Jim and Percy had made a set one foggy morning on Medrick Shoal. When the trawl came up it was a sight to make angels weep. For yards at a stretch the hooks were bare or bitten off. Then came "dogs" of all sizes from "garter-dogs," or "shoe-strings," a foot long, to full-grown ten-pounders of about a yard. Mingled with them was an occasional lonesome skeleton of a haddock, cusk, or hake.
"Look at the pirate!" said Jim.
Grasping a ganging well above the hook, he held the fish up for Percy's inspection. It was two feet long, of a dirty gray color, slim, shark-shaped, with mouth underneath. Before each of the two fins on its back projected a sharp horn.
"Think of buying perfectly good herring at Vinalhaven, and freighting 'em way down here to feed a thing like that!" mourned Jim. "He's the meanest thief that ever grew fins. Swims too slow to catch a fish that's free; but good-by to anything that's hooked, if he's round. He'll gouge out a piece as big as a baseball at every bite. I'd hate to fall overboard in a school of 'em."
"Don't touch him!" he warned, hastily, as Percy reached out an investigating hand. "He'll stick those horns into you, and they're rank poison."
"Aren't dogfish good for anything?" asked Percy.
"Not a thing! No, I'll take that back. They can be ground up for fertilizer; their livers are full of oil; and their skin makes the finest kind of sandpaper for cleaning or polishing metal without scratching it. They've been canned, too, under the name of grayfish; but no fisherman'd ever eat 'em; he knows 'em too well."
Rod after rod of trawl yielded the same results.
"I'm almost tempted to save my buoys and anchors, and cut all the rest away," announced Jim in disgust. "I've known it to be done. They wear the line out, sawing across it. But I guess the best way is to save what we can and stop fishing for a while. Sometimes they come square-edged, like a stone wall, just as they have this morning; and in a few days they'll have gone somewhere else. Hope it'll be that way this time!"
It was almost noon before the whole trawl was aboard. It had yielded barely two hundred pounds of hake.