Beast (6 page)

“I take it back,” Darling said. “I think it was a shark.”

“What makes you think so?” Mike asked, wanting to believe, but needing some convincing.

“Had to be. I just remembered, National Geographic, some sharks can put out twenty tons per square inch when they bite. That’d be more than enough to cut those cables.”

“Why wouldn’t he run with it?”

“Wouldn’t have to. No hooks in it. He just swims round and round and bites the wires off one by one.” Darling was even beginning to convince himself.

Mike thought for a moment, then said, “Oh.”

Darling looked up at the sky. He felt an odd desire, a desire to quit and go home. But the sun was still climbing, it wasn’t yet noon, and he’d already burned up twenty-five or thirty dollars’ worth of fuel. If they went home now, he’d be out of pocket fifty bucks with nothing to show for it but an awkward explanation to the aquarium. And so he forced himself to say, “What say we try for a day’s pay?”

Mike said, “Good enough,” and together they began to rig a deep line with some big baited hooks.

Maybe they’d catch something worth selling, maybe just something worth eating. Even if they just caught something, it would be better than heading back to the dock and acknowledging another day’s defeat.

The thought depressed him. These days, the act of fishing itself, which once had been enjoyable even when he was skunked, had become depressing. He likened it to journeying back to the place where you were raised, where you had had good times and good memories, and finding that it had been paved over and made into a parking lot.

All fishing did nowadays was remind him of how good things used to be.

He had read all the old accounts of what Bermuda had been like when the first settlers arrived. The island was overrun then by birds and pigs. The birds belonged, and some of them, like the cahows, were so dumb that they’d land on people’s heads and wait to be grabbed and put into the cook pot. The pigs didn’t belong. Some had been put ashore by ships’ captains, in anticipation of a time when castaways would need nourishment. Others swam ashore from shipwrecks, and they thrived on birds and eggs.

But what had entranced the old-timers, what accounted for the almost religious enthusiasm in their accounts, was the sea life. Everything was around Bermuda, everything from turtles to whales, and in numbers inconceivable to people from the Old World, where even by the seventeenth century a great many species had been slaughtered almost to extinction.

Darling wasn’t one to indulge in weepy bushwa about the good old days. He saw change as inevitable and destruction as part of it, especially when man got into the mix, and that was the way things were.

But what did infuriate him, what shamed and disgusted him, was the change he had seen in Bermuda in only twenty years. By his reckoning, Bermuda had been ruined in the lifetime of a house cat.

In the late sixties and early seventies, he could still go out on the reefs and catch his dinner. There were lobsters under every rock, schools of parrotfish, angelfish, triggerfish, surgeonfish, damselfish, hogfish, porgies, even occasional groupers. When he worked on a shipwreck, goatfish dug in the sand beside him, rays skittered across the bottom, and there was always the tiny danger that some nearsighted wrasse would take a bite from his earlobe. More than once, reef sharks had chased him off a wreck, nibbling at the tips of his flippers.

Just over the edge in deeper water were whole colonies of groupers—Nassau groupers, spotted groupers, black groupers and now and then a 500-or 600-pound jewfish. There were moray eels and tiger sharks, bull sharks and hinds and snappers. Turtles poked their heads up like little children swimming on the surface.

And in the deep, to put out a slick and drift was an invitation to excitement. Wahoo fought with barracudas for the bait. Bonitos and Alison tuna swarmed around the back of the boat. Billfish cruised the slick, their dorsal fins cutting the water like scythes, and the big, fast pelagic sharks flashed beneath the boat and showed off the shiny blue of their backs.

A good day was a thousand pounds of rockfish and a thousand more of tuna, and the hotels took pride in listing the prime special of the day as fresh Bermuda fish.

No more. Some of the hotels still listed Bermuda fish, but not with pride, for what they served now, all that was left, was trash, the fish that had survived because nothing wanted them. If a fisherman caught a grouper of any size, it was an event that made the paper.

Bermuda’s ocean was one step from being as lifeless as the western eddies of Long Island Sound.

