Chirikoff was landed the same day, all unaware
that at times in the mist and {53} rain he had been within from fifteen
to forty miles of poor Bering, zigzagging across the very trail of the
afflicted sister ship.
[Illustration: Sea Cows.]
By December the entire crew of Bering's castaways, prisoners on the
sea-girt islands of the North Pacific, were lodged in five underground
huts on the bank of a stream. In 1885, when these mud huts or _yurts_
were examined, they were seen to have walls of peat three feet thick. To
each man was given a pound of flour. For the rest, their food must be
what they caught or clubbed--mainly, at first, the sea-otter, whose flesh
was unpalatable to the taste and tough as leather. Later, Steller
discovered that the huge sea-cow--often thirty-five feet long--seen
pasturing on the fields of sea-kelp at low tide, afforded food of almost
the same quality as the land cow. Seaweed grew in miniature forests on
the island; and on this pastured the monster bovine of the sea--true fish
in its hind quarters but oxlike in its head and its habits--herding
together like cattle, snorting like a horse, moving the neck from side to
side as it grazed, with the hind leg a fin, the fore fin a leg, udder
between the fore legs, and in place of teeth, plates.
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