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Out of /fie 



the rare voice of the whale, or the reverbera- 

 tion of smitten water, or the vibration of great 

 volumes of air driven out of the laboring 

 lungs through the blow-holes, we could not 

 tell ; nor had the fishermen ever heard it 

 save when a whale was fighting for his life. 

 While the whale was gone and we watched 

 breathless for him to come to the surface 

 again, the skipper and the old fisherman 

 answered my hurried questions. Yes, they 

 had seen the threshers, or fox-sharks, before, 

 and had sometimes caught them in their 

 nets. Once they had seen three or four of 

 them fighting a whale as they were jigging 

 cod on the shoals. They were from twelve 

 to twenty feet long, the skipper said, in- 

 cluding the prolonged upper lobe of the tail, 

 which they could use with terrific force as 

 a weapon of offense. Then the scholar 

 brought out of the cabin the skull of a fox- 

 shark that we had found in the hut of a 

 Labrador fisherman, a skull that was chiefly 

 a pair of long, pointed, cruel jaws with rows 

 of hooked ivory fangs fitting together like 

 the teeth of a bear trap. "That's it, — a 



