There is no certain answer to the question. At any rate, the whales appear in the open leads from Point Hope to Point Barrow about the middle of April. These are all young whales who seem to be the early risers. After them come the cows and their calves, and behind these, mostly in the open water, follow the older single whales. Bachelors and old maids these, and perhaps lack of responsibilities makes them lazy. As these are the last up in the spring, so they are the first down in the fall. Sometimes they too go in with the ice, and in that case the whaleships following do not get many. The whales which the Eskimos capture are almost always the young, who go up first, and they capture them quite easily from the ice. The Chuckchis about East Cape get from twenty to thirty thousand pounds of bone annually, and the Alaska natives about as much. This is bought in the main by traders or whalemen, who pay in trade goods at the rate of about fifty cents a pound for the bone. As good bone is worth about three dollars a pound in San Francisco, it will be seen that the business is a profitable one for the buyers. Yet the Eskimos are glad to dispose of their surplus for the white man’s goods, and the returns are of great value to them. There used to be in Bering Sea and the Arctic a small black whale with a white spot near the small, which was easily killed and yielded good blubber, but was weak in whalebone. These whales were all killed off as long ago as 1885. Before them, and now probably extinct, were the old 100-ton gray backs, the monster bowheads of all. These whales were leviathans indeed, yielding sometimes four hundred barrels of oil, and often three to four thousand pounds of whalebone. These were the prize monsters of the early days of the bowhead fishery, and the lucky ship that got through the straits and fastened to one or two of them was well along toward a full trip at a blow. The last record of the capture of one of these whales was as far back as 1876. They were sly, lazy old chaps, exposing often only the edges of the gray spout-hole when blowing, and having thus the appearance of a gull sitting on the water. It is perhaps plausible that these great-grand-fathers of whales had survived the glacial epoch, as is claimed for them. At least, they were of as great age compared with the smaller bowheads as are the giant sequoias of California compared with the redwoods of the present day.