Shark Trouble (5 page)
Thus far, Wilcox hadn't produced any scuba-diving segments because there hadn't been any demand for them. Where was the excitement or entertainment in taking a movie camera under water, where the celebrity couldn't talk, and filming fish swimming around on a reef?
Jaws
and the tumult attendant on it led Wilcox to believe that sharksâunseen, malevolent, and, best of all, man-eatersâcould produce ⦠oh, well, the pun is unavoidable ⦠monster ratings.
I was a certified diver, though by no means a confidently experienced one. Years earlier, while earning my certification in the Bahamas, I had seen a shark in the distance, minding its own business, and my reaction had been commonplace: panic. I grabbed my instructor by the arm, pointed at the meandering shark, gestured that it was time for us to surface, and when he calmly refused, breathed so deeply and so rapidly that I sucked my tank dry.
So I agreed to journey to Australia for ABC, on one condition: that I could bring with me one of the handful of people who had ever been in the water with white sharks: Stan Waterman, a cameraman and associate producer on
Blue Water, White Death,
a pioneer in scuba diving who was often referred to as “America's Cousteau,” and most important, a neighbor and close friend whom I would trust with my life.
It sounded like fun. After spending the last year and a half locked up in a room alone, writing, it would be a welcome relief, an adventure, a unique experience to recount to my grandchildren, with suitable embellishments, of course.
As with the writing and publishing of
Jaws
and the writing, shooting, and release of the subsequent movieâand, in fact, as with most of the rest of my life to that pointâI hadn't the faintest idea what I was about to get myself into.
6
South Australia, 1974
Part III
We flew to Adelaide, South Australia, and from there across Spencer Gulf to Port Lincoln, a rugged frontier town in a neighborhood rife with optimistic place-names like Coffin Bay andâour destinationâDangerous Reef.
This was the world of the great white shark and the home of Rodney Fox. Fox had become a national hero in Australia, introducing the
Blue Water, White Death
crew to the great whites of South Australia and embarking on a career as a shark expert, tour guide, and conservationist. Even back then, Rodney knew ten times more than anyone else, scientist or civilian, about great whites, and he was the only individual in the known world who had any notion of how to attract them and film them, under water, in relative safety.
It was Rodney who had built the cages, he who had chartered the boats and hired the crews and bought the dead horse to use as bait and minced the chum and convinced me that I would be perfectly safe in the cage that was now being hammered to rubble by two thousandâplus pounds of maddened, panicked, and, seemingly, enraged great white shark.
It was Rodney's name that I invoked in vain as I was slammed about in the cage, envisioning myself reduced from a suddenly successful writer to a surf-'n'-turf snack for a prehistoric monster.
The curious thing was not merely that I wasn't afraid but that I
knew
I wasn't afraid. In all the turmoil, the violence, the confusion, the darknessâthe sensory overloadâmy brain made room for a conscious observation about itself. We had departed the realm of fear, my brain and I, and emerged into a peaceful pocket of detached observation. I felt no pain, save for the odd ache accompanying the
thunk
of my insulated bones against the bars. I watched my stubby rubber fingers plucking futilely at the little rubber ring that held the knife in its sheath. Every movement looked slow and deliberate, as if the “play” mechanism in my mental VCR had been slowed to “frame advance.”
The noise was raucous, each sound distinct and surprising: the hollow, metallic
whang
of the cage slamming against the hull of the boat; the subdued
whoosh
as a ton of shark flesh lashed wildly through the water; the bubbles blasting both from me and from the rippling gill slits of the huge frightened animal; and, so far in the distance that they might have been imaginary or the relics of a resurrected dream, shrill shards of human voices.
Even my own survival had become a matter more of interest than of anxiety.
The cage began to move, scraping along the bottom of the boat, and now there was light enough for me to see that weâthe shark, the cage, and Iâwere somehow still connected to the boat above. With a thrust of its tail, the giant body lunged upward and forward.
What's this? Now it wants to board the boat?
Suddenly, with swiftness and grace and in complete silence, the shark slid backward and down, turned, and swam away. The rope had disappeared from its mouth. I had a final glimpse of its tail, and then the shark was gone, absorbed into the misty blue fabric of the sea.
