bellows, but his legs are ill developed
from the cramped posture of knees in the manhole. Indeed, more than
knees go under the manhole. When pressed for room, the Aleut has been
known to crawl head foremost, body whole, right under the manhole and
lie there prone between the feet of the paddlers with nothing between
him and the abysmal depths of a hissing sea but the parchment keel of
the bidarka, thin as paper.

How do these thin skin boats escape wreckage on a sea where tide-rip
washes over the reefs all summer and ice hummocks sweep out from the
shore in winter tempest? To begin with, the frost that creates the ice
clears the air of fog, and the steel-shod pole either sheers the
bidarka off from the ice, or the ice off from the bidarka. Then, when
the fog lies knife-thick over the dangerous rocks in summer time, there
is a certain signal to these deep-sea plunderers. The huge Pacific
walrus--the largest species of walrus in the world--lie in herds of
hundreds on these danger rocks, and the walrus snorts through the gray
mist like a continual fog-horn. No better danger signal exists among
the rocks of the North Pacific than this same snorting walrus, who for
all his noise and size is a floundering coward. The great danger to
the nutshell skin's is from becoming ice-logged when the sleet storms
fall and freeze; and for the rest, the sea makes small matter of a
hunter more or less.

{74} No landsman's still-hunt affords the thrilling excitement of the
otter hunter's spearing-surrounds. Fifteen or twenty-five little skin
skiffs, with two or three men in each, paddle out under a chief elected
by common consent. Whether fog or clear, the spearing is done only in
calm weather. The long line of bidarkas circles silently over the
silver sea. Not a word is spoken, not a paddle blade allowed to click
against the bone gun'els of the skiff. Double-bladed paddles are
frequently used, so shift of paddle is made from side to side of the
canoe without a change of hands. The skin shallops take to the water
as noiselessly as the glide of a duck. Yonder, where the boulders lie
mile on mile awash in the surf, kelp rafts--forests of seaweed--lift
and fall with the rhythmical wash of the tide. Hither the otter
hunters steer, silent as shadows. The circle widens, deploys, forms a
cordon round the outermost rim of the kelp fields. Suddenly a black
object is seen floating on the surface of the waters--a sea-otter
asleep. Q