The woods and the waters are teeming with animal life; the lofty semi-naked peaks harbor mountain goats in large flocks; the beautiful grouse of Sabine hides in the forest thickets; the land otter and the mule-eared deer haunt the countless ravines, valleys, and rivulet bottoms; salmon in fabulous numbers run up those streams, and big, brown and glossy black bears come down to fatten upon these spawning fish. But the Sitkan savage is indolent, and, though all this dietary abundance and variety is before him, he lives quite exclusively upon halibut and salmon, the former mostly fresh and the latter air-dried and smoked in the soot of his rancherie. Halibut he finds all the year round; salmon briefly run only at widely separated periods. The halibut fishery is the one systematic regular occupation of the natives. These fish may be taken in all waters of the archipelago at almost any season, though on certain banks, well known to the Indians, they are more numerous at times. When the halibut are most active and abundant, the Koloshians take them in large quantities, fishing with a hook and line from their canoes, which are anchored over the favored spots by stones attached to cedar-bark ropes or cables. They still employ their own primitive, clumsy-looking hook in decided preference to using our own make. When the canoe is loaded to the gunwale by an alert fisherman, these halibut are brought in to some convenient adjacent point on the shore, where they are handed over to the women, who are there to take care of them, usually living in a temporary rancherie. They squat around the pile, rapidly clean the fish, removing the larger bones, head, fins, and tail, and cut it into broad, thin flakes. These are then hung on the poles of a wooden frame trellis, where, without salt, and by the wind and sun alone, sometimes aided by a slow fire underneath the suspended fish-meat, the flakes are sufficiently cured and dried; then they are packed away in those characteristic cedar boxes for future use. A group of old and young squaws, half-nude, flecked with shining scales and splashed with blood, as they always are when at work upon a fine run of halibut or salmon—such a group is to be vividly remembered ever afterward, if you see it even but once. The little pappooses, entirely naked, with big heads and bellies, slender necks and legs, are running hither and thither in infantile glee and sport, always with a mouthful of raw ova or a handful of stewed fish from the kettle near by, while the babies, propped up in their stiff-backed lashings, croon and sleep away the time.