He sheered off a bit on hearing the splash; but afterwards soon swam up to where the baited hook was towing in our wake, smelling at it cautiously as if to see whether it was advisable for him to bolt the savoury morsel or not. Then, with a disdainful swish of his screw-like tail, he turned round in the water and resumed his station further astern, as if he saw through our attempt to entrap him, and despised it.
“I thought so,” said Mr Marline. “He’s too old a bird to be caught by chaff. You won’t hook him in a blue moon!”
“Don’t you be too cocksure of that,” retorted Captain Miles. “Sharks, I have noticed, frequently resemble cats in the way they will nibble at a bait, and pretend they don’t care about it, when all the while they are dying to gobble it down—just in the same manner as you’ll observe pussy, if you offer her a nice bit of meat, will sniff and turn away her head as if rejecting the morsel with disdain, affecting to make you believe it beneath her notice, only the next moment to abstract it slily from your hand, glad enough to get it! You’ll see presently, Mr Marline, that our friend there will go at the pork again, I’ll bet anything.”
“All right, cap’en,” replied Mr Marline. “I only hope, I’m sure, that your anticipation will prove correct;” but, from the sly quizzical smile on his face and the dry way in which he spoke, I don’t think the mate believed in our hooking the ugly brute, all the same.
After a little time, I noticed two small fishes coming up towards the bait and poking their pointed noses into it as if taking observations, and I called Captain Miles’s attention to them.
“Oh, that’s a good sign,” said he. “Those are pilot-fish, which always accompany his majesty Mr Shark in the way of aides-de-camp, as you call those smart gentlemen in gay uniforms who are usually seen prancing about the general at a review of troops ashore. Whenever you see the little chaps, the shark himself is never far off, for they precede him as his scouts to warn him of danger as well as tell him if there’s anything worth grabbing in the offing. If it wasn’t for them I believe he’d fare rather badly, as his own sight is bad—fortunately for poor fellows that fall in the water in the way Jackson did t’other day!”
“But, captain,” I remarked, “they must be very bad guides if they do not tell the shark about the hook.”
“Aye,” he replied; “something like ‘the blind leading the blind,’ eh? Still, you know Moggridge has taken care that the bait carefully conceals the snare within, and the pilot-fish are none the wiser. See them now!”
As I watched, I noticed first one and then the other of the little fish smell at the piece of pork, making their observations apparently, after which they swam back to the side of the shark, where they remained for a moment on either side of his snout, as if they were making their report upon the tempting object and giving their master all particulars.
Then the shark, with a fluke of his tail, also advanced closer to the bait, which just then, by a twist of the rope attached to it, the boatswain jerked away.