So we find the sea-otter-hunting of the present, as it was in the past, entirely confined to the natives, with white traders here and there vieing in active competition one with the other in bidding for the quarry of those dusky captors. The traders erect small frame dwellings as stores in the midst of the otter-hunting settlements, places like Oonalashka, Belcovsky, Oonga, and Kadiak villages, which are the chief resorts of population and this trade in Alaska. They own and employ small schooners, between thirty and one hundred tons burthen, in conveying the hunting parties to and from these hamlets above mentioned as they go to and return from the sea-otter hunting-grounds of Saanak and the Chernaboor rocks, where five-sixths of all the sea-otters annually taken in Alaska are secured. Why these animals should evince so much partiality for this region between the Straits of Oonimak and the west end of Kadiak Island is somewhat mysterious, but, nevertheless, it is the great sea-otter hunting-ground of the country. Saanak Island, itself, is small, with a coast-circuit of less than eighteen miles. Spots of sand-beach are found here and there, but the major portion of the shore is composed of enormous water-worn boulders, piled up high by the booming surf. The interior is low and rolling, with a central ridge rising into three hills, the middle one some eight hundred feet high. There is no timber here, but an abundant exhibit of grasses, mosses, and sphagnum, with a score of little fresh-water ponds in which multitudes of ducks and geese are found every spring and fall. The natives do not live upon the island, because the making of fires and scattering of food-refuse, and other numerous objectionable matters connected with their settlement, alarm the otters and drive them off to parts unknown. Thus the island is only camped upon by the hunting-squads, and fires are never made unless the wind is from the southward, since no sea-otters are ever found to the northward of the ground. The sufferings—miseries of cold, and even hunger, to which the Aleutes subject themselves here every winter, going for weeks and weeks at a time without fires, even for cooking, with the thermometer below zero in a wild, northerly and westerly gale of wind, is better imagined than portrayed.