The cage righted itself, but because one of its floating tanks had been punctured, it hung askew. Someone above pulled on the rope, and I felt myself moving up toward the light. Through the moving glassy plane of the surface I saw faces, grotesquely distorted, staring down at me from the boat and, a bull's-eye in their center, the round black eye of the ABC Sports camera lens.
Once on board, I described my ordeal for the camera, nearly weeping with relief.
Rodney, who had undergone (forget merely
seen
) circumstances infinitely worse, enthused with complimentary expostulations like, “You're mad!”
Stan, gifted with a silver tongue, an affection for eighteenth-century diction, and an infinite capacity for ironic flattery, said, “Tell me, sir, is it true that you don't know the very meaning of fear?”
Not till I described what I thought had gone wrong and inquired as to what had, in fact, gone wrong was there an awkward pause. Most of the crew seemed unaware that anything
had
gone wrong, and those few who did know seemed less than eager to discuss the matter.
I chanced then to look up at the flying bridge, where my wife, Wendy, was leaning on the railing and watching with wry amusement the scene below on the stern. We'd been married for ten years by then, and from her expression I knew immediately that she knew everything, from exactly what had gone wrong to who and what had been involved in correcting it. I was confident, too, that whatever had transpired, she had played a role in its satisfactory outcome.
As indeed she had.
In 1974 much of Australia, particularly such outlying states as South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territories, was socially equivalent to Tombstone, Arizona, in the 1880s or Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1920s. Binge drinking was a national pastime, fistfighting was accepted as entertainment and a valid means of self-expression, and women were regarded as fragile workhorses, delicate termagants, and necessary evils. (A joke of the time asked, “What's Australian foreplay?” The answer: “Brace yourself, Shirley!”)
Wendy and I stayed overnight in the Tasman Hotel in Port Lincoln, and when we went downstairs for a drink, we discovered that she was not permitted access to the bar; she could get a drink only in the ladies' lounge.
It was rare, therefore, if not unprecedented, for a wife to accompany her husband on an expedition like ours, living in close quarters on small boats, and Wendy found herself treated with profound awkwardness, though neither resentment nor disrespect.
So when the white shark had appeared and I had climbed into the cage, Wendy was banished from the action, exiled up to the flying bridge.
Admirably, she hadn't argued, and almost immediately she discovered that she had the best position on the boat, with a comprehensive view of everything that was going on: the giant shark lunging at the baits, bumping and biting the two cagesâmine and Stan'sâthe surface cameraman struggling to keep up with fast-moving figures, ever-changing focal lengths, shifting light, and splashes of blood and oil and water.
She saw the rope attached to my cage slip into the shark's mouth; she saw it catch between the teeth; she saw the shark grow increasingly desperate to rid itself of the cage, thrashing and gnashing and pummeling both cages.
She also saw that nobody else had noticed any of it. They were all too close to the action, too focused on their own tasks. Cameramen were leaning over the transom, trying for close-ups; assistants held on to the cameramen's belts to keep them from tumbling overboard; some crewmen were busy ladling more chum into the water; others could do nothing but stare, openmouthed, as a fish the size of a Buick went berserk behind the boat.
Wendy knew what would happen if the shark couldn't shake loose of the rope, and it became obvious that it couldn't.
She slid quickly down the ladder from the flying bridge, marched aft, shouldered aside one chummer and one idle gaper, and took hold of the rope a foot or two behind the cleat to which it was tied on the stern. She leaned over the stern, trying to see the head of the shark and locate the spot where the rope entered its mouth.
Just then the shark raised its head and lunged upward, and Wendy found herself nose-to-nose withâperhaps twenty-four inches away fromâthe most notorious, hideous, frightening face in nature. The snout was smeared with red. Bits of flesh clung to its jaws, and rivulets of blood drooled from the sides of its mouth. The upper jaw was down, in bite position, and gnashing as if trying to climb the rope. The eyes, as big as baseballs, were rolled backward in their socketsâgreat whites do not have nictitating membranesâand as the great body shook, it forced air through its gill slits, making a noise like a grunting pig.
All this Wendy recalled in meticulous detail. She also recalled shaking the rope and yelling at the shark, calling it a son of a bitch and other epithets she wasn't aware she knew, and demanding that it let go of the rope. The shark grunted at her and twisted its head, showing her one of its ghastly black eyeballs, and the rope sprang free.
