“I say, isn’t this jolly?” he cried, as, having performed his share of clearing up by wiping his knife on a wisp of grass, he lay back luxuriously on his yielding couch of moss and basked in the fireglow. “I’m sure I don’t know what a fellow could want in the way of camping out any better than this. We’ve a good shelter, comfortable beds, plenty to eat, an interesting country to explore, no one to bother us, the best fishing I ever heard of, and good shooting. You said there was plenty of game here, didn’t you, Serge?”
“I don’t know that I did,” answered the young Alaskan, “but there is. I found fresh caribou tracks to-day, and wherever there are caribou there are big brown bears as well――in fact, I saw what I am sure must be a bear road.”
“What do you mean?” asked Phil, showing his interest by rising into a sitting posture and gazing at the speaker.
“I mean what I said. A regular bear and caribou road. I never saw one before, but I have often heard hunters describe the well-beaten trail that starts away off on the mainland somewhere beyond the head of Cook Inlet and follows the Kenai peninsula for two or three hundred miles down to this very Strait of Krenitzin, and so to this island. Every summer many caribou follow it and come to Oonimak for the sake of the moss and lichens that grow here more luxuriantly than anywhere else. Wherever caribou go the bears follow, so I expect there are plenty of both on the island now.”
“Oh, if I only had a rifle!” sighed Phil. “Is there anything else in the way of game?”
“Not much; only sea-lions, and hair-seals, and foxes, and any quantity of sea-fowl, including ducks and geese, and now and then a sea-otter.”
“I call that a pretty fair list. By-the-way, what is a sea-otter? I don’t remember ever to have seen one.”
“Probably not,” laughed Serge. “Along the southern coast of these very islands is about the only place in the whole world where they are now found, and even here they are rarely seen. I tell you the hunter who gets a sea-otter nowadays is in great luck; and yet the only money or trade goods that the four or five thousand Aleuts of these islands ever see come to them in exchange for sea-otter skins. It is the only paying kind of hunting that is left entirely to the natives, and in which white men do not engage.”