Free Rat Island by William Stolzenburg

dwellings, at first for money, now held in low esteem, and when this was gambled away, for the fine sea-otters, which had to offer up their costly skins.”
    Faced with the relentless slaughter, the otters and innumerable rookeries of seals that Steller had noted at the onset steadily evaporated. Hunters found themselves journeying farther for their meat, trudging miles over rocky tundra to new shores in pursuit of the retreating herds. On the way, they hunted by the hundreds the ptarmigan, the snow grouse of the Arctic, until the ptarmigan too grew hard to find. They chased down the island’s strange species of cormorant, a fish-eating bird big enough to feed three and, to its ultimate demise, flightless.
    Eventually the men of the St. Peter turned their attention to the most tempting mass of meat on the island, which came in the form of a sea beast thirty feet long and some four tons heavy. The sea cow, a gigantic cousin to the manatee, lolled in familial pods along the shallow shores. Steller, ever the naturalist, had been observing them daily from his hut. He would come to know these animals as no other human ever would.
    â€œThey come in so close to shore that not only did I on many occasions prod them with a pole or a spear, but sometimes even stroked their back with my hand,” Steller wrote. “If badly hurt they did nothing more than move farther away from shore, but after a little while they forgot their injury and came back.”
    After a string of frustrated bunglings and escapes of wounded sea cows, the hunters eventually honed a crude but lethal technique. It amounted to live butchery, which Steller seamlessly recorded with compassion and chilling candor. “These … gluttonous animals keep head under water with but slight concern for their life and security, so that one may pass in the very midst of them in a boat even unarmed and safely single out from the herd the one he wishes to hook … Their capture was effected by a large iron hook the point of which somewhat resembled the fluke of an anchor, the other end being fastened by means of an iron ring to a very long and stout rope, held by thirty men on shore. A strong sailor took this hook and with four or five other men stepped into the boat, and one of them taking the rudder, the other three or four rowing, they quietly hurried towards the herd. The harpooner stood in the bow of the boat with the hook in his hand and struck as soon as he was near enough to do so, whereupon the men on shore, grasping the other end of the rope, pulled the desperately resisting animal laboriously towards them. Those in the boat, however, made the animal fast by means of another rope and wore it out with continual blows until tired and completely motionless, it was attacked with bayonets, knives and other weapons and pulled up on land. Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously and make such resistance with its forelimbs that big strips of the cuticle were torn off. In addition it breathed heavily, as if sighing. From the wounds in its back the blood spurted upward like a fountain.”
    Finding their stricken mates and family members under assault, the sea cows would surge heroically to their rescue. “To this end some of them tried to upset the boat with their backs, while others pressed down the rope and endeavored to break it, or strove to remove the hook from the wound in the back by blows of their tail, in which they actually succeeded several times. It is a most remarkable proof of their conjugal affection that the male, after having tried with all his might, although in vain, to free the female caught by the hook, and in spite of the beating we gave him, nevertheless followed her to the shore, and that several times, even after she was dead, he shot unexpectedly up to her like a speeding arrow. Early next morning, when we came to cut up the meat and bring it to the dugout, we found the