The shark slid backward off the stern and away from the boat, and when it was fully in the water, it rolled onto its side and, like a fighter plane peeling away from a formation, soared down and away into the darkness.
Part II
7
Six Dangerous Sharks
Â
There are, I believe, half a dozen species of sharks that can, and sometimes do, pose a threat to human beings.
The Great White
First and most notorious is the great white, the shark portrayed in
Jaws
. The largest carnivorous fish in the sea, great whites can grow to more than eighteen feet long and can weigh more than four thousand pounds. They can and sometimes do eat people, though it's now accepted that nearly every attack on a person is a mistake: the shark either confuses the person with a seal or sea lion or, particularly in murky water where it must rely on senses other than its eyes, takes a test bite to determine if this living thing is edible. There
have
been cases of great whites targeting humans, and few though they are, each case generates justified horror.
A few years ago a woman who had been scuba diving near a seal colony was taken from the waters off Tasmania. She had almost gotten to the boat and was reaching out to grab her husband's hand when an enormous great white attacked her from behind and below. While her shocked husband held on to his wife's hand, the shark bit her in half, then returned and took the upper half, literally yanking her torso from her husband's grasp.
Another notorious episodeâand one for which no shark expert, scientist, or diver I've spoken with has ever offered a credible explanationâoccurred back in 1909. A fifteen-foot-long female great white was caught off the town of Augusta, Sicily, and her belly was found to contain the remains of
three
human beings: two adults and a child.
More than 70 percent of great-white-shark-attack victims survive, because the shark realizes it has attacked in error and doesn't return to finish off the prey. Granted, that figure doesn't take into account swimmers, divers, and snorkelers who simply disappear while swimming in great-white country.
The high rate of survival may have to do with a phenomenon known as the “bite, spit, and wait” thesis of great-white behavior. First advanced by Dr. John McCosker, senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, the thesis explains both terminal attacks and attacks aborted after a single bite. According to McCosker, great whites have the astonishing capacity to assess, in the microsecond of a first bite, the caloric value of potential prey. If the shark determines that the prey isn't worth the effortâthat is, won't return as much energy as the shark will expend in attacking and eating itâit breaks off the attack after a single bite. Depending on the ferocity of the bite, the prey may or may not survive.
But if the first bite tells the shark that the prey contains an energy bonanzaâas would a nice fat seal, for example, or a sea lionâit will hang around after the first bite, wait for its prey to bleed to death, and then come back to finish the meal.
In general, large great whites perceive human beings as too bony to bother with, so they often depart after that first bite. Of course, when a 2,000- or 3,000-pound fish tastes a 170-pound man, withdrawal can be too little, too late. I will never forget a coroner's postmortem photographs of a young man killed in the Neptune Islands off South Australia. The shark must barely have grazed him before recognizing its mistake, for aside from one deep cut in a thigh and a nasty wound on one hand and wrist, the victim was unharmed. In the photographs he looked as if he was asleep. Sadly, however, the big shark's big teeth had opened two arteries, and the man had bled to death before he could reach the shore.
Some white-shark victims insist that they felt no pain at all when they were attacked, only a
thud
as they were struck and then a feeling of being tugged, as the shark's scalpel-sharp teeth severed flesh and bone. A friend of ours who lost a leg to a white shark while snorkeling off Australia recalled, “I couldn't see it, but I knew exactly what had me. It had me by the leg and was pulling me down. I thought for sure I was going to drown. I've never been so relieved in my life as when I felt my leg let go.” Luckily for him, a boat was nearby, someone aboard knew how to tie a tourniquet around his thigh, and he made it to a hospital.
From the swimmer's perspective, the best thing about great whites is that although they exist worldwide, they're extremely rare everywhere. Nature, in its infinite and eternally astonishing wisdom, determined that an apex predator (the absolute top of the food chain) as powerful and devastating as a great white should not exist in vast numbers: the marine food chain couldn't support them. So nature decreed that great whites would breed relatively late in lifeânot until they're at least twenty years oldâand would bear relatively few young, only some of which would survive to adulthood.
