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 1s impracticable, 
and I now come to the main business of my notes, the capture 
of tarpon by the modern method of trolling. 
39 
