through

this renewal at this time every year. The process requires about six

weeks between the first dropping or falling out of the old over-hair

and its full substitution by the new: this change takes place, as a

rule, between August 1st and September 28th.

The fur is shed, but it is so shed that the ability of a seal to

take to the water and stay there, and not be physically chilled or

disturbed during its period of moulting, is never impaired. The whole

surface of these extensive breeding-grounds, traversed over by me

after the seals had gone, was literally matted with shedded hair and

fur. This under-fur or pelage is, however, so fine and delicate,

and so much concealed and shaded by the coarser over-hair, that a

careless eye or a superficial observer might be pardoned in failing

to notice the fact of its dropping and renewal.

The yearling cows retain the colors of the old coat in the new, when

they shed for the first time, and so repeat them from that time on,

year after year, as they live and grow old. The young three-year-olds

and the mature cows look exactly alike, as far as color goes, when

they haul up at first and dry out on the rookeries, every June and

July.

The yearling males, however, make a radical change when they shed

for the first time, since they come out from their “staginess” in a

nearly uniform dark gray, and gray and black mixed, and lighter, with

dark ochre to whitish on the upper and under parts, respectively.

This coat, next year, when they appear as two-year-olds, shedding

for the three-year-old coat, is a very much darker gray, and so on

to the third, fourth, and fifth seasons; then after this, with age,

they begin to grow more gray and brown, with a rufous-ochre and

whitish-tipped “wig” on the shoulders. Some of the very old bulls

change in their declining years to a uniform shade, all over, of

dull-grayish ochre. The full glory and beauty of the seal’s mustache

is denied to him until he has attained his seventh or eighth year.

The male does not get his full growth and weight until the close of

his seventh year, but realizes most of it, osteologically speaking,

by the end of the fifth; and from this it may be perhaps truly

inferred that the male seals live to an average age of eighteen

or twenty years, if undisturbed in a normal condition, and that

the females exist ten or twelve seasons under the same favorable

circumstances. Their respective weights, when fully mature and fat,

in the spring, will, in regard to the male, strike an average of from

four to five hundred pounds, while the females will show a mean of

from seventy to eighty pounds.

The female does not gain a maximum size and weight until the end of

her fourth year, so far as I have observed, but she does most of

her longitudinal growing in the first two. After she has passed her

fourth and fifth years, she weighs from thirty to fifty pounds more

than she did in the days of her youthful maternity.[125] In the

table of these weights given below it will be observed that the adult

females correspond with the three years old males; also, that the

younger cows weigh frequently only seventy-five pounds, and many of

the older ones go as high as one hundred and twenty, but an average

of eighty to eighty-five pounds is the rule. Those specimens just

noted which I weighed were examples taken by me for transmission

to the Smithsonian Institution, otherwise I should not have been

permitted to make this record of their bulk, inasmuch as weighing

them means to kill them; and the law and the habit, or rather the

prejudice of the entire community up there, is unanimously in

opposition to any such proceeding, for they never touch females, and

never go near or disturb the breeding-grounds on such an errand. It

will be noticed, also, that I have no statement of the weights of any

exceedingly fat and heavy males which appear first on the breeding

grounds in the spring; those which I have referred to, in the table

above given, were very much heavier at the time of their first

appearance, in May and June, than at the moment when they were in my

hands, in July; but the cows, and the other classes, do not sustain

protracted fasting, and therefore their avoirdupois may be considered

substantially the same throughout the year.

Thus, from the fact that all the young seals and females do not vary

much in weight from the time of their first coming out in the spring,

till that of their leaving in the fall and early winter, I feel safe

in saying that they feed at irregular but not long intervals, during

this period when they are here under our observation, since they are

constantly changing from land to water and from water to land, day in

and day out. I do not think that the young males fast longer than a

week or ten days at a time, as a rule.

By the end of October and November 10th, a great mass of the

“holluschickie,” the trooping myriads of English Bay, Southwest

Point, Reef Parade, Lukannon Sands, the table-lands of Polavina, and

the mighty hosts of Novastoshnah, at St. Paul, together with the

quota of St. George, had taken their departure from these shores, and

had gone out to sea, feeding upon the receding schools of fish that

were now retiring to the deeper waters of the North Pacific, where,

in that vast expanse, over which rolls an unbroken billow, five

thousand miles from Japan to Oregon, they spend the winter and the

early spring, until they reappear and break up, with their exuberant

life, the dreary winter-isolation of the land which gave them birth.

A few stragglers remain, however, as late as the snow and ice will

permit them to, in and after December; then they are down by the

water’s edge, and haul up entirely on the rocky beaches, deserting

the sand altogether; but the first snow that falls in October makes

them very uneasy, and a large hauling-ground will be so disturbed by

a rainy day and night that its hundreds of thousands of occupants

fairly deserted it. The fur-seal cannot bear, and will not endure,

the spattering of sand into its eyes, which usually accompanies

the driving of a rain-storm; they take to the water, to reappear,

however, when that nuisance shall be abated.

The weather in which the fur-seal delights is cool, moist, foggy,

and thick enough to keep the sun always obscured, so as to cast no

shadows. Such weather, which is the normal weather of St. Paul and

St. George, continued for a few weeks in June and July, brings up

from the sea millions of fur-seals. But, as I have before said, a

little sunshine, which raises the temperature as high as 50° to 55°

Fahr., will send them back from the hauling-grounds almost as quickly

as they came. Fortunately, these warm, sunny days on the Pribylov

Islands are so rare that the seals certainly can have no ground of

complaint, even if we may presume they have any at all. Some curious

facts in regard to their selection of certain localities on these

islands, and their abandonment of others, are now on record.

I looked everywhere and constantly, when threading my way over acres

of ground which were fairly covered with seal-pups and older ones,

for specimens that presented some abnormity, _i.e._, monstrosities,

albinos, and the like, such as I have seen in our great herds of

stock; but I was, with one or two exceptions, unable to note anything

of the kind. I have never seen any malformations or “monsters” among

the pups and other classes of the fur-seals, nor have the natives

recorded anything of the kind, so far as I could ascertain from them.

