The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-01-04

pick up others or to meet the first when it comes up, if it does. If l see 1 am going to have busy day I set my men to skinning when I have six seals in the boat; an ordinary fur seal will weigh about 125 pounds. A good skin ner will strip the pelt off and have the carcass overheard in five minutees. He runs the knife around the tail flip per, then rips the pelt up the belly to the jaw, then passes the knife around each of the forward dippers and then begins skinning much as one does the carcass of a steer. The pelt comes away easily and after reaching the flip pers, they are poked through the holes and the skin is taken from the head. When we return at might the skins are counted and the captain and mates salt and put them away.
 "Of course I am speaking of pelagic sealing hunting in the open sea, and it is against the law for Americans to do that, but not for other nations We follow the herd up the coast until we sight a cutter and then-kiling seals at the rookeries is easier than knocking a pig in the head at the slaughter houses and is sheer butchery. You can read all about it in books; what am telling now is known only to the men engaged in it.
 Sea otter hunting is more dangerous than seal hunting and of late has be- come losing proposition. Sea otter are almost extinct along the Pacific coast from Mexico to Alaska. I saw an otter skin once that sold for $1 900 in London. the raw pelt, too; it was a beauty though, fur unusually thick and the color lighter than the blue of a maltese kitten. The best skin I ever killed sold for $500, l remember the time when sea otter were plenty. off the Chtrikoffs in S7 we run on to about 400. It was late in the after noon, and the captain who happened to be with one of the boats, signalled to return quietly to the schooner. He said we would not scatter the herd that night, it was so late that we could hope J, to get only few, but we would be out bright and early in the morning. Well sir, do you know that the blasted Indians from Cherikoff got on to the herd some way and went into it with their lances. The next morning we could not find single otter
 "Otter range differently on different coasts. Off Japan and Kamchatka we find them we'll off shore in deep water but on the American coast they are | found close in shore in and on the kelp Some carry six or eight boats on an ot. 1 ter huntingcruise, but in my experience l four boats are enough. In hunting otter we use the ordinary, high power repeating rifles; one never gets near l enough to use shot gun. The fouI boats leave the schooner abreast and about 400 yards apart, which formation they keep for miles. If an outside boat sights an otter 1t pulls or sails within shooting distance and the hunter fires; l if he misses the otter dives, the boat is driven rapidly ahead 200 yards or more beyond where the otter went down. The next boat pulls to where the other was last seen, the third boat pulls straight ahead even with the first boat and then pulls even with the one behind, thus forming a square in which the otter is sure to come up, as they never stay 1 down more than ten minutes. The sig nal, when an otter is sighted, is the raising of an oar perpendicularly.
 q have been lost on the sea nine times I was one of the crew or the c. G. White that sailed from San Fran cisco in go for the Kormandorski group the Boring and Copper Islands prob- ably the first schooner to fit out here for sealing on the Siberian coast, We reached the vicinity of the islands all right twenty men, all told, Seals ot the Siberian coast seldom cross the 1 1S0th meridian, but range south from their rookeries and return in the spring The herd was pretty well north when we picked it up one fine morning. We were then about forty-fve miles of Cooper Island. Six boats put out, three men to the boat leaving Captain flag man and the cabin boy in charge of the schooner, We caught up with the herd all right, but about 10 o'clock in the morning a strong southeast wind came up, kicking up a nasty sea. We saw we | could not return to the schooner and thought to ride out the blow until she could come along and pick us up.
 "A little after noon a thick for settled down, and we could see scarcely a boa length ahead. A few minutes before il shut down I had signaled the other: