On land, the skin side of
the coats could be turned in and the fur out.
Oonalaska, westward of the Aleutian chain of islands and Kadiak, just
south of the great Alaskan peninsula, were the two main points whence
radiated the hunting flotillas for the sea-otter grounds. Formerly, a
single Russian schooner or packet boat would lead the way with a
procession of a thousand bidarkas. Later, schooners, thirty or forty
of them, gathered the hunters at some main fur post, stowed the light
skin kyacks in piles on the decks, and carried the Aleuts to the otter
grounds. This might be at Atka, where the finest otter hunters in the
world lived, or on the south shore of Oonalaska, or in Cook's Inlet
where the rip of the tide runs a mill-race, or just off Kadiak on the
Saanach coast, where twenty miles of beach boulders and surf waters and
little islets of sea-kelp provide ideal fields for the sea-otter. Here
the sweeping tides and {70} booming back-wash keep up such a roar of
tumbling seas, the shy, wary otter, alert as an eagle, do not easily
get scent or sound of human intruder.
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