Angling for Sharks 81 



each about sixteen feet long, and commanding the com- 

 bined strength of all the idlers in the neighborhood. They 

 are not exactly game fishes, but they fight hard, and their 

 vicious dispositions make every man and fish feel that every 

 shark caught is a good riddance. On these sharks, too, 

 were several shark's pilots, but at Key West the species is 

 different, larger and more slender, and with a black stripe 

 down its side. The open sea remora is all black. Moreover, 

 this species does not cling to the shark through all its vicissi- 

 tudes, as the true remora does, but cuts loose hastily 

 and shifts for itself at the first indication of trouble. If 

 such an arrangement were possible, this species would turn 

 state's evidence whenever a shark is caught. 



In Alaska lives the great nurse shark or sleeper shark. 

 It is a great lumbering beast, twenty feet long, and weigh- 

 ing, I should think, a ton or more. It fights the whales, 

 biting out pieces of flesh with its jagged teeth. But mostly, 

 in these degenerate days, it lies about salmon canneries, 

 to feed on offal. It gorges itself at high tide, then goes 

 away somewhere to sleep it off, when the tide is falling. It 

 will take the hook readily enough, but only steam tackle 

 can draw it in. 



Just beyond the little town of Fort Wrangel in Alaska, at 

 the north end of Wrangel Island, where the water is gray 

 with the glacial mud which comes down from the Stickeen 

 River, there is a large salmon cannery. By the side of the 

 cannery is a small bay covering an acre or so, flooded with 

 water at high tide, bare, and filled with fine gray silt when 

 the ebb goes out. Here to the cannery comes, every day, a 

 sleeper shark or two, to gorge on salmon heads and salmon 

 offal. Into this little bay, if the tide is high, the shark goes 

 to sleep it off. When he is comfortably disposed on the 

 bottom, the tide goes out, and there he is. There is twenty 

 or thirty feet of tide about Fort Wrangel, and between ebb 

 and flow there is a great deal of difference. The shark 

 flounders helplessly for awhile, and at last is suffocated, and 



