Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles above Fort Vancouver, but learned that it was not unusual for these animals to ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and Indians scattered along the river-banks kill them for their skin and blubber,--going out in boats for the purpose. My informant's boat had on one occasion taken an old seal nursing her calf. When the dam was towed to shore, the young one followed her, occasionally putting its fore-flippers on the gunwale to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and behaving with such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. It came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of its parent; no one had the heart to drive it away; so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from that time forward. After a while the party moved its position a distance of several miles while Jack was away in the river on a fishing-excursion, but there was no eluding him. The morning after the shift he came wagging into camp, a faithful and much-overjoyed, but exceedingly battered and used-up seal. He had evidently sought his friends by rock and flood the entire night preceding.
Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a sudden human interest in some gracefully modelled canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook Indians from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled by a square sail learned of the whites. Knowing the natural, ingrained laziness of Indians, one can imagine the delight with which they comprehended that substitute for the paddle. After all, this may perhaps be an ill-natured thing to say. Who does like to drudge when he can help it? Is not this very Wilson G. Hunt a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that he may presently stop drudging.
At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore under the more gradual steeps, on the lower ledges of the basaltic precipices, and on little rock-islands in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and scaffoldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. They left it in the open air without guard, as fearless of robbers as if the fish did not constitute their almost entire subsistence for the winter. And within their own tribes they have justification for this fearlessness. Their standard of honor is in most respects curiously adjustable,--but here virtue is defended by the necessities of life.