USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 46
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When sleeping on drifting ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean, or on rocks at St. Matthew's or Walrus Island, they resort to a very sin- gular method of keeping guard, if I may so term it. In this herd of three or four hundred male walrus that were beneath my vision, though nearly all were sleeping, yet the movement of one would disturb the other, which would raise its head in a stupid manner for a few moments, grunt once or twice, and before lying down to sleep again it would strike the slumbering form of its nearest com- panion with its tusks, causing that animal to rouse up in turn for a few moments also, grunt, and pass the blow on to the next, lying down in the same manner. Thus the word was transferred, as it were, constantly and unceasingly around, always keeping some one or two aroused, which consequently were more alert than the rest.
On Walrus Island a particularly large individual walrus was se- lected and shot, out of a herd of more than two hundred. This was done at the author's instance, who made the following memoranda : It measured twelve feet seven inches from its bluff nostrils to the tip of its excessively abbreviated tail, which was not more than two and one-half or three inches long ; it had the surprising girth of fourteen feet. An immense mass of blubber on the shoulders and around the neck made the head look strangely small in propor- tion, and the posteriors decidedly attenuated; indeed, the whole weight of the animal was bound up in its girth anteriorly. It was a physical impossibility for me to weigh this brute, and I therefore can do nothing but make a guess, having this fact to guide me- that the head, cut directly off at the junction with the spine, or the occipital or atlas joint, weighed eighty pounds ; that the skin, which
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I carefully removed with the aid of these natives, with the head, weighed five hundred and seventy pounds. Deducting the head and excluding the flippers, I think it is safe to say that the skin it- self would not weigh less than three hundred and fifty pounds, and the animal could not weigh much less than a ton, from two thou- sand to two thousand two hundred pounds.
The head had a decidedly flattened appearance, for the nostrils, eyes, and ear-spots seem to be placed nearly on top of the cranium. The nasal apertures are literally so, opening directly over the muz- zle. They are oval, and closed parallel with the longitudinal axis of the skull, and when dilated are about an inch in their greatest di- ameter.
The eyes are small, but prominent ; placed nearly on top of the head, and, protruding from their sockets, they bulge like those of a lobster. The iris and pupil of this eye is less than one-fourth of its exposed surface ; the sclerotic coat swells out from under the lids when they are opened, and is of a dirty, mottled coffee-yellow and brown, with an occasional admixture of white ; the iris itself is light-brown, with dark-brown rays and spots. I noticed that when- ever the animal roused itself, instead of turning its head, it only rolled its eyes, seldom moving the cranium more than to elevate it. The eyes seem to move, rotating in every direction when the creat- ure is startled, giving the face of this monster a very extraordi- nary attraction, especially when studied by an artist. The expression is just indescribable. The range of sight enjoyed by the walrus out of water, I can testify, is not well developed, for, after throw- ing small chips of rock down upon the walruses near me, several of them not being ten feet distant, and causing them only to stu- pidly stare and give vent to low grunts of astonishment, I then rose gently and silently to my feet, standing boldly up before them ; but then, even, I was not noticed, though their eyes rolled all over from above to under me. Had I, however, made a little noise, or had I been standing as far as one thousand yards away from them to the windward, they would have taken the alarm instantly, and tumbled off into the sea like so many hustled wool-sacks, for their sense of smell is of the keen, keenest.
The ears of the walrus, or rather the auricles to the ears, are on the same lateral line at the top of the head with the nostrils and eyes, the latter being just midway between. The pavilion, or auricle, is a mere fleshy wrinkle or fold, not at all raised or devel- 29
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oped : and from what I could see of the meatus externus it was very narrow and small; still, the natives assured me that the Otariidae had no better organs of hearing than Rosmarus.
The head of the male walrus, to which I have alluded, and from which I afterward removed the skin, was eighteen inches long be- tween the nostrils and the post-occipital region ; and, although its enormous tusks seemed to be firmly planted in their osseous sockets, judge of my astonishment when one of the younger natives flippantly struck a tusk with a wooden club quite smartly, and then easily jerked the tooth forth. I had frequently observed that it was difficult to keep such teeth from rattling out of their alveoli in any of the best skulls I had gathered of the fur seals and sea-lions, especially difficult in the case of the latter.
