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This, however, occasioned little or no anxiety to Betsy Waroonga, for she was not an anxious mother; but when, raising her eyes a little higher, she beheld the tip of the back-fin of a shark describing lively circles in the water as if it had scented the tender morsel and were searching for it, her easy indifference vanished.
If he sticks that back-fin into you, it will poison you." "Then I should think it would poison us to eat him," said she. "No; it's only his fin." "I've eaten cat-fish, but I never saw one like that," she said. "Look at its horrible mouth! And it has whiskers like a cat!" "Oh! you never saw one with its head on," I said. "What I want to do is to get this hook out."
And here, where we steamed along, was the very spot where we had seen the shark's back-fin when we rowed back from the first Guacharo cave. And it was all over. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.
That black wheel was part of his back, as he turned down; and the tooth on it was his back-fin. But the noise, like a giant's cough? Rather like the blast of a locomotive just starting. That was his breath. What? as loud as that? Why not? He is a very big fellow, and has big lungs. How big is he? I cannot say: perhaps thirty or forty feet long. We shall be able to see better soon.
"Jumbos, of course. You want anything, you yell." Unidentified flying objects were forgotten as Steve initiated them into the proper method of eating fresh crab. It turned out to be quite an art, but one that they mastered quickly. Soon all three of them were munching succulent back-fin crab meat drenched in fresh butter.
How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases.
We were unlucky indeed, in the matter of sharks; for, with the exception of a problematical back-fin or two, we saw none in the West Indies, though they were swarming round us. The next day the boat's head was turned homewards. And what had been learnt at the little bay of Alice Biscayen suggested, as we went on, a fresh geological question.
No sounds were heard save the dull roar of the breaker that fell, at long regular intervals, on the seaward side of the reef, and no motion was visible except the back-fin of a shark as it cut a line occasionally on the sea, or the stately sweep of an albatross, as it passed above the schooner's masts and cast a look of solemn inquiry upon her deck. But that schooner was not a pirate.
For as he rode through the Doubloon at low tide in the morning, he espied in the surf that river-god, or Jumby, of which I spoke just now; namely, the gray back-fin of a shark; and his mule espied it too, and laid back her ears, knowing well what it was. M rode close up to the brute.
"And your idee of an honor, is it," he sneered, "is that I'm goin' to put that dingbusset with a leather back-fin onto my head and grab up them two leather swill-pails and stick that iron thing there under my arm and grab that puckering-string bag in my teeth and start tophet-te-larrup over this town a-chasin' fires? Say " but his voice choked, and he began to read once more the pamphlet.
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