Trade is conducted on the barter principle, furs being low and goods high.  The risks are great, transport is costly, and money is a long time invested before it returns.  The palmy days of the fur trade are over; the product has greatly diminished, and competition has reduced the percentage of profit on the little that remains.

There was a time in the memory of man when furs formed the currency of Kamchatka.  Their employment as cash is not unknown at present, although Russian money is in general circulation.

[Illustration:  Change for A dollar]

There is a story of a traveler who paid his hotel bill in a country town in Minnesota and received a beaver skin in change.  The landlord explained that it was legal tender for a dollar.  Concealing this novel cash under his coat, the traveler sauntered into a neighboring store.

“Is it true,” he asked carelessly, “that a beaver skin is legal tender for a dollar?” “Yes, sir,” said the merchant; “anybody will take it.”

“Will you be so kind, then,” was the traveler’s request, “as to give me change for a dollar bill?”

“Certainly,” answered the merchant, taking the beaver skin and returning four muskrat skins, current at twenty-five cents each.

The sable is the principal fur sought by the merchants in Kamchatka, or trapped by the natives.  The animal is caught in a variety of ways, man’s ingenuity being taxed to capture him.  The ‘yessak,’ or ‘poll-tax’ of the natives is payable in sable fur, at the rate of a skin for every four persons.  The governor makes a yearly journey through the peninsula to collect the tax, and is supposed to visit all the villages.  The merchants go and do likewise for trading purposes.

Mr. George S. Cushing, who was long the agent of Mr. Boardman in Kamchatka, estimated the product of sable fur at about six thousand skins annually.  Sometimes it exceeds and sometimes falls below that figure.  About a thousand foxes, a few sea otters and silver foxes, and a good many bears, may be added, more for number than value.  Silver foxes and otters are scarce, while common foxes and bears are of little account.  A black fox is worth a great deal of money, but one may find a white crow almost as readily.

Bears are abundant, but their skins are not articles of export.  The beasts are brown or black, and grow to a disagreeable size.  Bear hunting is an amusement of the country, very pleasant and exciting until the bear turns and becomes the hunter.  Then there is no fun in it, if he succeeds in his pursuit.  A gentleman in Kamchatka gave me a bearskin more than six feet long, and declared that it was not unusually large.  I am very glad there was no live bear in it when it came into my possession.

There is a story of a man in California who followed the track of a grizzly bear a day and a half.  He abandoned it because, as he explained, “it was getting a little too fresh.”