There is no sexual dissimilarity in color or size, and both male and female manifest the same intense shyness and aversion to man, coupled with the greatest solicitude for their young, which they bring into existence at all seasons of the year, for the natives capture young pups in every calendar month. As the hunters never have found the mothers and their offspring on the rocks or beaches, they affirm that the birth of a sea-otter takes place on the numerous floating kelp-beds which cover large areas of the ocean south of the Aleutian chain and off the entire expanse of the northwest coast. Here, literally “rocked in the cradle of the deep,” the young kahlan is brought forth and speedily inured to the fury of fierce winds and combing seas. Upon these algoid rafts the Aleutes often surprise them sporting one with the other, for they are said to be very playful, and one old hunter told the writer that he had watched a sea-otter for half an hour as it lay upon its back in the rollers and tossed a bit of sea-weed up into the air from paw to paw, apparently taking great delight in catching it before it fell into the water. The sea-otter mother clasps her young to her breast between her fore-paws, and stretches herself at full length on her back in the ocean when she desires to sleep, and she suckles it also in this position. The pup cannot live without its mother, though frequent attempts have been made by hunters to raise them, for the little animals are very often captured alive and wholly uninjured; but, like some other animals, they seem to be so deeply imbued with fear or dislike of man that they invariably die of self-imposed starvation. The enhydra is not polygamous, and it is seldom, indeed, that the natives, when out in search of it, ever see more than one animal at a time. The flesh is very unpalatable, highly charged with a rank taste and odor. A single pup is born, as the rule, about fifteen inches in length and provided with a natal coat of coarse, brownish, grizzled hair and fur, the head and nape being rather brindled, and the nose and cheeks whitish-gray, with the roots of the hair everywhere much darker next to the skin. From this poor condition of fur at birth the otter gradually improves as it grows older, shading darker, finer, thicker, and longer by the time they are two years of age. Then they rapidly pass into prime skins of the most lustrous softness and ebony shimmering, though the creature is not full-grown until it has passed its fourth season. The rufous-white nose and mustache of the pup are not changed in the pelage of the adult, but remain constant through life. The whiskers are short, white, and fine. So much for the biology of the sea-otter. Now we turn to the still more interesting one of its captors.