He sold them for fifty dollars.
I remained in San Francisco until in the spring of 1886, when
there was a party fitting up a schooner to go sealing on the coast
of Alaska, and I was offered a job as shooter. I agreed to go with
them and they were to pay me two dollars for each seal that I
killed. The first of April we started, and were twenty-two days
getting to where there was seal.
Now this was a new business to me, and my first seal hunting was
near the mouth of the Yukon river. The captain anchored about
twenty miles from land. There were six sealing boats with the
schooner, the shooter had charge of his boat, and there were two
or three other men to accompany him. One of my boatmen was a
Frenchman and the other a German; they were both stout and willing
to work. While I received two dollars a piece for all the seals
killed, they only got one dollar each, making in all four dollars
each that the seals cost the company.
In the morning the captain gives each man his course and
instructions to return at once when the signal cannon is fired.
The first morning that we started out we went about four miles
before we saw any seal, when we ran on to a school sleeping on the
water. The two boatmen pulled up among them and I turned loose to
shooting them and got six out of the outfit before they got away
from us. Shooting seal out of a boat reminded me very much of
shooting Indians when on a bucking cayuse, as the boat is always
in motion, and it is all that a person can do to stand up in it
when the sea is any ways rough.
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