I saw only three albino pups among the multitudes on St. Paul, and

none on St. George. They did not differ, in any respect, from the

normal pups in size and shape. Their hair, for the first coat, was

a dull ochre all over; the fur whitish, changing to a rich brown,

the normal hue; the flippers and muzzle were a pinkish flesh-tone in

color, and the iris of the eye sky-blue. After they shed, during the

following year, they have a dirty, yellowish-white color, which makes

them exceedingly conspicuous when mixed in among a vast majority of

black pups, gray yearlings, and “holluschickie” of their kind.

Undoubtedly some abnormal birth-shapes must make their appearance

occasionally; but at no time while I was there, searching keenly for

any such manifestation of malformation on the rookeries, did I see a

single example. The morphological symmetry of the fur-seal is one of

the most salient of its characteristics, viewed as it rallies here in

such vast numbers; but the osteological differentiation and asymmetry

of this animal is equally surprising.

It is perfectly plain that a large percentage of this immense number

of seals must die every year from natural limitation of life. They do

not die on these islands; that much I am certain of. Not one dying a

natural death could I find or hear of on the grounds. They evidently

lose their lives at sea, preferring to sink with the _rigor mortis_

into that cold, blue depth of the great Pacific, or beneath the green

waves of Bering Sea, rather than to encumber and disfigure their

summer haunts on the Pribylov Islands.

Prior to the year 1835, no native on the islands seemed to have any

direct knowledge, or was even acquainted with a legendary tradition,

in relation to the seals, concerning their area and distribution on

the land here; but they all chimed in after that date with great

unanimity, saying that the winter preceding this season (1835-36) was

one of frightful severity; that many of their ancestors who had lived

on these islands in large barraboras just back of the Black Bluffs,

near the present village, and at Polavina, then perished miserably.

They say that the cold continued far into the summer; that immense

masses of clearer and stronger ice-floes than had ever been known to

the waters about the islands, or were ever seen since, were brought

down and shoved high up on to all the rookery margins, forming an icy

wall completely around the island, and loomed twenty to thirty feet

above the surf. They further state that this frigid cordon did not

melt or in any way disappear until the middle or end of August, 1836.

They affirm that for this reason the fur-seals, when they attempted

to land, according to their habit and their necessity, during June

and July, were unable to do so in any considerable numbers. The

females were compelled to bring forth their young in the water and

at the wet, storm-beaten surf-margins, which caused multitudes of

mothers and all of the young to perish. In short, the result was a

virtual annihilation of the breeding-seals. Hence, at the following

season, only a spectral, a shadowy imitation of former multitudes

could be observed upon the seal-grounds of St. Paul and St. George.

On the Lagoon rookery, now opposite the village of St. Paul, there

were then only two males, with a number of cows. At Nah Speel,

close by and right under the village, there were then only some

two thousand. This the natives know, because they counted them. On

Zapadnie there were about one thousand cows, bulls, and pups; at

Southwest Point there were none. Two small rookeries were then on

the north shore of St. Paul, near a place called “Maroonitch;” and

there were seven small rookeries running round Northeast Point, but

on all of these there were only fifteen hundred males, females, and

young; and this number includes the “holluschickie,” which, in those

days, lay in among the breeding-seals, there being so few old males

that they were gladly permitted to do so. On Polavina there were

then about five hundred cows, bulls, pups, and “holluschickie;” on

Lukannon and Keetavie, about three hundred; but on Keetavie there

were only ten bulls and so few young males lying in altogether that

these old natives, as they told me, took no note of them on the

rookeries just cited. On the Reef, and Gorbatch, were about one

thousand only. In this number last mentioned some eight hundred

“holluschickie” may be included, which laid with the breeding-seals.

There were only twenty bulls on Gorbatch, and about ten old males on

the Reef.

Such, briefly and succinctly, is the sum and the substance of all

information which I could gather prior to 1835-36; and while I do not

entirely credit these statements, yet the earnest, straightforward

agreement of the natives has impressed me so that I narrate it here.

It certainly seems as though this enumeration of the old Aleutes was

painfully short.

Then, again, with regard to the probable truth of the foregoing

statement of the natives, perhaps I should call attention to the fact

that the entire sum of seal-life in 1836, as given by them, is just

four thousand one hundred, of all classes, distributed as I have

indicated above. Now, on turning to Bishop Veniaminov, by whom was

published the only statement of any kind in regard to the killing on

these islands from 1817 to 1837 (the year when he finished his work),

I find that he makes a record of slaughter of seals in the year 1836

of four thousand and fifty-two, which were killed and taken for their

skins; but if the natives’ statements are right, then only fifty

seals were left on the island for 1837, in which year, however,

four thousand two hundred and twenty were again killed, according to

the bishop’s table, and according to which there was also a steady

increase in the size of this return from that date along up to 1850,

when the Russians governed their catch by the market alone, always

having more seals than they knew what to do with.

Again, in this connection, the natives say that until 1847 the

practice on these islands was to kill indiscriminately both females

and males for skins; but after this year, 1847, that strict respect

now paid to the breeding-seals, and exemption of all females, was

enforced for the first time, and has continued up to date.

In attempting to form an approximate conception of what the seals

were or might have been in those early days, as they spread

themselves over the hauling and breeding grounds of these remarkable

islands, I have been thrown entirely upon the vague statements given

to me by the natives and one or two of the first American pioneers

in Alaska. The only Russian record which touches ever so lightly

upon the subject[126] contains a remarkable statement which is,

in the light of my surveys, simply ridiculous now—that is, that

the number of fur-seals on St. George during the first years of

Russian occupation was nearly as great as that on St. Paul. A most

superficial examination of the geological character portrayed on the

accompanying maps of those two islands will satisfy any unprejudiced

mind as to the total error of such a statement. Why, a mere tithe

only of the multitudes which repair to St. Paul in perfect comfort

over the sixteen or twenty miles of splendid landing ground found

thereon could visit St. George, when all of the coast-line fit for

their reception on this island is a scant two and a half miles; but,

for that matter, there was at the time of my arrival and in the

beginning of my investigation a score of equally wild and incredible

legends afloat in regard to the rookeries of St. Paul and St. George.