Its tusks, or canines, are set firmly under the nostril-apertures in deep, massive, bony pockets, giving that strange, broad, square- cut front of the muzzle so characteristic of its physiognomy.
The upper lips of this walrus of Bering Sea are exceedingly thick and gristly, and its bluff, square muzzle is studded, in regu- lar rows and intervals, with a hundred or so, short, stubby, gray- white bristles, varying in length from one-half to three inches. There are a few very short and much softer bristles set, also, on the fairly hidden chin of its lower jaw, which closes up under a projecting snout and muzzle, and is nearly concealed by the enor- mous tushes, when laterally viewed.
The thickness of the skin of the walrus is a marked and most anomalous feature. I remember well how surprised I was, when I followed the incision of a broad-axe used in beheading the speci- men shot for my benefit, to find that the skin over its shoulders and around the throat and chest was three inches thick-a puffy, spongy epidermis, outwardly hateful to the sight, and inwardly rest- ing upon a slightly acrid fat or blubber so peculiar to this animal. Nowhere was that hide, upon the thinnest point of measurement, less than half an inch thick. It feeds exclusively upon shell- fish (Lamellibranchiata), or clams principally, and also upon the bulbous roots and tender stalks of certain marine plants and grasses which grow in great abundance over the bottoms of broad, shallow lagoons and bays of the main Alaskan coast. I took from the paunch of the walrus above mentioned more than a bushel of crushed clams in their shells, all of which that animal had evidently just swallowed, for digestion had scarcely commenced. Many of
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those clams in that stomach, large as my clinched hands, were not even broken ; and it is in digging this shell-fish food that the ser- vices rendered by its enormous tusks become apparent .*
I am not in accord with some singular tales told, on the Atlan- tic side, about the uses of these gleaming ivory teeth, so famous and conspicuous : I believe that the Alaskan walrus employs them solely in his labor of digging clams and rooting bulbs from those muddy oozes and sand-bars in the estuary waters peculiar to his geographical distribution. Certainly, it is difficult for me to rec- oncile my idea of such uncouth, timid brutes, as were those spread before me on Walrus Islet, with any of the strange chapters written as to the ferocity and devilish courage of a Greenland "morse." These animals were exceedingly cowardly, abjectly so. It is with the greatest difficulty that the natives, when a herd of walruses are surprised, can get a second shot at them. So far from clustering in attack around their boats, it is the very reverse, and a hunter's only solicitude is which way to travel in order that he may come up with the fleeing animals as they rise to breathe.
On questioning the natives, as we returned, they told me that the walrus of Bering Sea was monogamous, and that the difference between the sexes in size, color, and shape is inconsiderable ; or, in other words, that until the males are old the young males and the females of all ages are not remarkably distinct, and would not be at all if it were not for their teeth. They said that the female brings
* It is, and always will be, a source of sincere regret to me and my friends that I did not bodily preserve this huge panneh and its contents. It would have filled a half-barrel very snugly, and then its mass of freshly swallowed elams (Mya truncata), filmy streaks of macerated kelp, and fragments of erus- taceans, could have been carefully examined during a week of leisure at the Smithsonian Institution. It was, however, ripped open so quickly by one of the Alentes, who kieked the contents out, that I hardly knew what had been done ere the strong-smelling subjeet was directly under my nose. The natives then were anxious that I should hurry through with my sketches, measurements, ete., so that they might the sooner push off their egg-laden bidarrah and cross back to the main island before the fogs would settle over our homeward track, or the rapidly rising wind shift to the northward and imperil our passage. Weighty reasons these, which so fully impressed me, that this unique stomach of a carnivora was overlooked and left behind ; hence, with the exeeption of curiously turning over the clams (especially those unerushed specimens), which formed the great bulk of its contents, I have no memoranda or even distinct recollection of the other materials that were incorporated.
