THE ALLIGATOR MADE STRAIGHT FOR THE OPEN SEA.
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 is impracticable, and I now come to the main business of my notes, the capture of tarpon by the modern method of trolling.