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But it was in the storm hunt over the kelp-beds that the wildest work went on. Through the fiercest storm scudded bidarkies and kayaks, meeting the herds of sea-otter as they drove before the gale. To be sure, the bidarkies filled and foundered; the kayaks were ripped on the teeth of the rock reefs. But the sea took no account of its dead; neither did the Russians.
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 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.
Vancouver was back from San Francisco carefully charting the inner channel of the coast. Baranoff, the little czar of the Russian traders, was coasting at the head of fifteen hundred 'bidarkies' between the Aleutians and Sitka; and Spain was still sending out ragged pilots to chart the seas which she had not the marine to hold. The big canoe went on, up the Peace river.
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