t to the surface.
The little kayaks would circle out silent as shadows over the silver
surface of the sea. A round head would bob up, or a bubble show where
a swimmer was moving below the surface. The kayaks would narrow their
surrounding circle. Presently a head would appear. The hunter nearest
would deal the death-stroke with his steel gaff, and the quarry would
be drawn in. But it was in the storm hunt over the kelp-beds that the
wildest work went on. Through the fiercest storm scudded bidarkies and
kayaks, meeting the herds of sea-otter as they drove before the gale.
To be sure, the bidarkies filled and foundered; the kayaks were ripped
on the teeth of the rock reefs. But the sea took no account of its
dead; neither did the Russians. Only the Aleut women and children wept
for the loss of the hunters who never returned; and sea-otter hunting
decreased the population of the Aleutian Islands by thousands. It was
as fatal to the Indian as to the sea-otter. Two hundred thousand
sea-otters were taken by the Russians in half a century. Kadiak
yielded as many as 6000 pelts in a single year; Oonalaska, 3000; the
Pribylovs, 5000; Sitka used to yield 15,000 a {38} year. To-day there
are barely 200 a year found from the Commander Islands to Sitka.

It may be imagined that Russian criminals were not easy masters to the
simple Aleut women and children who were held as hostages in camp to
guarantee a good hunt. Brandy flowed like water, the Czar was far
away, and it was a land with no law but force. The Russian hunters
cast conscience and fear to the winds. Who could know? God did not
seem to see; and it was two thousand miles to the home fort in
Kamchatka. When the hunt was poor, children were brained with clubbed
rifles, women knouted to death before the eyes of husbands and fathers.
In 1745 a whole village of Aleuts had poison put in their food by the
Russians. The men were to eat first, and when they perished the women
and children would be left as slaves to the Russians. A Cossack,
Pushkareff, brought a ship out for the merchant Betshevin in 1762, and,
in punishment for the murder of several brutal members of the crew by
the Aleuts, he kidnapped twenty-five of their women. Then, as storm
drove him towards Kamchatka, he feared to enter the home port with such
a damning human cargo. So he promptly marooned fourteen victims on a
rocky coast, {39} and binding the others hand and foot, threw them into
the sea.