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The sun returned to us in due season, gilding the tree-tops with its beams; our little bay began to bask in its glory, and with the cheerfulness that usually accompanies such a scene, vanished most of our apprehensions for the moment. A night of reflection had quieted our fears, and we all woke up next morning, as indifferent to the fate of the Sea-Otter, as was at all decent.
Four years after Bering's crew had brought back word of the sea-otter in 1742, there were seventy-seven different private Russian concerns hunting sea-otter off the islands of Alaska.
"It was only a sea-otter," I tried to explain, thinking perhaps she did not care for snake stories. But the explanation did not appear to interest her, and I was mortified to observe that my impression upon her was anything but pleasant. "She doesn't seem to like me and my stories," thought I, "but she is too young, perhaps, to appreciate them."
He also gave a psychological prophetic glimpse of the insidious sealskin sacque. In Seventeen Hundred and Ninety, a ship from the Pacific brought a hundred otterskins to New York. The skins were quickly sold to London buyers at exorbitant prices. The nobility wanted sea-otter, or "Royal American Ermine," as they called it. The scarcity boomed the price.
The packing-case had been broken open, and the scanty but precious contents littered an improvised table in the hold. Pen in hand, Hardenberg counted and ciphered and counted again. He could not forbear a chuckle when the net result was reached. The lot of the skins the pelt of the sea-otter is ridiculously small in proportion to its value was no heavy load for the average man.
It was the sea-otter brought Russian coasters cruising southward from Alaska to California; and it was the little sable set the mad pace of the Cossacks' wild rush clear across Siberia to the shores of the Pacific. The tribute that the riotous Cossacks collected, whether from Siberia or America, was tribute in furs.
She was muffled up in the rich furs of the sea-otter; and the small lamp which she held in her hand streamed upwards a feeble gleam upon her countenance, sufficient however to discover the superb beauty and touching expression which had drawn all eyes upon St. David's day.
True, the sea-otter has decreased and is almost extinct in places; but then, where game laws protect it, as in the Commander Islands, it is on the increase, and as for the Aleut hunters their thousands lie in the bottom of the sea; and of the thousands who rallied forth long ago, often only a few hundred returned.
Since 1741, when Bering's sailors had found the kelp-beds, Aleuts had hunted the sea-otter and Russians had hunted the Aleuts. For three years fate reversed the wheel. It was to be a man-hunt of fugitive Russians.
A flaw of wind had caught the mountain billows; the sixty hunters went under. From where he was, Baranof saw the disaster, saw the terror of the other two hundred men, saw the rising storm, and at a glance measured that it was farther back to the sloops than on towards the dangerous shore. The sea-otter hunt was forgotten in the impending catastrophe to the entire brigade.
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