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forth her young, a single calf, in June usually, on the ice-floes in the Arctic Ocean, above Bering Straits, between Point Barrow and Cape Seartze Kammin ; that this calf resembles the parent in gen- eral proportions and color when it is hardly over six weeks old, but that the tusks (which give it its most distinguishing expression) are not visible until the second year of its life ; that the walrus mother is strongly attached to her offspring, and nurses it later through the season in the sea ; that the walrus sleeps profoundly in the water, floating almost vertically, with barely more than the nostrils above water, and can be easily approached, if care is taken as to the wind, so as to spear it or thrust a lance into its bowels ; that the bulls do not fight as savagely as the fur-seal or the sea-lion ; that the blunted tusks of these combatants seldom do more than bruise their thick hides ; that they can remain under water nearly an hour, or about twice as long as the seals, and that they sink like so many stones immediately after being shot at sea.
I personally made no experiments touching the peculiarity of sinking immediately after being shot. Of course, on reflection, it will appear to any mind that all seals, no matter how fat or how lean, would sink instantly out of sight, if not killed, at the shock of a bullet ; even if mortally wounded, the great involuntary impulse of brain and muscle would be to dive and speed away, for all swim- ming is submarine when pinnipeds desire to travel.
Touching this mooted question, I had an opportunity when in Port Townsend, during 1874, to ask a man who had served as a partner in a fur-sealing schooner off the Straits of Fuca. He told me that unless a seal was instantly killed by the passage of his rifle-bullet through its brain, it was never secured, and would sink before they could reach the bubbling wake of its disappearance. If, however, the aim of a marksman had been correct, then its body was invariably taken within five to ten minutes after the rifle dis- charge. Only one man does the shooting; the rest of such a crew, ten to twelve white men and Indians, man canoes and boats which are promptly despatched from the schooner, after each re- port, in the direction of a victim. How long one of the bodies of these " clean " killed seals would float he did not know; the practice always was to get it as quickly as possible, fearing that the bearings of its position, when shot from a schooner, might be confused or lost. He also affirmed that, in his opinion, there were not a dozen men on the whole northwest coast who were good
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enough with a rifle, and expert at distance calculation, to shoot fur- seals successfully from the deck of a vessel on the ocean. The Indians of Cape Flattery do most of their pelagic fur-sealing by cautiously approaching from the leeward when these animals are asleep, and then throw line-darts or harpoons into them before they awaken.
The finest bidarrah skin-boats of transportation that I have seen in this country were those of the St. Lawrence natives. These were made out of dressed walrus-hides, shaved and pared down by them to the requisite thickness, so that when they were sewed with sinews to the wooden whalebone-lashed frames of such boats they dried into a pale greenish-white prior to oiling, and were even then almost translucent, tough and strong.
When I stepped, for the first time, into the baidar of St. Paul Island, and went ashore, from the Alexander, over a heavy sea, safely to the lower bight of Lukannon Bay, my sensations were of emphatic distrust ; the partially water-softened skin-covering would puff up between the wooden ribs, and then draw back, as the waves rose and fell, so much like an unstable support above the cold, green water below, that I frankly expressed my surprise at such an outlandish craft. My thoughts quickly turned to a higher ap- preciation of those hardy navigators who used these vessels in cir- cumpolar seas years ago, and of the Russians who, more recently, employed bidarrahs chiefly to explore Alaskan and Kamchatkan terra incognita. There is an old poem in Avitus, written by a Roman as early as 445 A.D. ; it describes the ravages of Saxon pirates along the southern coasts of Britain, who used just such vessels as this bidarrah of St. Paul.
" Quin et armoriens piratim Saxona tractus Spirabat, cui pelle falum fulcare Britannum Ludus, et assuto glaucum mare findere lembo."
These boats were probably covered with either horse's or bulls' hides. When used in England they were known as coracles; in Ireland they were styled curachs. Pliny tells us that Cæsar moved his army in Britain over lakes and rivers in such boats. Even the Greeks used them, terming them karabia ; and the Russian word of korabl', or " ship," is derived from it. King Alfred, in 870-872, tells us that the Finns made sad havoc among many Swedish set- tlements on the numerous "meres " (lakes) in the moors of that
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country, by " carrying their ships (baidars) overland to the meres whence they make depredations on the Northmen ; their ships are small and very light."
