Instead of firearms, the primitive club and net and spear are again
used, giving the sea-otter a fair chance against his antagonist--Man.
Except that the hunters are few and now dress in San Francisco clothes,
they go to the hunt in the same old way as when Baranof, head of the
Russian Fur Company, led his battalions out in companies of a thousand
and two thousand "bidarkies"--walrus-skin skiffs taut as a drumhead,
with seams tallowed and an oilskin wound round each of the manholes, so
that the boat {68} could turn a somerset in the water, or be pitched
off a rock into the surf, and come right side up without taking water,
paddler erect.
The first thing the hunter had to look to was boat and hunting gear.
Westward of Cook's Inlet and Kadiak was no timber but driftwood, and
the tide wash of wrecks; so the hunter, who set out on the trail of the
pathless sea, framed his boat on the bones of the whale. There were
two kinds of boats--the long ones, for from twelve to twenty men, the
little skiffs which Eskimos of the Atlantic call kyacks--with two or
three, seldom more, manholes.
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