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Updated: July 24, 2025
So the toll of birds and mammals taken by the present genuine residents for necessary food is not a menace, if taken in reason. In isolated places in the Gulf, like Harrington, the Provincial law might safely be relaxed, so as to allow the eggs of ducks and gulls to be taken up to the 5th of June and those of murres, auks and puffins up to the 15th.
It took me a week to perfect my arrangements for transporting the great auks, by water, to Port-of-Waves, where a lumber schooner was to be sent from Petite Sainte Isole, chartered by me for a voyage to New York. I had constructed a cage made of osiers, in which my auks were to squat until they arrived at Bronx Park. My telegrams to Professor Farrago were brief. One merely said "Victory!"
He found there an immense quantity of dog-fish, very large, and so strong that four men could with difficulty kill them, and numbers of birds, which, having no wings, could not fly, and which fed upon fish. They are classed under the general names of auks and penguins. In this very secure harbour, the ships were drawn up on shore to be repaired.
The sun shone with unclouded splendour, and the bright air, which trembled with that liquidity of appearance that one occasionally sees in very hot weather under peculiar circumstances, was vocal with the wild music of thousands of gulls, and auks, and other sea-birds, which clustered on the neighbouring cliffs, and flew overhead in clouds.
The shirts of the male and female Esquimo are made from the skin of the auks, and one hundred and fifty of these little birds are used in the manufacture of one shirt. The largest Esquimo family known among the North Greenland tribe, numbers six; as a rule, an Esquimo family rarely outnumbers three. An Esquimo family is not stationary.
Our sportsmen would clamber up the cliffs and come back laden with little auks; great generous fires of turf, that cost nothing but the toil of gathering, blazed merrily; and our happy oarsmen, after a long day's work, made easy by the promise ahead, would stretch themselves in the sunshine and dream happily away till called to the morning wash and prayers.
Hence it will cause him no surprise that there should be geese and frigate-birds with webbed feet, living on the dry land or most rarely alighting on the water; that there should be long-toed corncrakes living in meadows instead of in swamps; that there should be woodpeckers where not a tree grows; that there should be diving thrushes, and petrels with the habits of auks.
It don't stand to reason; for now and then somebody gets a great auk egg. If you find 'em they've got to be laid; and if they're laid there's got to be hen great auks somewhere. Now the p'int is to find out where them great auks lay. It may be a awful job to do it, but if I can do it, and get just two eggs, my fortune's made, and yourn too.
Quickly she adjusted her own new garments, and then she took the little golden baby and over its head and shoulders laced a tight-fitting hood of soft young fox skin. This done she gently placed the child into the hood on her back. Inside this was lined with the breasts of baby auks and made downy with fibrous moss.
Then I asked him whether these birds of Halyard's were really great auks, and he replied, somewhat indifferently, that he supposed they were at least, nobody had ever before seen such birds near Port-of-Waves. "There's something else," he said, running, a pine-sliver through his pipe-stem "something that interests us all here more than auks, big or little.
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