Big Game with a Revolver 309 



Of course the indulgent reader will understand 

 that this is an amiable lapse of the imagination ; 

 I could not take an affidavit that they were the 

 same orcas ; they looked the same, perhaps were. 

 In any event, they were big, beautiful, as sea 

 beauties go; particularly when you had a soup- 

 qon of knowledge regarding their teeth and 

 powers of jaw and digestion. So I hailed them 

 as old friends; they had dropped over to San 

 Clemente on the same errand as ourselves. It 

 was thirty miles farther out to sea and there 

 were more fish and better fishing for orcas and 

 men. 



There is no mistaking them for anything else. 

 You see a great black fin a mile away, the fin 

 of the straight-fin Orca gladiator or killer. He 

 is not common in Southern California; you find 

 him farther north playing havoc with the sal- 

 mon pack at the mouths of the rivers; following 

 the fur seals in their loop to the south and 

 return, and it is this animal that Scamnion de- 

 scribes as taking a whale from whalers, by main 

 force and ferocity. 



About the channel islands the Orca ater is the 

 familiar form; beautiful creatures, with a dark 

 slate-like skin as finely polished as a piano case, 

 absolutely free from parasites of any kind, with 

 not the suspicion of a blemish, and decorated in 

 a marvellous manner wholly inexplicable unless 

 to let the looker-on know that it is Orca ater, and 



