Hence the need for legs that ever agitated the screen,
and for hands that splashed and throats that yelled. Pandemonium
reigned as the trap tightened.
But no fish broke surface or collided against the hidden legs. At
last the chief fisherman entered the trap. He waded around
everywhere, carefully. But there were no fish boiling up and out
upon the sand. There was not a sardine, not a minnow, not a polly-
wog. Something must have been wrong with that prayer; or else, and
more likely, as one grizzled fellow put it, the wind was not in its
usual quarter and the fish were elsewhere in the lagoon. In fact,
there had been no fish to drive.
"About once in five these drives are failures," Allicot consoled us.
Well, it was the stone-fishing that had brought us to Bora Bora, and
it was our luck to draw the one chance in five. Had it been a
raffle, it would have been the other way about. This is not
pessimism. Nor is it an indictment of the plan of the universe. It
is merely that feeling which is familiar to most fishermen at the
empty end of a hard day.
CHAPTER XIV - THE AMATEUR NAVIGATOR
There are captains and captains, and some mighty fine captains, I
know; but the run of the captains on the Snark has been remarkably
otherwise.
