Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1894 — THE SEA OTTER. [ARTICLE]

THE SEA OTTER.

His Fur the Costliest in the WorldShot from Derricks. Just at the present the Sea Otter is the favorite of the millionairess, and his fur is the costliest in the world. I wonder if any of the wearers of this beautiful fur—so costly that the price of one set would feed a hungry family for two whole years—ever stop to find out how the first wearer was born on a bed of kelp, floating out in the open sea, on the icy cold waters of the Pacific, and literally “rocked in the cradle of the deep;” how he was brought up on the heaving billows, and, when bedtime came, found a soft resting place on his mother’s breast, while she floated upon her back and clasped him with her paws as he slept; how the only land he ever saw was the rugged, rock-bound shores of Alaska or Washington. Now and then,when the ocean was very rough, and before the hunters were so bad, he used to crawl out upon a rock and lie there, while the roar of the breakers boomed in his ears and the breakers dashed over him In torrents. But then, it is probable that not one woman out of every five hundred takes the trouble to learn the life history of the creature whose furry coat she wears. The Sea Otter is the largest of the Marten family, and is very unlike the family after which the family is named. It has a thick, clumsy body, which, with the round, blunt head, is from three and a half to four feet in length. Unlike those of all other otters, the tail is short and stumpy, being about one-fifth the length of the head and body. As if to increase its value, and hasten its destruction, the skin is much larger than the body, like a misfit coat, and lies loosely upon it in many folds. For this reason the stretched pelt is always mucfy and longer than the animal that wore it?"

The coat of the full-grown Sea Otter is very dense, very fine, and its color is shimmering, lustrous black. Ever since the earliest discovery of the Sea Otter by the Russians, its fur has been eagerly sought by them, and the cash prices of skins have always been so high that there is not, in the whole United States, a museum rich enough to afford a good series of specimens. Mr. Charles H. Townsend, the naturalist of the United States Fish Commission, writes me that in 1891 the price of the best skins had reached S4OO each, and their value has been since increasing, On the northwest coast of the Statte of Washington, where Sea Otters if re still found along a thirtymile s€rip of coast (from Gray’s Harbor, half-way to Cape Flattery), they are ?hot by hunters from tall “derrick’S’’ from thirty to forty feet high, erected in the surf half-way between high tide and low tide, and the hunter who kills four Otters in a year considers his work successful. Owing to the persistent hunting that has been going on ever since Alaska came into our possession,‘the Sea Otter is rapidly following the buffalo to the State of Extermination. The favorite food of the Sea Otter is not fish, as one might suppose from the habits of the common Otter, but clams, crabs/ mussels, and sea-urchins. Its molar teeth are of necessity very strong, for the grinding up of this rough fare, and the muscles of the jaws are proportionately powerful.—[St. Nicholas.