1987
Hunting sea mammals
Laurie Mulcahy: From what I read, the archaeologists say that there wasn’t a lot of whale hunting in Prince William Sound, that it was mostly Kodiak and the Aleutians.
Bobby Stamp: Oh, well, I think when the opportunity struck, they did hunt it, but they didn’t specifically concentrate on that one animal. Seal was the one, seal and sea lion. And there was another species of a small porpoise that they hunted.
Laurie Mulcahy: So, there weren’t that many whales up there to hunt.
Bobby Stamp: Oh, there were some. . . . Maybe if that animal was the only one around, they probably would have concentrated on that, but they never did. Seal was the one and sea lion.
1962
Seal hunting
All my formal education was received in the church from the year 1893 to 1898. As a youth, however, I took every opportunity possible to learn practical skills from the men in the kayaks. My brother took me out for target practice before I ever went hunting for seal and other animals. A seal is by no means the only animal hunted on the first hunt. Almost any animal will do fine. The first animal that I did shoot, however, was a seal. It was given to my mother. If my mother had been dead my grandparents would have received it. During the New Year’s festival in February we would have a dance where all the first caught animals were presented by the parents of the young novice hunters.
When I was about sixteen years old I began hunting from the kayak. At this time we used three types of kayaks: the one, two, and three-man varieties. . . . After I had married Francis I got my own kayak. A man in the village helped me to construct the frame itself.
All the women would then lend a hand with the preparation of the seal skins used for covering the light frame.
When the kayak was still in use, we had rifles and harpoons. A fat seal would always float, but we had to use the harpoon for seals which had only been wounded by the bullets. The harpoon was attached to a line, which in turn was connected to an air bladder [float]. The bladder was always carried on the kayak. It would help us to get the seal if it tried to swim away or if it had been only slightly wounded by our shots.
Once a seal had been shot it was dragged to the nearest shore. In the two-man kayaks, the man in the forward hatch would paddle to the nearest shore while the man in the second hatch would hold onto the seal. On shore the seal was cut up, the meat stored inside the kayak, the skins placed on the outside, and the men would then return to the village with the kill. A two-man kayak could hold as many as four seals. A one-man kayak could only transport one seal at a time.
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