Finding, therefore, that the whole work must be undertaken _de novo_,

I went about it without further delay.

Thus it will be seen that there is, frankly stated, nothing that

serves as a guide to a fair or even an approximate estimate as to the

numbers of the fur-seals on these two islands, prior to the result of

my labor.

At the close of my investigation during the first season of my work

on the ground in 1872 the fact became evident that the breeding

seals obeyed implicitly an imperative and instinctive natural law

of distribution—a law recognized by each and every seal upon the

rookeries prompted by a fine consciousness of necessity to its own

well-being. The breeding-grounds occupied by them were, therefore,

invariably covered by the seals in exact ratio, greater or less, as

the area upon which they rested was larger or smaller. They always

covered the ground evenly, never crowding in at one place here to

scatter out there. The seals lie just as thickly together where

the rookery is boundless in its eligible area to their rear and

unoccupied by them as they do in the little strips which are abruptly

cut off and narrowed by rocky walls behind. For instance, on a rod

of ground under the face of bluffs which hem it in to the land from

the sea there are just as many seals, no more and no less, as will

be found on any other rod of rookery ground throughout the whole

list, great and small—always exactly so many seals, under any and all

circumstances, to a given area of breeding-ground. There are just as

many cows, bulls, and pups on a square rod at Nah Speel, near the

village, where in 1874, all told, there were only seven or eight

thousand, as there are on any square rod at Northeast Point, where a

million of them congregate.

This fact being determined, it is evident that just in proportion

as the breeding-grounds of the fur-seal on these islands expand or

contract in area from their present dimensions, so the seals will

increase or diminish in number.

That discovery at the close of the season of 1872 of this law of

distribution gave me at once the clue I was searching for, in order

to take steps by which I could arrive at a sound conclusion as to the

entire number of seals herding on the Pribylov group.

I noticed, and time has confirmed my observation, that the period for

taking these boundaries of the rookeries, so as to show this exact

margin of expansion at the week of its greatest volume, or when they

are as full as they are to be for the season, is between July 10th

and 20th of every year—not a day earlier and not many days later.

After July 20th the regular system of compact, even organization,

breaks up. The seals then scatter out in pods or clusters, the pups

leading the way, straying far back: the same number then instantly

cover twice and thrice as much ground as they did the day or week

before, when they laid in solid masses and were marshalled on the

rookery ground proper.

There is no more difficulty in surveying these seal-margins during

this week or ten days in July than there is in drawing sights along

and around the curbs of a stone fence surrounding a field. The

breeding-seals remain perfectly quiet under your eyes all over the

rookery and almost within your touch, everywhere on the outside of

their territory that you may stand or walk. The margins of massed

life, which are indicated on the topographical surveys of these

breeding-grounds of St. Paul and St. George, are as clean cut and as

well defined against the soil and vegetation as is the shading on my

maps. There is not the least difficulty in making such surveys, and

in making them correctly.

Without following such a system of enumeration, persons may look over

these swarming myriads between Southwest Point and Novastoshnah,

guessing vaguely and wildly, at any figure from one million up to

ten or twelve millions, as has been done repeatedly. How few people

know what a million really is! It is very easy to talk of a million,

but it is a tedious task to count it off: this makes a statement as

to “millions” decidedly more conservative when the labor has been

accomplished. After a thorough survey of all these great areas of

reproduction the following presentation of the actual number of seals

massed upon St. Paul is a fair one:

“Reef rookery” has 4,016 feet of sea-margin, with 150 feet

of average depth, making ground for 301,000

“Gorbotch rookery” has 3,660 feet of sea-margin, with 100

feet of average depth, making ground for 183,000

“Lagoon rookery” has 750 feet of sea-margin, with 100 feet

of average depth, making ground for 37,000

“Nah Speel rookery” has 400 feet of sea-margin, with 40

feet of average depth, making ground for 8,000

“Lukannon rookery” has 2,270 feet of sea-margin, with 150

feet of average depth, making ground for 170,000

“Keetavie rookery” has 2,200 feet of sea-margin, with 150

feet of average depth, making ground for 165,000

“Tolstoi rookery” has 3,000 feet of sea-margin, with 150

feet of average depth, making ground for 225,000

“Zapadnie rookery” has 5,880 feet of sea-margin, with 150

feet of average depth, making ground for 441,000

“Polavina rookery” has 4,000 feet of sea-margin, with 150

feet of average depth, making ground for 300,000

“Novastoshnah, or Northeast Point” has 15,840 feet of

sea-margin, with 150 feet of average depth, making

ground for 1,200,000

—————————

A grand total of breeding-seals and young for St. Paul

Island in 1874 of 3,030,000

The rookeries of St. George are designated and measured as below:

“Zapadnie rookery” has 600 feet of sea-margin, with 60

feet of average depth, making ground for 18,000

“Starry Arteel rookery” has 500 feet of sea-margin, with

125 feet of average depth, making ground for 30,420

“North rookery” has 750 feet of sea-margin, with 150 feet

of average depth, and 2,000 feet of sea-margin, with 25

feet of average depth, making ground in all for 77,000

“Little Eastern rookery” has 750 feet of sea-margin, with

40 feet of average depth, making ground for 13,000

“Great Eastern rookery” has 900 feet of sea-margin, with

60 feet of average depth, making ground for 25,000

———————

A grand total of the seal-life for St. George Island,

breeding-seals and young, of 163,420

—————————

Grand sum total for the Pribylov Islands (season of

1873), breeding-seals and young 3,193,420

The figures thus given show a grand massing of 3,193,420

breeding-seals and their young. This enormous aggregate is entirely

exclusive of the great numbers of the non-breeding-seals that, as we

have pointed out, are never permitted to come up on those grounds

which have been surveyed and epitomized by the table just exhibited.