Darling listened with bitter amusement to the explanations of the fishermen. Pollution! they cried, and to that he replied: Bullshit.

What had killed Bermuda’s fishing industry—he believed, he knew, he felt he could document—was fishermen. Not only Bermuda fishermen, but the species in general. People. People who weren’t content with making a living and wanted to make a killing, treating the ocean as if it were a deep pit to be strip-mined. He had even given them a scientific name: Homo assholus.

Well, they’d made a killing all right, but not the way they thought.

And the chief villain was a piece of equipment they had invented: the fish trap.

In times past, fishermen had fished—with hand lines—and what limited their catch was their grit. They stopped when they fell down in a stupor, their hands swollen like a convention of sausages.

Then someone thought of putting down wire cages with bait inside and buoys to the surface. The fish would swim in and, thanks to the construction of the traps, not be able to find their way out again.

Soon, everybody was putting traps down, as many as they wanted. There was supposed to be a limit, but nobody paid any attention to it.

And did they catch fish! So many fish that they threw away all but the best—dead or dying, but who cared?— and if the price went down because there were too many, why, no sweat, they just caught more.

Darling had never used traps, didn’t like them, not from some high moral purpose but because to him trapping wasn’t fishing, it was killing and scooping up, not entertaining in the least. And, he thought, if you can’t enjoy what you do for a living, then find something else to do. He had no intention of ending his days sitting in the yard with a cat in his lap and a bird on his shoulder, telling visitors that he had lived a long life and had hated every minute of it.

The first problem with the traps was that they did their job too well. They caught everything—big, small, young, old, pregnant, whatever. A hand-line fisherman could pick and choose among his catch and put back fish that were too small or too young or too loaded with roe or simply not what he was fishing for. But with traps, by the time the fish had been jammed together in the wire for a few days, and bruised and shocked and scarred and abused by one another and by the cage itself, they had little chance of surviving even if the fishermen took the trouble to put them back, which most of them didn’t.

The second problem was lost traps. If the buoy broke away or the rope chafed off or a storm sea pushed the trap over the edge into the deep and it sank beyond reach, the trap would keep on killing. The fish inside would die and become bait for more fish, which would come in and be trapped and die and become bait for more fish, forever and ever, amen.

Everybody had a remedy. They tried biodegradable string to hold the traps’ doors shut, even biodegradable doors, on the theory that if a trap got lost, eventually the material would rot away and the door would open and the fish could get out. But “eventually” was so long in coming that whole generations of animals could be wiped out before the doors would magically pop open.

Darling had found lost traps on the bottom that looked like a Tokyo subway car at rush hour, jam-packed with everything from eels to parrotfish to octopus to crabs. The sight saddened and enraged him, for while he was not a sentimentalist about death, this was death to no purpose whatever—an ultimate waste. More than once, he had stopped the boat and lost time and money diving down to deep traps and slashing off the floating lines and cutting away the doors with wire snips. The perplexed, exhausted and wounded prisoners—some with scales scraped away by the wire, some with open sores from frantic fights—would meander within the now-open trap for several moments, as if unable to believe their sudden good fortune, and only when he moved away would they seem to share some silent cue and burst free.

Finally, in 1990, about ten years too late, the Bermuda government had outlawed trap fishing and paid off the island’s seventy-eight commercial fishermen— richly enough, Darling thought, though the fishermen complained loudly that the amounts were too paltry to compensate them for the loss of a God-given right.

The sanctimonious outcry against the loss of rights infuriated Darling. What rights? Where was it written that any man had a right to kill off all the fish in Bermuda? By such logic, he felt, bank robbery should be a protected profession: If a man has a right to feed his family, and if what he does costs an insurance company a few hundred thousand dollars a year, well, that’s the cost of freedom.

Now that traps were outlawed, the hope was that the fish would come back, but Darling had his doubts. Bermuda was not like the Bahamas, a chain of seven hundred islands that had a chance to replenish each other if one or another was fished out—though some Bahamians seemed even more hell-bent than Bermudians on destroying themselves. They had taken to fishing with Clorox: pump a little into a reef, and all the fish and lobsters come out in the open where they’re easy to scoop up. Of course, Clorox killed the reef, too, all of it, forever. But a man had to make a living.