Until I saw these bidarrahs of the St. Lawrence natives, in 1874, I was more or less inclined to believe that the tough, thick, and spongy hide of a walrus would be too refractory in dressing for use in covering such light frames, especially those of the bidarka ; but the manifest excellence and seaworthiness of those Eskimo boats satisfied me that I was mistaken. I saw, however, abundant evidence of a much greater labor required to tan or pare down this thick cuticle to that thin, dense transparency so marked on their bidarrahs ; for the pelt of a hair-seal, or sea-lion, does not need any more attention, when applied to this service, than that of simply unhairing it. This is done by first sweating the "loughtak " in piles, then rudely, but rapidly, scraping with blunt knives or stone flensers the hair off in large patches at every stroke ; the skin is then air-dried, being stretched on a stout frame, where, in the lapse of a few weeks, it becomes as rigid as a board. When- ever wanted for use thereafter, it is soaked in water until soft or "green " again ; then it is sewed with sinews, while in this fresh condition, tightly over the slight wooden skeleton of the bidarka or the heavier frame of a bidarrah. In this manner all boats and lighters at the islands are covered. Then they are air-dried thor- oughly before oiling, which is done when the skin has become well indurated, so as to bind the ribs and keel as with an iron plating. The thick, unrefined seal-oil keeps the water out for twelve to twenty hours, according to the character of the hides. When, however, the skin-covering begins to " bag in " between the ribs of its frame, then it is necessary to haul the bidarrah out and air-dry it again, and then re-oil. If attended to thoroughly and constant- ly, those skin-covered boats are the best species of lighter which can be used in these waters, for they will stand more thumping and pounding on the rocks and alongside ship than all wooden, or even corrugated-iron, lighters could endure and remain seaworthy.
The flesh of the walrus is not, to our palate, at all toothsome ; it is positively uninviting. That flavor of the raw, rank mollusca, upon which it feeds, seems to permeate every fibre of its flesh, mak- ing it very offensive to the civilized palate ; but the Eskimo, who do not have any of our squeamishness, regard it as highly and feed upon it as steadily, as we do on our own best corn-fed beef. Indeed,
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the walrus to an Eskimo answers just as the cocoa-palm does to a South Sea islander : it feeds him, it clothes him, it heats and illuminates his "igloo, " and it arms him for the chase, while he builds a summer shelter and rides upon the sea by virtue of its hide. The morse, however, is not of much account to the seal-hunters on the Pribylov Islands. They still find, by stirring up the sand-
St Lawrence 1.
Newack's Brother, with a Sealskin full of Walrus-oil. [Muhlemoot boy-fourteen or fifteen years of age.]
dunes and digging about them at Northeast Point, all the ivory that they require for their domestic use on the islands, nothing else be- longing to a walrus being of the slightest economic value to them. Some authorities have spoken well of walrus-meat as an article of diet. Either they had that sauce for it born of inordinate hunger, or else the cooks deceived them. Starving explorers in the arctic regions could relish it-they would thankfully and gladly eat any- thing that was juicy, and sustained life, with zest and gastronomic
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fervor. The Eskimo naturally like it; it is a necessity to their existence, and thus a relish for it is acquired. I can readily under- stand, by personal experience, how a great many, perhaps a majority of our own people, could speak well, were they north, of seal-meat, of whale " rind," and of polar-bear steaks ; but I know that a mouth- ful of fresh or " cured " walrus-flesh would make their " gorges rise." The St. Paul natives refuse to touch it as an article of diet in any shape or manner. I saw them removing the enormous testicles of an old morse which was shot, for my purposes, on Walrus Island. They told me they did so in obedience to the wishes of a widow doctress at the village, Maria Seedova, who desired a pair for her incantations.