That class of seals, the “holluschickie,” in general terms (all

males, and those to which the killing is confined), come up on the

land and sea-beaches between the rookeries, in immense straggling

droves, going to and from the sea at irregular intervals, from the

beginning to the closing of an entire season. The method of the

“holluschickie” on these hauling-grounds is not systematic—it is

not distinct, like the manner and law prescribed and obeyed by the

breeding-seals—therefore it is impossible to arrive at a definite

enumeration, and my estimate for them is purely a matter of my

individual judgment. I think they may be safely rated at 1,500,000;

thus, we have the wonderful number of 4,700,000 fur-seals assembled

every summer on the rocky rookeries and sandy hauling-grounds of the

Pribylov Islands!

No language can express adequately your sensations when you first

stroll over the outskirts of any one of those great breeding grounds

of the fur-seal on St. Paul’s Island. There is no impression on my

mind more fixed than is the one stamped thereon during the afternoon

of a July day when I walked around the inner margins of that immense

rookery at Northeast Point—indeed, while I pause to think of this

subject, I am fairly rendered dumb by the vivid spectacle which rises

promptly to my view—I am conscious of my inability to render that

magnificent animal-show justice in definition. It is a vast camp of

parading squadrons which file and deploy over slopes from the summit

of a lofty hill a mile down to where it ends on the south shore—a

long mile, smooth and gradual from the sea to that hill-top; the

parade-ground lying between is also nearly three-quarters of a mile

in width, sheer and unbroken. Now, upon that area before my eyes,

this day and date of which I have spoken, were the forms of not less

than three-fourths of a million seals—pause a moment—think of the

number—three-fourths of a million seals, moving in one solid mass

from sleep to frolicsome gambols, backward, forward, over, around,

changing and interchanging their heavy squadrons, until the whole

mind is so confused and charmed by the vastness of mighty hosts

that it refuses to analyze any further. Then, too, I remember that

the day was one of exceeding beauty for that region—it was a swift

alternation overhead of those characteristic rain-fogs, between the

succession of which the sun breaks out with transcendent brilliancy

through misty halos about it. This parade-field reflected the light

like a mirror, and the seals, when they broke apart here and there

for a moment, just enough to show its surface, seemed as though they

walked upon the water. What a scene to put upon canvas—that amphibian

host involved in those alternate rainbow lights and blue-gray shadows

of the fog!

[Illustration: Survey Showing the Immense Breeding Area of

Novastoshnah.

[_The shaded belt is that ground wholly covered by Fur-Seal

Rookeries._]]

While Novastoshnah is the largest, yet in some respects I consider

Tolstoi, with its bluffs and its long sweep which takes in the sands

of English Bay, to be the most picturesque, though it be not the most

impressive rookery—especially when that parade-ground belonging to it

is reached by the climbing seals.

From Tolstoi at this point, circling around three miles to Zapadnie,

is the broad sand-beach of English Bay, upon which and back over

its gently rising flats are the great hauling-grounds of the

“holluschickie,” which I have indicated on the general map, and to

which I made reference in a previous section of this chapter. Gazing

at these myriads of “bachelor-seals” spread out in their restless

hundreds and hundreds of thousands upon this ground, one feels the

utter impotency of verbal description, and reluctantly shuts his note

and sketch books to view it with renewed fascination and perfect

helplessness.

[Illustration: LAGOON ROOKERY

Survey Showing the Close Contact of Village, Slaughter-Field and

Breeding Grounds.]

Looking from the village across the cove and down upon the lagoon,

still another strange contradiction appears—at least it seems a

natural contradiction to one’s usual ideas. Here we see the Lagoon

rookery, a reach of ground upon which some twenty-five or thirty

thousand breeding-seals come out regularly every year during the

appointed time, and go through their whole elaborate system of

reproduction, without showing the slightest concern for or attention

to the scene directly east of them and across that shallow slough

not eighty feet in width. There are the great slaughtering fields of

St. Paul Island; there are the sand-flats where every seal has been

slaughtered for years upon years back, for its skin; and even as we

take this note, forty men are standing there knocking down a drove

of two or three thousand “holluschickie” for their day’s work, and

as they labor, the whacking of their clubs and the sounds of their

voices must be as plain to those breeding-seals, which are not one

hundred feet from them, as it is to us, a quarter of a mile distant!

In addition to this enumeration of disturbances, well calculated to

amaze, and dismay, and drive off every seal within its influence, are

the decaying bodies of the last year’s catch—seventy-five thousand

or eighty-five thousand unburied carcasses—that are sloughing away

into the sand which, two or three seasons from now, nature will, in

its infinite charity, cover with the greenest of all green grasses.

The whitened bones and grinning skulls of over three million seals

have bleached out on that slaughtering-spot, and are buried below its

surface.

Directly under the north face of the village hill, where it falls to

the narrow flat between its feet and the cove, the natives have sunk

a well. It was excavated in 1857, they say, and subsequently deepened

to its present condition in 1868. It is twelve feet deep, and the

diggers said that they found bones of the sea-lion and fur-seal

thickly distributed every foot down, from top to bottom. How much

lower these osteological remains of prehistoric pinnipeds can be

found no one knows as yet. The water here, on that account, has never

been fit to drink, or even to cook with, but, being soft, was and is

used by the natives for washing clothes, etc. Most likely, it records

a spot upon which the Russians, during the heyday of their early

occupation, drove the unhappy visitors of Nah Speel to slaughter.

There is no Golgotha known to man elsewhere in the world as extensive

as this one of St. Paul.

Yet, the natives say that this Lagoon rookery is a new feature in

the distribution of the seals; that when the people first came here

and located a part of the present village, in 1824 up to 1847, there

never had been a breeding-seal on that Lagoon rookery of to-day; so

they have hauled up here from a small beginning, not very long ago,

until they have attained their present numerical expansion, in spite

of all these exhibitions of butchery of their kind, executed right

under their eyes, and in full knowledge of their nostrils, while the

groans and low moanings of their stricken species, stretched out

beneath the clubs of the sealers, must have been and are far plainer

in their ears than they are in our own!

Still they come—they multiply, and they increase—knowing so well

that they belong to a class which intelligent men never did molest.

To-day at least they know it, or they would not submit to these

manifestations which we have just cited, so close to their knowledge.

The Lagoon rookery, however, never can be a large one, on account of

the very nature of this ground selected by the seals; it is a bar

simply pushed up beyond the surf-wash of boulders, water-worn and

rounded, which has almost enclosed and cut away the Lagoon from its

parent sea. In my opinion, the time is not far distant when that

estuary will be another inland lake of St. Paul, walled out from salt

water and freshened by rain and melting snow, as are the other pools,

lakes, and lakelets on the island.

Zapadnie, in itself, is something like the Reef plateau on its

eastern face, for it slopes up gradually and gently to the

parade-plateau above—a parade-ground not so smooth, however, being

very rough and rocky, but which the seals enjoy. Just around the

point, a low strip of rocky bar and beach connects it with the

ridge-walls of Southwest Point, a very small breeding rookery, so

small that it is not worthy of a survey, is located here. I think,

probably, on account of the nature of the ground, that it will never

hold its own, and is more than likely abandoned by this time.

One of the prehistoric villages, the village of Pribylov’s time, was

established here between that point and the cemetery ridge, on which

the northern wing of Zapadnie rests. An old burying-ground, with its

characteristic Russian crosses and faded pictures of the saints, is

plainly marked on the ridge. It was at this little bight of sandy

landing that Pribylov’s men first came ashore and took possession of

the island, while others in the same season proceeded to Northeast

Point and to the north shore to establish settlements of their own

order. When the indiscriminate sealing of 1868 was in progress, one

of the parties lived here, and a salt-house which was then erected

by them still stands. It is in a very fair state of preservation,

although it has never been occupied since, except by the natives who

come over here from the village in the summer to pick those berries

of the _Empetrum_ and _Rubus_, which abound in the greatest profusion

around the rough and rocky flats that environ a little lake adjacent.

The young people of St. Paul are very fond of this berry-festival,

so-called among themselves, and they stay there every August, camping

out, a week or ten days at a time, before returning to their homes in

the village.

So abundant have been the seals that no driving of animals from

the parade-grounds of Zapadnie has ever been made since 1869. It is

easily reached, however, if it were desirable to do so.

Polavina has also been an old settlement site, and, for the reason

cited at Zapadnie, no “holluschickie” have been driven from this

point since 1872, though it is one of the easiest worked. It was in

the Russian times a pet sealing-ground with them. The remains of an

old village have nearly all been buried in the sand near the lake,

and there is really no mark of its early habitation, unless it be

the singular effect of a human graveyard being dug out and despoiled

by the attrition of seal bodies and flippers. The old cemetery just

above and to the right of the barrabkie, near the little lake, was

originally established, so the natives told me, far away from the

hauling of the “holluschickie.” It was, when I saw it in 1876, in a

melancholy state of ruin. A thousand young seals (at least) moved off

from its surface as I came up, and they had actually trampled out

many sandy graves, rolling the bones and skulls of Aleutian ancestry

in every direction. Beyond this ancient demesne which the natives

established long ago, as a house of refuge during the winter when

they were trapping foxes, looking to the west over the lake, is a

large expanse of low, flat swale and tundra, which is terminated by

the rocky ridge of Kamminista. Every foot of it has been placed there

subsequent to the original elevation of the island by direct action

of the sea, beyond question. It is covered with a thick growth of the

rankest sphagnum, which quakes and trembles like a bog under one’s

feet, but over which the most beautiful mosses ever and anon crop

out, including that characteristic floral display before referred to

in speaking of the island. Most of the way from the village up to

the Northeast Point, as will be seen by a cursory glance at the map,

with the exception of this bluff of Polavina and the terraced table

setting back from its face to Polavina Sopka, the whole island is

slightly elevated above the level of the sea, and its coast-line is

lying just above and beyond the reach of the surf, where great ridges

of sand have been piled up by the wind, capped with sheafs and tufts

of rank-growing _Elymus_.

Near the village, at that little bight mapped as Zoltoi, is a famous

rendezvous for the “holluschickie,” and from this place during the

season the natives make regular drives, having only to step out

from their houses in the morning and walk a few rods to find their

fur-bearing quarry.

Passing over Zoltoi on our way down to the point, we quickly come

to a basaltic ridge or back-bone over which the sand has been rifted

by strong winds, and which supports a rank and luxuriant growth of

the _Elymus_ and other grasses, with beautiful flowers. A few hundred

feet farther along our course brings us in full view, as we look to

the south, of one of the most entrancing spectacles that seals afford

to man. We glance below upon and survey a full sweep of the Reef

rookery along a grand promenade ground, which slopes gently to the

eastward and trends southward down to the water from its abrupt walls

bordering on the sea to the west; it is a parade plateau as smooth

as the floor of a ball-room, 2,000 feet in length, from 500 to 1,000

feet in width, over which multitudes of “holluschickie” are filing in

long strings or deploying in vast platoons, hundreds abreast, in an

unceasing march and countermarch. The breath that rises into the cold

air from a hundred thousand hot throats hangs like clouds of white

steam in the gray fog itself; indeed, it may be said to be a seal-fog

peculiar to such a spot, while the din, the roar arising over all,

defies adequate description.

We notice to our right and to our left an immense solid mass of the

breeding-seals at Gorbotch, and another stretching and trending

nearly a mile from our feet, far around to the Reef Point below and

opposite that parade-ground, with here and there a neutral passage

left open for the “holluschickie” to go down and come up from the

waves.

The adaptation of this ground of the Reef rookery to the requirements

of the seal is perfect. It so lies that it falls gently from its high

Zoltoi Bay margin, on the west, to the sea on the east, and upon

its broad expanse not a solitary puddle of mud-spotting is to be

seen, though everything is reeking with moisture, and the fog even

dissolves into rain as we view the scene. Every trace of vegetation

upon this parade has been obliterated. A few tufts of grass, capping

the summits of those rocky hillocks, indicated on the eastern and

middle slope, are the only signs of botanical life which the seals

have suffered to remain.

