When the Kaniags gather together they are exceedingly talkative, abounding in jokes, in the recitation of funny legends, and stories of every imaginable nature associated with their simple lives. As they paddle their bidarkas and bidarrahs in making long journeys, they enliven the labor by continuous songs, snatches from church tunes, or lively airs taught them by the Russians and later by our soldiers and traders. They are in every respect much more susceptible of emotional impulses than are the Aleutes. This greater sociability is well exhibited by the invariable erection, in every settlement, of a “kashima,” or public dance and work-house, or, in fact, a town-hall as we have it:—the Aleutes have nothing of the sort. They pass a good deal of their time on the land, traversing mountain trails in quest of bears, wolves, foxes, the land-otter, and the marmot, or “yeavrashkie,” which is made into that famous skin coat called the “parkie” all over this Alaskan country outside of the Sitkan archipelago. As these natives exist to-day there are only eighteen hundred, a few more or less, of them, which is an immense shrinkage from the Russian enumeration of six thousand five hundred made by actual count of Baranov. They seem to be declining even now, year by year, even as the Koloshians of the Sitkan region do, so that the native population of the Kadiak district, if decreased[53] in the next two decades as it has in the last, will hardly have a living representative. No one can well avoid a train of fast-crowding thought when he stops in contemplation of sickness and death as it appears and is treated in savage settlements—the only medical counsel that they ever have is their own individual instinct. Ignorant as they are of the simplest anatomical details of their structure, it is not surprising that they should surrender to disorders and disease with that remarkable passive apathy which is so distinctive of the sick everywhere in such communities.