Curiosity, mingled with a desire to really understand, alone tempted me to taste some walrus-meat which was placed before me at Poonook, on St. Lawrence Island ; and candor compels me to say that it was worse than the old beaver's tail which I had been victimized with in British Columbia, worse than the tough brown- bear steak of Bristol Bay-in fact, it is the worst of all fresh flesh of which I know. It had a strong flavor of an indefinite acrid nature, which turned my palate and my stomach instantaneously and simultaneously, while the surprised natives stared in bewildered silence at their astonished and disgusted guest. They, however, greedily put chunks, two inches square and even larger, of this flesh and blubber into their mouths as rapidly as the storage room there would permit ; and with what grimy gusto ! as the corners of their large lips dripped with the fatness of their feeding. How little they thought, then, that in a few short seasons they would die of starvation, sitting in these same igloos-their caches empty and nothing but endless fields of barren ice where a life-giving sea should be. The winter of 1879-80 was one of exceptional rigor in the Arctic, although in the United States it was unusually mild and open. The ice closed in solid around St. Lawrence Island-so firm and unshaken by the giant leverage of wind and tide that all walrus were driven far to the southward and eastward beyond the reach of those unhappy inhabitants of that island, who, thus unexpect- edly deprived of their mainstay and support, seemed to have mis- erably starved to death then, with an exception of one small village on the north shore: thus, the residents of Poonook, Poogovellyak, and Kagallegak settlements perished, to a soul, from hunger ; nearly three hundred men, women, and children. I recall that visit
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which I made to these alert Innuits, August, 1874, with sadness, in this unfortunate connection, because they impressed me with their manifest superiority over the savages of our northwest coast. They seemed, then, to be living, during nine months of the year, almost
1
" Newack " and " Oogack."
[St. Lawrence Mahlemoots : pen portraits made at Poogovellyak, August, 1874.]
wholly upon the flesh and oil of the morse. Clean-limbed, bright- eyed, and jovial, they profoundly impressed me with their happy reliance and subsistence upon the walrus-herds of Bering Sea. I could not help remarking then, that these people had never been subjected to the temptations and subsequent sorrow of putting
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their trust in princes ; hence their independence and good heart. But now it appears that it will not do to put your trust in Rosmarus either.
I know that it is said by Parry, by Hall, and lately by others, that the flesh of the Atlantic walrus is palatable ; perhaps the nat- ure of its food-supply is the cause. We all recognize a wide differ- ence in pork from hogs fed on corn and those fed on beech- mast and oak-acorns, and those which have lived upon the offal of the slaughtering houses, or have gathered the decayed castings of the sea-shore; the sea-horse of Bering Sea lives upon that which does not give a pleasant flavor to its flesh.
The range of our Alaskan walrus now appears to be restricted in the Arctic Ocean to an extreme westward at Cape Chelagskoi, on the Siberian coast, and an extreme eastward between Point Barrow and the region of Point Beechey, on the Alaskan shore. It is, how- ever, substantially confined between Koliutchin Bay, Siberia, and Point Barrow, Alaska. As far as its distribution in polar waters is concerned, and how far to the north it travels from these coasts of two continents, I am unable to present any well-authenticated data illustrative of the subject ; the shores of Wrangel Island were found in possession of walrus-herds during the season of 1881.
This walrus has, however, a very wide range of distribution in Alaska, though not near so great as in prehistoric times. They abound to the eastward and southeastward of St. Paul, over in Bristol Bay, where great numbers congregate on the sand-bars and flats, now flooded, now bared by the rising and ebbing of the tide ; they are hunted here to a considerable extent for their ivory. No morse are found south of the Aleutian Islands ; still, not more than forty-five or fifty years ago, small gatherings of these animals were killed here and there on some islands between Kadiak and Oonimak Pass ; the greatest aggregate of them, south of Bering Straits, will always be found in the estuaries of Bristol Bay and on the north side of the peninsula of Alaska.
I have been frequently questioned whether, in my opinion, more than a short space of time would elapse ere the walrus was extermi- nated, or not, since our whalers had begun to hunt them in Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. To this I frankly make answer that I do not know enough of the subject to give a correct judgment. The walrus spend most of their time in waters that are within reach of these skilful and hardy navigators ; and if they (the walrus) are of
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sufficient value to a whaler, he can and undoubtedly will make a business of killing them, and work the same sad result that he has brought about with the mighty schools of cetacea which once whistled and bared their backs, throughout the now deserted waters of Bering Sea, in perfect peace and seclusion prior to 1842. The returns of the old Russian America Company show that an annual average of ten thousand walrus have been slain by the Eskimo since 1799 to 1867. There are a great many left yet ; but, unless the oil of Rosmarus becomes very precious commercially, I think the shoal waters of Bristol Bay and Kuskokvim mouth, together with the ec-
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