A small rock, “Seevitchie Kammin,” five or six hundred feet right

to the southward and out at sea, is also covered with the black

and yellow forms of fur-seals and sea-lions. It is environed by

shoal-reefs, rough and kelp-grown, which navigators prudently avoid.

At Lukannon and Ketavie there is a joint blending of two large

breeding-grounds, their continuity broken by a short reach of

sea-wall right under and at the eastern foot of Lukannon Hill. The

appearance of these rookeries is, like all the others, peculiar to

themselves. There is a rounded, bulging hill, at the foot of Lukannon

Bay, which rises perhaps one hundred and sixty or one hundred and

seventy feet from the sea, abruptly at the point, but swelling out

gently up from the sand-dunes in Lukannon Bay to its summit at

the northwest and south. The big rookery rests upon its northern

slope. Here is a beautiful adaptation of the finest drainage, with a

profusion of those rocky nodules scattered everywhere over it, upon

which the female seals so delight in resting.

Standing on the bald summit of Lukannon Hill, we turn to the south,

and look over Ketavie[127] Point, where another large aggregate of

rookery life rests under our eye. The hill falls away into a series

of faintly terraced tables, which drop down to a flat that again

abruptly descends to the sea at Ketavie Point. Between us and Ketavie

rookery is the parade-ground of Lukannon,—a sight almost as grand

as is that on the Reef which we have feebly attempted to portray.

The sand-dunes to the west and to the north are covered with the

most luxuriant grass, abruptly emarginated by sharp abrasions of

the hauling-seals: this is shown very clearly on my general map.

Ketavie Point is a solid basaltic shelf. Lukannon Hill, the summit

of it, is composed of volcanic tufa and cement, with irregular cubes

and fragments of pure basalt scattered all over its flipper-worn

slopes. This is that place, down along the flat shoals of Lukannon

Bay, where the sand-dunes are most characteristic, as they rise in

their wind-whirled forms just above surf-wash. Here also is where the

natives come from the village during the early mornings of the season

for driving, to get any number of “holluschickie” required.

It is a beautiful sight, glancing from the summit of this great

rookery hill, up to the north over that low reach of the coast to

Tonkie Mees, where the waves seem to roll in with crests which

rise in unbroken ridges for a mile in length each, ere they break

so grandly and uniformly on the beach. In these rollers the

“holluschickie” are playing like sea-birds, seeming to sport the most

joyously at the very moment when a heavy billow breaks and falls upon

them.

The precipitous shore-line of St. George is enough in itself to

explain the small number of seals found there, when contrasted with

the swarming myriads of her more favorably adapted sister island.

Nevertheless that Muscovitic sailor, Pribylov, not knowing then

of the existence of St. Paul, was as well satisfied as if he had

possessed the boundless universe when he first found it. As in the

case of St. Paul Island, I have been unable to learn much here in

regard to the early status of the rookeries, none of the natives

having any real information. The drift of their sentiment goes to

show that there never was a great assemblage of fur-seals on St.

George—in fact, never as many as there are to-day, insignificant

as the exhibit is, compared with that of St. Paul. They say that

at first the sea-lions owned this island, and that the Russians,

becoming cognizant of the fact, made a regular business of driving

off the “seevitchie,” in order that fur-seals might be encouraged to

land. Touching this statement, with my experience on St. Paul, where

there is no conflict at all between the fifteen or twenty thousand

sea-lions which breed around on the outer edge of the seal rookeries

there and at Southwest Point, I cannot agree to the St. George

legend. I am inclined to believe, however—indeed, it is more than

probable—that there were a great many more sea-lions on and about St.

George before it was occupied by men—a hundredfold greater, perhaps,

than now, because a sea-lion is an exceedingly timid, cowardly

creature when it is in the proximity of man, and will always desert

any resting-place where it is constantly brought into contact with

him.[128]

The rookeries on this island, being so much less in volume, are not

especially noted—still, one of them, “Starry Arteel,” is unique

indeed, lying as it does in a bold sweep from the sea up a very

steep slope to a point where the bluffs bordering it seaward are

over four hundred feet in vertical declination. The seals crowd

just as closely to the edge of this precipice along its entire face

as they do at the tide-level. It is a very strange sight for that

visitor who may sail under these bluffs with a boat in fair weather

for landing, and, as you walk the beach, above which the cliff-wall

frowns a sheer five hundred feet, there, directly over your head,

the craning necks and twisting forms of restless seals, appear as

if ready to launch out and fall below, ever and anon, as you glance

upward, so closely and boldly do they press to the very edge of

the precipice. I have been repeatedly astonished at an amazing

power possessed by the fur-seal of resistance to shocks which would

certainly kill any other animal. To explain clearly, the reader will

observe by reference to the maps that there are a great many cliffy

places between the rookeries on the shore-lines of the islands. Some

of these bluffs are more than one hundred feet in abrupt elevation

above the surf and rocks awash below. Frequently “holluschickie,” in

ones, or twos, or threes, will stray far away back from the great

masses of their kind and fall asleep in the thick grass and herbage

which covers these mural reaches. Sometimes they will repose and

rest very close to the edge, and then as you come tramping along you

discover and startle them and yourself alike. They, blinded by their

first transports of alarm, leap promptly over the brink, snorting,

coughing, and spitting as they go. Curiously peering after them and

looking down upon the rocks, fifty to one hundred feet below, instead

of seeing their stunned and motionless bodies, you will invariably

catch sight of them rapidly scrambling into the water, and, when in

it, swimming off like arrows from the bow. Three “holluschickie” were

thus inadvertently surprised by me on the edge of the west face to

Otter Island. They plunged over from an elevation there not less than

two hundred feet in sheer descent, and I distinctly saw them fall;

in scrambling, whirling evolutions, down, thumping upon the rocky

shingle beneath, from which they bounded as they struck, like so many

rubber balls. Two of them never moved after the rebound ceased; but

the third one reached the water and swam away swift as a bird on the

wing.