Tiger Sharks
Tiger sharks, too, are genuinely dangerous to man. They've been responsible for several attacks off Hawaii in recent years, and it's widely believed, with good reason, that they pose more of a threat to humans than do great whites. Tigers may not be as big or as robust and heavy as great whites, but a fifteen-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound tiger shark is plenty big enough; there are more of them, for they pup many more young than great whites (though some of the rapacious young quickly eat their brethren), and they're ubiquitous. While great whites, as a rule, hang around coastal waters, tiger sharks are completely free-roaming: they're fond of coastal waters, they like to enter lagoons at night and hunt in the shallows for prey that often includes smaller sharks, and they also roam the deep.
Once, when I was on a boat over the abyssal canyons off Bermuda, a huge tiger shark cruised leisurely around our stern, as if showing off its formidable size. The top of its head was as big around as a manhole cover, and the long, slender striped body seemed to take forever to pass by the stern. It was a chilling sight, reminiscent of the crocodile in
Peter Pan
that waits for Captain Hook to fall overboard. To me, the message from this giant said,
Take your time, no rush, I'm in no hurry, but sometime, someday, one of you will make a mistake and enter my realm, and then you'll be mine.
Suddenly, though, the shark must have received a signal that real potential prey was nearby, for it sped away and, a few seconds later, exploded through the surface fifteen or twenty feet behind the boat, clutching in its jaws an adult sea turtle. The turtle was too big to swallow, its shell too tough to crack; its head and legs had withdrawn into the safety of the carapace. The shark shook the turtle violently from side to side and then, mysteriously, let it go and slipped silently beneath the surface.
For several moments we watched the turtle bobbing on the surface, head and legs still invisible, and we guessed that the shark had abandoned the effort and departed in search of easier prey. The turtle must have come to the same conclusion, for slowly its legs protruded from the shell, then came the head, and then â¦
Bammo!
Like a rocket, the shark blasted up from below, clamped its jaws on one of the turtle's hind legs, and worried it with its teeth until, at last, the leg came off. The remaining three legs and the head snapped back inside the shell; again the shark slid away under water; again the turtle bobbed on the surface.
For the next half hour or so, we saw the assault repeated again and again, though without further success. Once wounded, the turtle appeared to be prepared to hunker down inside its shell forever, if necessary. As much as we rooted for the turtleâwe knew it could live a successful life with three functioning legsâthere was no way we could interfere; nor did we want to, for this was normal, natural predation in the sea.
Bull Sharks
The third shark that poses a true threat to man in the sea is the bull shark, which comes in several varieties, including the Zambezi shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark, and several of the so-called whalers of Australia. As the first two names imply, bull sharks are even more wide-ranging than tigers; they have been found inâand have killed people inâlakes and rivers. Most sharks can't survive, not to mention hunt and feed, in even brackish water, but bull sharks are equipped with some biological quirk that permits them to function normally in salt, brackish, and
fresh
water.
Bull sharks also frequent shallow water and murky water, like that off the Gulf Coast of Florida. It was a bull shark that attacked young Jesse Arbogast in July 2001, triggering the media frenzy that lasted all summer, and Bahamians asserted that bull sharks were probably the culprits in the two nonfatal attacks a month later in the shallow waters off Grand Bahama Island. Bull sharks have such a bad reputation for being aggressive, fearless, and territorial that they undoubtedly are blamed for more attacks than they're responsible for. Still, there are so many bull sharks in so many waters in which so many people choose to swim that they must be classified as extremely dangerous.
Oceanic Whitetips
Then there's the oceanic whitetip, whose Latin name so aptly describes the creature that I'll burden you with it:
C. longimanus,
or “long-hands.” This shark's pectoral fins are extraordinarily long and graceful, resembling the wings of a modern fighter jet.
Longimanus
tends to stay in the deep ocean, and nobody on earth has the vaguest notion about total numbers of long-hand attacks because the people they do attack are either adrift, alone, or survivors of shipwrecks, who don't much care
what
species of shark it is that's harassing them. I'd bet that many of the crewmen of the
Indianapolis,
in 1945, were killed by long-hands, but no one will ever know.
