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Beneath him lay some brown cubes which he knew to be boxlike upper stories to the houses of the natives. "That settles one thing," he murmured. "They're islanders. The natives of Russia build their homes of poles, deerskin and walrus-skin, tepee fashion; the American natives use logs and sod. Only islanders build them of rocks." For a moment his courage failed him.
From here they were quickly paddled over to the shore. They were then led up a steep bank, down a street lined with innumerable dome-like houses covered with walrus-skin, and were finally dragged into the largest of these houses and rudely thrust into an inner room. The door slammed, and Jarvis laughed. "Humph!" he chuckled. "Fancy putting a man in a bloomin' jail made of deer skin.
Oiled walrus-skin, stretched taut as a drum-head, served as a covering for the kayak against the seas, a manhole being left in the centre for the paddler to ensconce himself waist-deep, with oilskin round his waist to keep the water out. Clothing was worn fur side in, oiled side out; and the soles of all moccasins were padded with moss to protect the feet from the sharp rocks.
Asia was not its home. Where did it go? Russian adventurers who rafted the coast of Siberia in crazy skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward, whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came washing from an unknown land.
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.
Throughout the long line of the Aleutian Islands and the neighbouring coasts of North America, for over a century, hunters' boats little cockle-shell skiffs made of oiled walrus-skin stretched on whalebone frames, narrow as a canoe, light as cork rode the wildest seas in the wildest storms in pursuit of the sea-otter.
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