While they seem to escape without bodily injury incident to such

hard falls as ensue from dropping fifty or sixty feet upon pebbly

beaches and rough boulders below, and even greater elevations, yet

I am inclined to think that some internal injuries are necessarily

sustained in almost every case, which soon develop and cause death.

The excitement and the vitality of the seal at the moment of the

terrific shock are able to sustain and conceal a real injury for the

time being.

Driving the “holluschickie” on St. George, owing to the relative

scantiness of hauling area for those animals there, and consequent

small numbers found upon these grounds at any one time, is a very

arduous series of daily exercises on the part of the natives who

attend to it. Glancing at the map, the marked considerable distance

over an exceedingly rough road will be noticed between Zapadnie and

the village, yet in 1872 eleven different drives across the island of

four hundred to five hundred seals each were made in the short four

weeks of that season.

The peculiarly rough character to this trail is given by large,

loose, sharp-edged basaltic boulders which are strewn thickly over

all those lower levels that bridge the island between the high bluffs

at Starry Arteel and the slopes of Ahluckeyak Hill. The summits of

the two broader, higher plateaux, east and west respectively, are

comparatively smooth and easy to travel over, and so is the sea-level

flat at Zapadnie itself. On the map of St. George a number of very

small ponds will be noticed. They are the fresh-water reservoirs

of the island. The two largest of these are near the summit of

this rough divide. The seal-trail from Zapadnie to the village

runs just west of them and comes out on the north shore, a little

to the eastward of the hauling-grounds of Starry Arteel, where it

forks and unites with that path. A direct line between the village

and Zapadnie, though nearly a mile shorter on the chart, is equal

to five miles more of distance by reason of its superlative rocky

inequalities.

One question is always sure to be asked in this connection. The

query is: “At the present rate of killing seals it will not be

long ere they are exterminated—how much longer will they last?” My

answer is now as it was then: “Provided matters are conducted on the

Seal Islands in the future as they are to-day, 100,000 male seals

under the age of five years and over one may be safely taken every

year from the Pribylov Islands without the slightest injury to the

regular birth-rate or natural increase thereon; provided also that

the fur-seals are not visited by plagues or by pests, or any such

abnormal cause for their destruction, which might be beyond the

control of men, and to which, like any other great body of animal

life, they must ever be subjected to the danger of.”[129] From my

calculations given above it will be seen that 1,000,000 pups or

young seals, in round numbers, are born upon these islands of the

Pribylov group every year. Of this million, one-half are males.

These 500,000 young males, before they leave the islands for sea

during October and November, and when they are between five or six

months old, fat, and hardy, have suffered but a trifling loss in

numbers—say one per cent.—while on and about the islands of their

birth, surrounding which and upon which they have no enemies whatever

to speak of; but after they get well down to the Pacific, spread out

over an immense area of watery highways in quest of piscatorial food,

they form the most helpless of their kind to resist or elude the

murderous teeth and carnivorous attacks of basking sharks[130] and

killer-whales.[131] By these agencies, during their absence from the

islands until their reappearance in the following year, and in July,

they are so perceptibly diminished in number that I do not think,

fairly considered, more than one-half of the legion which left the

ground of their birth last October come up the next July to these

favorite landing-places—that is, only 250,000 of them return out

of the 500,000 born last year. The same statement in every respect

applies to the going and the coming of the 500,000 female pups, which

are identical in size, shape, and behavior.

As yearlings, however, these 250,000 survivors of last year’s birth

have become strong, lithe, and active swimmers, and when they again

leave the hauling grounds, as before, in the fall, they are fully as

able as are the older class to take care of themselves, and when they

reappear next year, at least 225,000 of them safely return in the

second season after birth. From this on I believe that they live out

their natural lives of fifteen to twenty years each, the death-rate

now caused by the visitation of marine enemies affecting them in the

aggregate but slightly. And, again, the same will hold good touching

the females, the average natural life of which, however, I take to be

only nine or ten years each.

Out of these two hundred and twenty-five thousand young males we

are required to save only one-fifteenth of their number to pass

over to the breeding-grounds, and meet there the two hundred and

twenty-five thousand young females; in other words, the polygamous

habit of this animal is such that, by its own volition, I do not

think that more than one male annually out of fifteen born is needed

on the breeding-grounds in the future; but in my calculations, to be

within the margin and to make sure that I save two-year-old males

enough every season, I will more than double this proportion, and

set aside every fifth one of the young males in question. That will

leave one hundred and eighty thousand seals, in good condition, that

can be safely killed every year, without the slightest injury to

the perpetuation of the stock itself forever in all of its original

integrity.

In the above showing I have put a very extreme estimate upon that

loss sustained at sea by the pup-seals—too large, I am morally

certain; but, in attempting to draw this line safely, I wish to place

the matter in the very worst light in which it can be put, and to

give the seals the full benefit of every doubt. Surely I have clearly

presented the case, and certainly no one will question the premises

after they have studied the habit and disposition of the rookeries;

hence, it is a positive and tenable statement, that no danger of

the slightest appreciable degree of injury to the interests of the

Government on the Seal Islands of Alaska exists, as long as the

present law protecting it, and the management executing it, continues.

These fur-seals of the Pribylov group, after leaving the islands in

the autumn and early winter, do not visit land again until the time

of their return, in the following spring and early summer, to these

same rookery and hauling-grounds, unless they touch, as they are

navigating their lengthened journey back, at the Russian Islands,

Copper and Bering, seven hundred miles to the westward of the

Pribylov group. They leave our islands by independent squads, each

one looking out for itself. Apparently all turn by common consent

to the south, disappearing toward the horizon, and are soon lost in

the vast expanse below, where they spread themselves over the entire

Pacific as far south as the 48th and even the 47th parallels of

north latitude: within this immense area between Japan and Oregon,

doubtless, many extensive submarine fishing-shoals and banks are

known to them; at least, it is definitely understood that Bering

Sea does not contain them long when they depart from the breeding

rookeries and the hauling-grounds therein. While it is carried in

mind that they sleep and rest in the water with soundness and with

the greatest comfort on its surface, and that even when around the

land, during the summer, they frequently put off from the beaches to

take a bath and a quiet snooze just beyond the surf, we can readily

agree that it is no inconvenience whatever, when the reproductive

functions have been discharged, and their coats renewed, for them

to stay the balance of the time in their most congenial element—the

briny deep.

