Beta Book

Wood Island, about 1-1/2 miles from Kadiak,
is small and well covered with spruce. It has some two hundred people,
for the most part natives, and under Russian rule was used for a huge
ice-storing plant. Kadiak Island, 100 miles by 30, is thickly studded
with mountains, and extremely picturesque, with the white covering of
early spring, as we found it, or when green with heavy grass dotted with
wild flowers in July.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL, KADIAK ISLAND.]
The Kadiak group looks as if it might have fallen out of Cook Inlet, and
one of the native legends tells us that once the Kadiak Islands were so
near the Alaskan shore that a mammoth sea otter, while trying to swim
through the narrow straits, got wedged between the rocks, and his
tremendous struggles to free himself pushed the islands out into their
present position. The sea otter and bear have always been most
intimately connected with the lives of the Kadiakers, and have exercised
a more important influence on their characters than any of their
surroundings except the sea.


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