But where did this strange
denizen of northern waters live? Only in rare seasons did the herds
assemble on the rocky islets of Kamchatka and Japan. And when spring
came, the sea-beaver disappeared. Asia was not its home. Where did it
go?
Russian adventurers who rafted the coast of Siberia {63} in crazy
skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward,
whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange
hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came washing from
an unknown land.
It was only when Bering's crew were left prisoners of the sea on an
island barren as a billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found
the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian
Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts
where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were
thrown back on the primal necessities without thought of gain?
The hungry Russian sailors fell on the kelp beds, clubbing right and
left regardless of pelts. What matter if the flesh was tough as
leather and rank as musk? It filled the empty stomachs of fifty
desperate men; and the skins were used on the treeless isle as rugs, as
coats, as walls, as stuff to chink the cracks of earth pits, where the
sailors huddled like animals in underground caves with no ceiling but
the tattered sails.
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