Giant Fish of Florida 



can, with little apparent effort, whisk a man off his legs ; and 

 of the jaws, which then snap round unpleasantly near the other 

 end. 



It would be folly to class this pastime as sport, for it is 

 merely a novel experience ; but a somewhat more sporting 

 method, where alligators are sufficiently plentiful, is to shoot 

 them with a rifle at night. Professional hunters take only the 

 underside of the skin, which is worth just twenty-five cents to 

 them. There is one alligator story that every visitor to Boca 

 Grand is sure to hear. A professional hunter was on one 

 occasion engaged to find sport for a man who wanted an easy 

 kill without adventuring his person among the parasites of the 

 bush, and they returned with a dead alligator within half 

 an hour. It afterwards transpired from an unknown source 

 that the hunter had walked with his employer to a small pond 

 a few hundred yards distant, and there made strange noises 

 through his nose, and told the other to fire in a certain 

 direction. The sportsman fired at quite another spot, being 

 somewhat excited ; but that made no difference, for the 

 hunter rushed in knee-deep and dragged forth a fine dead 

 alligator. There was no mark of any wound on its hide, but 

 the man told us that it had been killed by the concussion. 

 No one else said anything. Such recreation, however, is 

 appropriate only to days on which sea-fishing is impracticable, 

 and I now come to the main business of my notes, the capture 

 of tarpon by the modern method of trolling. 



39 



