If everything is auspicious, wind and tide the next morning, after sailing, bring the vessel well upon the ground. The headlands are made out and noted; the natives slip into their bidarkies as they are successively dropped over the schooner’s side while she jogs along under easy way, until the whole fleet of twenty or thirty craft is launched. The trader stands by the rail and shakes the hand of each grimy hunter as he steps down into his kyack, calling him, in pigeon-Russian, his “loobaiznie droög,” or dear friend, and bids him a hearty good-by. Then, as the last bidarka drops, the ship comes about and speeds back to the port which yesterday morning she cleared from, or she may keep on, before she does so, to some harbor at Saanak, where she will leave at a preconcerted rendezvous a supply of flour, sugar, tea, and tobacco for her party. If the weather be not too foggy, and the sea not very high, the bidarkies are deployed into a single long line, keeping well abreast, at intervals of a few hundred feet between. In this manner they paddle slowly and silently over the water, each man peering sharply and eagerly into the vista of tumbling water just ahead, ready to catch the faintest evidence of the presence of an otter, should that beast ever so slyly present even the tip of its blunt head above for breath and observation. Suddenly an otter is discovered, apparently asleep, and instantly the discoverer makes a quiet signal, which is flashed along the line. Not a word is spoken, not a paddle splashes, but the vigilant, sensitive creature has taken the alarm, and has turned on to its chest, and with powerful strokes of its strong, webbed hind feet, has smote the water like the blades of a propeller’s screw, and down to depths below and away it speeds, while the hunter brings his swift bidarka to an abrupt standstill directly upon the bubbling wake of the otter’s disappearance. He hoists his paddle high in the air, and holds it there, while the others whirl themselves over the water into a large circle around him, varying in size from one-quarter to half a mile in diameter, according to the number of boats engaged in the chase. [Illustration: THE SURROUND A fleet of Sea-otter Hunters in the North Pacific, South of Saanak Island: marking the Wake of an Otter at the Moment of its Diving]