Bermuda was a single rock in the middle of nowhere. What was there was there, and what wasn’t never would be.

And as if man weren’t working fast enough to turn Bermuda into a wasteland, Nature was throwing her wrecking ball at the island. Darling had a friend, Marcus Sharp, stationed at the U.S. Navy base, who knew something about meteorology and had showed him some NOAA figures concluding that the water temperature around Bermuda had risen by two degrees in the last twenty years.

Some scientists said it was because of the burning down of the Amazon jungle and the burning up of too much fossil fuel. Others said it was part of a natural rhythm, like the coming and going of the ice ages. But the reason wasn’t as important as the fact: It was happening.

To a man in a city, two degrees might be nothing. To corals in the sea, two degrees spelled the difference between life and death. Ten percent of Bermuda’s corals were already dead. Darling saw the evidence every day—big patches of bleached reef, like a boneyard. If ten percent became twenty percent, if then all the corals disappeared, gradually Bermuda would erode away, for corals were the island’s shield against the open ocean.

Coral polyps weren’t the only animals affected by the temperature rise. Some creatures had vanished, some had gone deeper, and some new ones had sprung up. There was a new burrower, for example—a microscopic worm or louse that lived in the sand. When divers disturbed the sand, the burrowers were liberated, and they fixed themselves to human skin and dug in. They excreted a poison that caused pustulant sores and an infernal itching that lasted for a week.

The last horse in the troika of destruction was the foreigners. While Bermudians were killing off their reef fish, the Japanese and the Koreans were massacring the deep-water species. They were out there every day, setting thirty-mile-long nets to intercept the migrators, and they were getting everything: tuna and billfish, mackerel and wahoos, sharks and bonitos and jacks and porpoises.

Those fishermen who didn’t use nets used long lines— miles and miles of line, with baited hooks every few feet, which accomplished the same thing: They killed everything, without selection or discrimination.

Darling thought of it as equality of slaughter.

Fishing had once given Darling a feeling of vitality, an appreciation of and wonder at the richness and diversity of life.

Now all it made him think of was death.

It took them an hour to bait and set their deep line. When it was down, Darling snapped a rubber buoy into a loop at the end of the line and tossed it overboard, letting it drift with the tide as the breeze pushed the boat to the southeast.

Mike opened a tin of Polish ham and a bottle of Coke and took them aft and sat on the hatch cover and tinkered some more with the pump motor.

Darling went into the wheelhouse and ate an apple while he listened to the radio to hear if anyone was catching anything anywhere. One captain reported that he had raised a shark. Another, a charter-boater way out on Challenger Bank, had caught a few Alison tuna. No one else had seen a thing.

The sun had just begun to slide westward off its peak when they pulled in the line. They took turns—one on the winch, the other feeling the line—and exchanged hopeful guesses.

“Feel him?”

“Coupla coneys.”

“Gummy shark, maybe.”

“Tapioca fish.”

“I say a pair of snappers.”

“Don’t you wish… .”

The eight hooks had caught two small red snappers, their eyes popped and their bladders squeezed out through their mouths by the sudden loss of pressure. Darling tossed them into the bait box and looked at the sky, then at the sea. Not a fin, not a feeding bird. Nothing. “Well, then, to hell with it,” he said, and he wiped his hands on his pants and went forward to start the engine.

He was about to step inside the cabin when he heard Mike say, “Look there.” He was pointing to the southern sky.

A navy helicopter was heading their way from the south.

“Wonder where he’s going,” Darling said.

“Nowhere. They never do. Just loggin’ time.”

“Maybe.” Darling waved as the helicopter passed overhead and continued northward. Mike was probably right. Except for occasional search-and-rescue jobs, there was so little work for navy pilots that they often had to fly back and forth around the island just to keep up their proficiency and their flying hours.