I vividly remember my father, John Merculieff, coming home beyond exhaustion five days a week. He was one of the “higher-ranking” sealers because he was a clubber, or “stunner.” To become a stunner, one had to work through the ranks over a period of years. It was the highest-rewarded position in the killing fields because it required skill to use a five-foot hickory club to kill a fast-moving seal with one blow to the head and do this over and over again. Six or seven men kill up to four thousand seals each day.
When I was allowed to go out “sealing” at age five, I saw firsthand how hard the men worked. As a child, it was a special event to be allowed to go out with the sealers. Sealing always began in June and ended by mid-August of each year. We had to be ready by 3:00 a.m. to go to the government breakfast hall if we wanted to get some food. Breakfasts were the same every day: small pancakes, powdered eggs, bacon, and coffee.
The government always wanted to herd seals before the day’s temperatures rose into the lower to mid-fifty-degree range because, any later than that, the seals would overheat and die, becoming what it called “road skins” when the pelts lost their high quality thus bringing in a lower price. Road skins were very hard to remove from the seal carcass and were frequently torn. So, by 4:00 a.m., we loaded up in government dump trucks used to haul seal carcasses and pelts from the field. The older men and clubbers would ride in the only covered truck, what we called the water truck because it contained fresh water for the sealers. It was always chilly in these moist pre-dawn days as temperatures usually were in the lower forties. I would crouch down below the cab to avoid the bone-chilling wind created by the moving truck.
We were part of a caravan of about ten government trucks and would head out to one of the seven fur seal rookeries where “bachelor” seals, non-breeding sub-adult males, congregated by the tens of thousands. We were headed toward the Northeast Point rookery, the largest rookery on the island. When the trucks arrived at the location, drivers would park the vehicles in a straight line on the tundra. I could tell where the seals were usually killed because the grass in the killing fields was always much greener than any surrounding grass, made fertile from the blood of hundreds of thousands of seals killed over the past 150 years. I thought about how my ancestors had to labor when trucks didn’t exist, rowing a fifty-foot, one-ton traditional craft, called a baidar (or nixalax), to and from the killing fields and the village.
Arriving at the killing fields, men would congregate around the trucks, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, talking in Unangan about the day. The conversations would typically be about the number of seals they probably would kill that day, whether or not the weather was good enough to go halibut fishing after sealing, and how people and their families were doing.
“Looks like a big kill day.”
“Yeah, this rookery always has lots of seals.”
“Hope we finish fast. Looks like a good fishing day. My family could use halibut.”
“Better watch out for the boss man. He looks grouchy today.”
“Yeah, last week the boss man was grouchy, and he sent five guys home without pay just because he thought they were too slow.”
“My back sure hurts from yesterday. They told me we killed 2,500 seals yesterday, and I sure feel it. Hope it doesn’t slow me down today. It could make it harder on everybody.”
Unangan sealers were the personification of teamwork because a central aspect of Unangan culture is cooperation and service to others without thought for oneself. The teamwork would begin when the sealer foreman signaled everyone to go. The thirty or so men would first walk toward the bachelor rookery, then run collectively as they approached the rocks near the shoreline where the seals rested and slept, coming between the seals and the shoreline and cutting off their only escape route.
I could hear the raucous roar of the tens of thousands of seals covering every inch of the rookeries where basalt boulders stretched for miles near the shoreline. There were breeding rookeries composed of prime males and mature females, idle bull rookeries where bulls past their prime rested, and non-breeding seal rookeries of sub-adult males. We never entered into breeding or idle bull rookeries.
I chose to run with the men, knowing that boys were allowed to participate in the “seal drive.” Everyone had to be alert. The black-colored seals matched the color of the rocks, even in daylight, and this was morning twilight. A threatened seal can be as fierce as a wild African lion, moving faster than a person can run in the rookery of large slippery rocks. The seals have large, very sharp canine teeth, and sometimes, although rarely, a seal would rip into a man’s thigh or leg, requiring multiple stitches. I had vivid visions of what the torn leg of a man must look like, and that certainly made me hyper aware as I ran through hundreds of snarling seals with the men. Although most of the seals were sub-adult males, ages two through four, there were some fierce bull seals in the groups, weighing as much as six hundred pounds. The men would move toward the shoreline, preventing the seals from escaping, and herd the seals inland. The men and boys would whistle and carry sticks that made sounds to keep the seals moving. I was reminded of movies where men were herding cattle. The sounds were very similar, to me.
The men made sure there weren’t any road skins by allowing the seals to rest frequently on their way to the gruesome killing fields. Fur seals have no sweat glands and let off heat through panting that then releases clouds of heat hanging over them. A seal that would die from heat exhaustion would be no good to eat, and its pelt would be hard to clean.
Frequently, bull seals and females would get mixed in among the sub-adult males and were let go on the way to the fields. I would see the bull seals and females run a few yards from the herded animals and stop to rest. The rest of the herded seals seemed terrified and confused. When they arrived at the killing fields, the men would take a break while the herd of seals tried to collect themselves. The seals would be guarded by three or four men and boys to make sure they did not run off. The men would know how long of a day it would be by the size of the herd that was collected. Most of the time over two thousand seals were collected from various parts of the rookeries (seven of which had non-breeding sub-adult male seals). That would mean about an eight-hour day killing seals.
When the sealer foreman gave the word, someone would cut out a pod of six or seven seals by making a loud noise with a large metal coffee can on a club. The “pod cutter” would then drive the small band of seals separated from the rest toward the stunners who used six-foot hickory clubs to stun the seal in the head, frequently killing it with the blow. These men were handpicked for their accuracy in stunning a seal. It was brutalizing work. I wondered what effect this job had on the men, especially my dad.
Within seconds the dead or stunned seals would be dragged away and lined up in rows of five. Then a “sticker” would cut the main artery of each seal to make sure it was dead and cut around the flippers and head. A crew of three or four men, called “rippers,” would attach a large pincer-type tool to the fur that was cut around the head and pull the skin off the seal. Once the skins were removed, they were placed in another line for collection. Either in the middle or at the end of the seal kill, the pelts were loaded onto the truck using pitch forks. When the truck was full of pelts, it would continue to the fur seal pelt-processing facility where the pelts would be soaked, “blubbered,” and put into fifty-gallon wooden barrels for shipment to further processing into fine furs by the Fouke Fur Company. The “blubbering” process was another grueling job in which the men would use large-curved cutting instruments to remove the fat layer from the flesh. The remaining seal carcasses were taken to another location where they would be processed for mink feed. But, before that happened, local people were allowed to take what seal parts they wanted for food. They would take hearts, livers, tongues, shoulders, and ribs, and it was the only time the federal government allowed our people to take seals for themselves.
It was no wonder that the men became debilitated by age thirty-five. The brutal labor took its physical and spiritual toll.