It must have breath. Again
and again, the little round head peeps up. Again the shout greets it.
Again the lightning dive. Sometimes only a bubble gurgling to the top
of the water guides the watchers. Presently the body is so full of
gases from suppressed breathing, it can no longer sink, and a quick
spear-throw secures the quarry. One animal against, perhaps, sixty
men. Is the quest fair? Yonder thunders the surf below beetling
precipices. Then the tide wash comes in with a rip like a whirlpool,
or the ebb sets the beach combers rolling--lashing billows of tumbling
waters that crash together and set the sheets of blinding spray
shattering. Or the fog comes down over a choppy sea with a whizzing
wind that sets the whitecaps flying backward like a horse's mane. The
chase may have led farther and farther from land. As long as the
little black head comes up, as long as the gurgling bubble tells of a
struggling breather below, the hunters follow, be it {76} near or far,
till, at the end of two or three hours, the exhausted sea-otter is
taken. Perhaps forty men have risked their lives for a single pelt for
which the trader cannot pay more than forty dollars; for he must have
his profit, and the skin must be dressed, and the middlemen must have
their profit; so that if it sells even for eleven hundred dollars in
London--though the average is nearer one hundred and fifty dollars--the
Aleut is lucky to receive forty or fifty dollars.
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