ilder
the turmoil of spray and billows, the more sea-otter would be driven to
refuge on the kelp fields. Cross tides like a whirlpool ran on this
coast when whipped by the winds. Not a sound from the sea-otter
hunters! Silently, like sea-birds glorying in the tempest, the canoes
bounded from crest to crest of the rolling seas, always taking care not
to be caught broadsides by the smashing combers, or swamped between
waves in the churning seas. How it happened is not known, but somehow
between wind and tide-rip, thirty of the canoes {330} that rode over a
billow and swept down to the trough never came up. A flaw of wind had
caught the mountain billows; the sixty hunters went under. From where
he was, Baranof saw the disaster, saw the terror of the other two
hundred men, saw the rising storm, and at a glance measured that it was
farther back to the sloops than on towards the dangerous shore. The
sea-otter hunt was forgotten in the impending catastrophe to the entire
brigade. Signal and shout confused in the thunder of the surf ordered
the men to paddle for their lives inshore. Night was coming on. The
distance was longer than Baranof had thought, and it was dark before
the brigades landed, and the men flung themselves down, totally
exhausted, to sleep on the drenched sands.

Barely were the hunters asleep when the shout of Kolosh Indians from
the forests behind told of ambush. The mainland hostiles resenting
this invasion of their hunting-fields, had watched the storm drive the
canoes to land. On one side was the tempest, on the other the forest
thronged with warriors. The Aleuts lost their heads and dashed for
hiding in the woods, only to find certain death. Baranof and the
Russians with him fired off their muskets till all powder was used.
Then they shouted in the Aleut dialect for the hunters to embark. The
sea was the lesser danger. By morning the brigades had joined the
sloops on the offing. Thirteen more canoes had been lost in the ambush.

{331} Such was the inauspicious introduction for Baranof to the
founding of the new Russian fort at Sitka or Norfolk Sound. It was the
end of May before the brigades glided into the sheltered, shadowy
harbor, where Chirikoff's men had been lost fifty years before. A
furious storm of snow and sleet raged over the harbor. When the storm
cleared, impenetrable forests were seen to the water-line, and great
trunks of trees swirled out to sea. On the ocean side to