Yes, it looks to you like suicide; but there is this method to their madness. These men have, by some intuition, arrived at an understanding that the storm will not last but a few hours longer at the most, and they know that some ten or twenty or even thirty miles away, directly to the leeward from where they pushed off, lies a series of islets, and rocks awash, out upon which the long-continued fury of this gale has driven a number of sea-otters that have been so sorely annoyed by the battle of the elements as to crawl there above the wash of the surf, and, burying their globose heads in heaps of sea-weed to avoid the pelting of the wind, are sleeping and resting in great physical peace until the weather shall change: then they will at once revive and plunge back into the ocean without the least delay. So our two hunters, perhaps the only two souls among the fifty or sixty now camped on Saanak, who are brave enough, have resolved to scud down on the tail of this howling gale, run in between the breakers to the leeward of this rocky islet ahead of them, and sneak from that direction over the land and across to the windward coast, so as to silently and surely creep up and on to the kelp-bedded victims, when, in the fury of the storm, the fast falling footsteps of the hunter are not heard by the active yet somnolent animal ere a deadly whack of his short club falls upon its unconscious head. The noise of such a tempest is far greater than that made by the stealthy movements of these venturesome natives, who, plying their heavy, wooden bludgeons, despatch the animals one after another without alarming the whole number. In this way, two Aleutian brothers are known to have slain seventy-eight otters in less than one hour! If these hardy men, when they pushed off from Saanak in that gale, had deviated a paddle’s length from their true course for the islet which they finally struck, after scudding twenty or thirty miles before the fury of wind and water, they would have been swept on and out into a vast marine waste and to certain death from exhaustion. They knew it perfectly when they ventured, yet at no time could they have seen ahead clearly, or behind them, farther than a thousand yards! Still, if they waited for the storm to abate, then the otters would all be back in the water ere they could even reach the scene. By doing what we have just seen them do they fairly challenge our admiration for their exhibit of nerve and adroit calculation, under the most trying of all natural obstruction, for the successful issue of their venture.