350 | LABRADOR 
Hake or haddock arerarely seen in Labrador. Theformer 
fish is easily distinguishable by his silvery armoured coat, 
and the latter by the black marks on his shoulders, irrev- 
erently attributed to the fingers of St. Peter, who is said 
to have pulled him out of the water to pay taxes, with the 
money in the fish’s mouth. Why the spots are black, 
tradition does not say. 
It seems to surprise most people that the shark is found 
in Labrador, as he is always associated with tropical waters. 
The variety we have is the sleeper, Somniosus microcepha- 
lus, the little-headed, sleepy shark. He has a large body 
up to fifteen feet long, and fully lives up to his name. He 
feeds on offal thrown overside, earning the name of gurry 
shark; he is the most despised of our ocean fauna. He 
frequently gets caught in the sunken nets for seals, though 
not nearly as often as he deserves, for he browses along the 
nets, eating out the seals. In most cases his energy is not 
sufficient to make him push into the net. A ten-foot shark 
has a mouth contour of two feet, and a gullet proportional. 
It is said that he eats live whales, biting huge pieces out 
of the abdominal blubber; but I cannot believe him smart 
enough to do this. So sharp are his teeth that he will sculp 
all the fat and skin off a dead seal, without taking two bites 
at one piece. I have taken from his stomach nearly every 
bit of a seal’s skin and fat in one long string the width of the 
shark’s mouth, almost as one takes off the peel from an 
orange or an apple. On one occasion we found in a shark 
the carcass of a red dog, which we had left on a pan of ice 
to drift out to sea a week previously. The sleeper shark 
seems to have little capacity for pain. Captain Atwood 
reports that after driving a scythe right through one’s 
