Their rifles would carry a
thousand yards. Whoever saw the little round black head bob above the
surface of the water, shot, and the surf wash carried in the dead body.
If the weather was dead calm, fog or clear, bands of twenty {71} and
thirty men deployed in a circle to spear their quarry. This was the
spearing-surround. Or if such a hurricane gale was churning the sea so
that gusty spray and sleet storm washed out every outline, sweeping the
kelp beds naked one minute, inundating them with mountainous rollers
that thundered up the rocks the next, the Aleut hunters risked life,
scudded out on the back of the raging storm, now riding the rollers,
now dipping to the trough of the sea, now scooting with lightning
paddle-strokes right through the blasts of spray athwart wave wash and
trough--straight for the kelp beds or rocky boulders, where the
sea-otter must have been driven for refuge by the storm. This hunting
is the very incarnation of the storm spirit itself, for the wilder the
gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be
to see or hear or smell the hunter.
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