That these animals are preyed upon extensively by killer-whales

(_Orca gladiator_), in especial, and by sharks, and probably other

submarine foes now unknown, is at once evident; for, were they not

held in check by some such cause, they would, as they exist to-day

on St. Paul, quickly multiply, by arithmetical progression, to so

great an extent that the island, nay, Bering Sea itself, could not

contain them. The present annual killing of one hundred thousand out

of a yearly total of over a million males does not, in an appreciable

degree, diminish the seal-life, or interfere in the slightest with

its regular, sure perpetuation on the breeding-grounds every year.

We may, therefore, properly look upon this aggregate of four and

five millions of fur-seals, as we see them every season on these

Pribylov Islands, as that maximum limit of increase assigned to them

by natural law. The great equilibrium which nature holds in life upon

this earth must be sustained at St. Paul as well as elsewhere.

Think of the enormous food-consumption of these rookeries and

hauling-grounds; what an immense quantity of finny prey must pass

down their voracious throats as every year rolls by! A creature so

full of life, strung with nerves, muscles like bands of steel, cannot

live on air, or absorb it from the sea. Their food is fish, to the

practical exclusion of all other diet. I have never seen them touch,

or disturb with the intention of touching it, one solitary example in

the flocks of water-fowl which rest upon the surface of the water all

about the islands. I was especially careful in noting this, because

it seemed to me that the canine armature of their mouths must suggest

flesh for food at times as well as fish; but fish we know they eat.

Whole windrows of the heads of cod and wolf-fishes, bitten off by

these animals at the nape, were washed up on the south shore of St.

George during a gale in the summer of 1873. This pelagic decapitation

evidently marked the progress and the appetite of a band of fur-seals

to the windward of the island, as they passed into and through a

stray school of these fishes.

How many pounds per diem is required by an adult seal, and taken

by it when feeding, is not certain in my mind. Judging from the

appetite, however, of kindred animals, such as sea-lions fed in

confinement at Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, I can safely say

that forty pounds for a full-grown fur-seal is a fair allowance,

with at least ten or twelve pounds per diem to every adult female,

and not much less, if any, to the rapidly growing pups and young

“holluschickie.” Therefore, this great body of four and five millions

of hearty, active animals which we know on the Seal Islands, must

consume an enormous amount of such food every year. They cannot

average less than ten pounds of fish per diem, which gives the

consumption, as exhibited by their appetite, of over six million

tons of fish every year! What wonder, then, that nature should do

something to hold these active fishermen in check.[132]

During the winter solstice—between the lapse of the autumnal and

the verging of the vernal equinoxes—in order to get this enormous

food-supply, the fur-seals are necessarily obliged to disperse over

a very large area of fishing-ground, ranging throughout the North

Pacific, five thousand miles across between Japan and the Straits

of Fuca. In feeding, they are brought to the southward all this

time; and, as they go, they come more and more in contact with those

natural enemies peculiar to the sea of these southern latitudes,

which are almost strangers and are really unknown to the waters of

Bering Sea; for I did not observe, with the exception of ten or

twelve perhaps, certainly no more, killer-whales, a single marine

disturbance, or molestation, during the three seasons which I passed

upon the islands, that could be regarded in the slightest degree

inimical to the peace and life of the _Pinnipedia_; and thus, from my

observation, I am led to believe that it is not until they descend

well to the south of the Aleutian Islands, and in the North Pacific,

that they meet with sharks to any extent, and are diminished by the

butchery of the killer whales.

But I did observe a very striking exhibition, however, of this

character one afternoon while looking over Lukannon Bay. I saw a

“killer” chasing the alert “holluschickie” out beyond the breakers,

when suddenly, in an instant, the cruel cetacean was turned toward

the beach in hot pursuit, and in less time than this is read the ugly

brute was high and dry upon the sands. The natives were called, and a

great feast was in prospect when I left the carcass.

But this was the only instance of the orca in pursuit of seals that

came directly under my observation; hence, though it does undoubtedly

capture a few here every year, yet it is an insignificant cause of

destruction, on account of its rarity.

The young fur-seals going out to sea for the first time, and

following in the wake of their elders, are the clumsy members of

the family. When they go to sleep on the surface of the water, they

rest much sounder than the others; and their alert and wary nature,

which is handsomely developed ere they are two seasons old, is in

its infancy. Hence, I believe that vast numbers of them are easily

captured by marine foes, as they are stupidly sleeping, or awkwardly

fishing.

I must not be understood as saying that fish alone constitute the

diet of the Pribylov pinnipeds; I know that they feed, to a limited

extent, upon crustaceans and upon the squid (_Loligo_), also eating

tender algoid sprouts; I believe that the pup-seals live for the

first five or six months at sea largely, if not wholly, upon

crustaceans and squids; they are not agile enough, in my opinion, to

fish successfully, in any great degree, when they first depart from

the rookeries.

In this connection I wish to record an impression very strongly

made upon my mind, in regard to their diverse behavior when out at

sea away from the islands, and when congregated thereon. As I have

plainly exhibited in the foregoing, they are practically without fear

of man when he visits them on the land of their birth and recreation;

but the same seal that noticed you with quiet indifference at St.

Paul, in June and July, and the rest of the season while he was

there, or gambolled around your boat when you rowed from the ship

to shore, as a dog will play about your horses when you drive from

the gate to the house, that same seal, when you meet him in one of

the passes of the Aleutian chain, one hundred or two hundred miles

away from here, as the case may be, or to the southward of that

archipelago, is the shyest and wariest creature your ingenuity can

define. Happy are you in getting but a single glimpse of him, first;

you will never see him after, until he hauls out, and winks and

blinks across Lukannon sands.