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Updated: May 4, 2025
While I sat sketching them from a point among the drifting icebergs where I could see far back into the heart of their distant fountains, two Taku seal-hunters, father and son, came gliding toward us in an extremely small canoe.
The only difficulty is that the ice may not be in a condition for us to cross the fiord. A warm land-wind has been blowing for three days; and even in the North, where the seal-hunters go, the ice often breaks up under them. But now allow me to get my bearings. That is the smoke from Brattahlid, behind us; and yonder I see the roofs of Eric's ship-sheds.
The doctor and Tomlin armed themselves with spears, but Jarring and Slag preferred clubs. "You see," said the latter, "I've heard though I can't rightly say I've seed it done myself that the seal-hunters o' the north do their work wi' clubs; so, if one man can kill a seal wi' such a thing, I don't see why another shouldn't."
I tried my Chinook and made out to say that I wanted to hire two of them in a few days to go a little way back on the glacier and around the bay. They are seal-hunters and promised to come again with "Charley," who "hi yu kumtux wawa Boston" knew well how to speak English. I saw three huge bergs born. Spray rose about two hundred feet.
But the marksman's ammunition was expended; a hand-to-hand encounter ensued. Not one American musket in twenty had a bayonet to it. So, wielding the stock right and left, the terrible farmers, with hats and coats off, fought their way among the furred grenadiers, knocking them right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal.
The seal-hunters, Tyeen says, are frequently lost in these sudden berg accidents.
Trevor Battye saw the Samoyeds doing to the Brent geese on Kolguev Island. Thousands were driven into a kind of kraal, and killed for winter food. Next to the pelagic sealer, the whalers and ordinary seal-hunters are the worst scourges of the animal world. They killed off, for instance, every single one of the Antarctic right whales, and nearly all the Cape and Antarctic fur seals.
The sheltered hollow where we landed seems to be a favorite camping-ground for the Sum Dum seal-hunters. The pole-frames of tents, tied with cedar bark, stood on level spots strewn with seal bones, bits of salmon, and spruce bark. We found the work of pushing through the ice rather tiresome.
Friendly relations, however, were speedily established, and as a cold rain was falling, they invited us to enter their hut. It seemed very small and was jammed full of oily boxes and bundles; nevertheless, twenty-one persons managed to find shelter in it about a smoky fire. Our hosts proved to be Hoona seal-hunters laying in their winter stores of meat and skins.
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