But while the spearing-surround was chiefly followed in battalions under the direction of a trading company, the clubbing was done by the individuals--the dauntless hunters, who scudded out in twos and threes in the wake of the blast, lost themselves in the shattering sheets of spray, with the wind screaming mad riot in their ears { 77} and the roily rollers running a mill-race against tide and wind. How did they steer their cockle-shell skiffs--these Vikings of the North Pacific; or did they steer at all, or only fly before the gale on the wings of the mad north winds? Who can tell? The feet of man leave earth sometimes when the spirit rides out reckless of land or sea, or heaven or hell, and these plunderers of the deep took no reckoning of life or death when they rode out on the gale, where the beach combers shattered up the rocks, and the creatures of the sea came huddling landward to take refuge among the kelp rafts.
Tossing the skin skiffs high and dry on some rock, with perhaps the weight of a boulder to keep them from blowing away, the hunters rushed off to the surf wash armed only with a stout stick.
The otters must be approached away from the wind, and the noise of the surf will deaden the hunter's approach; so beating their way against hurricane gales--winds that throw them from their feet at times--scrambling over rocks slippery as glass with ice, running out on long reefs where the crash of spray confuses earth and air, wading waist-deep in ice slush, the hunters dash out for the kelp beds and rocks where the otter are asleep. Clubbing sounds brutal, but this kind of hunting is, perhaps, the most merciful of all--to the animal, not the man. The otter is asleep. The gale conceals the approaching danger. One blow of the gaff, and the otter never awakes. In this way have three hunters killed as many as a hundred otter { 78} in two hours; and in this way have the thousands of Aleutian otter hunters, who used to throng the inlets of the northern islands, perished and dwindled to a population of poverty stricken, scattered men.
What were the rewards for all this risk of life? A glance at the records of the old fur companies tells why the Russian and American and English traders preferred sea-otter to the gold mines of the Spaniards in Mexico. Less than ten years after Cook's crew had sold their sea-otter for ten thousand dollars, the East India Company sold six hundred sea-otter for from sixty to one hundred dollars each. Two years later, Portlock and Dixon sold their cargo for fifty-five thousand dollars; and when it is remembered that two hundred sea-otter--twelve thousand dollars' worth at the lowest average--were sometimes got from the Nootka tribes for a few dollars' worth of old chisel iron--the profit can be estimated.