AMONG THE ALLIGATORS
The scenery of that coast will not be found prepossessing; but some of
the islands, though almost repellent from without, with their unvarying
fringe of oyster-covered mangrove growth depending in the water, are
really beautiful in the interior, where their vegetation presents a
luxuriant medley of palms, yucca, cactus, indiarubber trees, and all the
wealth of festooned creepers so characteristic of the sub-tropical
forest. There are long avenues of cabbage palm, that curious proof of
human patience, which leads men willingly to fell a plant fourteen
inches thick for the sake of a nut-like heart measuring six inches by
three. Many of the pools and swamps in the interior are still the haunts
of alligators, though the ranks of those hideous reptiles have been
greatly thinned by the professional skin hunters.
A ’gator hunt is not bad fun on an off day, even though the twelve-foot
veterans are now few and far between. If pursued on the shore, the
alligator will almost certainly make good its escape into the sea,
though how it fares with the ever-attendant sharks has not yet been
determined. The first requisite for an alligator hunt inland is to
enlist the services of a professional hunter, which your guide can
easily do, though the only obvious qualification of that official seems
to lie in the sanguine but unrealisable assurance that he gives, that
every submerged cave contains a quarry. The only equipment for this
“sport” is a strong gaff and a fourteen-foot sprit from the boat. You
then pick your way through tangled undergrowth, disturbing many a
moccasin snake that glides away on your approach.
At every likely puddle the professional one holds his nose and emits a
series of fearful grunts, with the object of attracting the wayward
reptile. As this expert trick usually fails, the only plan is to make
fast the gaff to the sprit, and carefully probe every hole and cave,
exploring crevices in the dry earth that look no bigger than large
rabbit earths. At length, if success is to be yours, the gaff will be
seized in the jaws of the infuriated sleeper, which may then be gaffed
anywhere near the head and hauled from his lair. On being brought forth
into the daylight, he opens his jaws to their full extent and grunts
loudly, but seems a harmless, torpid creature enough, though it is
prudent to keep clear of his tail, which
[Illustration: 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.