I do know, however, that
longimanus
is unpredictable, scary, and demonstrably capable of killing a human. There's a story about one that attacked two U.S. Navy divers in the deep waters of the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas. The shark took a big bite out of one of the divers and then, as the diver's mate fought it for possession of his friend, dragged the diver into the abyss. Finally, at a depth of about three hundred feetâfar beyond safe scuba depthâthe mate had to choose between letting go of his friend and dying himself, and he watched as shark and body disappeared into the gloom.
Long-hands are my personal bêtes noiresâone of the few species of shark of which I am genuinely and viscerally afraid. A couple of decades ago one made an honest effort to eat me. I don't blame the shark for trying, because my situation fell well within the bounds of Stupid Things You Should Avoid at All Costs, but the near-miss scared meâand scarred me permanentlyânevertheless.
I was with an ABC-TV crew, also in the Tongue of the Ocean, in open water more than a mile deep. We had tied our boat to a Navy buoy that had become a popular spot to film because it had been in the water for so long that the sea had claimed it, transforming it into an artificial reef. Microscopic animals had taken shelter in the buoy and the chain and had been followed by tiny crustacea and other small critters. Then the larger ones had come to feed, and those larger still, untilâin the magical way the sea has of generating life on all levelsâthe entire food chain had come to use buoy and chain as a feeding ground.
A school of yellowfin tuna was swarming around the buoy, attracted by something, and in the brilliant sunlight of the summer day the colors were so gorgeous that we decided to take some footage for the film segment about the Bahamas that we were working on for
The American Sportsman
.
I, as the so-called talent, was dispatched into the water. Stan Waterman followed to film whatever happenedâpresumably nothing more than the contrasting colors of the beautiful fish against the cobalt sea, interrupted now and then by a black-rubber-suited human wearing a yellow “horse-collar” buoyancy-compensator vest around his neck.
Back then I was still a pretty green blue-water diver. Blue-water diving is diving in water with no bottom visible or reachable; it can spark fears and phobias, for to look down into the darkling blue nothingness is to harken back to childhood nightmares about monsters and infinity. I wasn't accustomed to diving in water I knew to be more than five thousand feet deep, and once in a while I was haunted by a vision of my body drifting down, down, down, from light blue to darker blue, to purple and violet and the unknown black.
So, naturally, whenever I had to dive in blue water, I carried a security blanket: a sawed-off broomstick about three feet long, attached to my wrist by a rawhide thong. Exactly what it was supposed to protect me from I never determined, but my logic was unassailable: if cameramen could carry cameras with which to ward off attackers, and assistants could carry cameras and lights, why shouldn't I be allowed to carry a broomstick?
Thus armed, I jumped overboard and swam among the yellowfin tunaâor, rather, they swam around me. I held on to the barnacle-covered buoy chain to keep from being swept away by the current, and the school of tuna, which had scattered when I splashed into the water, re-formed and circled me. The shafts of sunlight piercing the surface glittered on their silver scales and yellow fins, and it seemed to me that Stan must be gathering an entire library of beauty shots.
The water was very clear, visibility more than a hundred feet, I was sure, though it's hard to tell in blue water, for there's nothing visible against which to gauge distances.
At the very edge of my vision I saw a shark swimming by. I couldn't discern what kind it was, and I didn't much care, for it was ambling, really, and showing no interest in me or the tuna.
Meanwhile, far up on the bow of the fifty-five-foot boat, one of the crewâbored and tantalized by the sight of so many delicious meals swimming so close to the boatârigged a fishing rod, dropped a baited hook into the water, and let it drift back into the school of tuna. He had not asked permission, nor had he told anyone what he was doing, forâhey, who cares?âhe was staying out of the way and minding his own business. When he hooked a fish, he would simply drag it up to the bow and haul it aboard, and no one need be the wiser.
Stan gestured for me to move away from the buoy, so that he could frame me and the fish cleanly against the blue background. I let go of the chain and kicked my way out into open water. Obligingly, the tuna followed.
Suddenly I was gone, jerked downward by an irresistible force, with a searing pain in my lower leg, arms flung over my head, broomstick aiming at the surface. I could see Stan and the tuna receding above me. I looked around, panicked and confused, to see what had grabbed me. The shark? Had I been taken by the shark? I saw nothing.
I looked down. I was already in the dark blue; all that lay below were the violet and the black and â¦
wait
â¦
there, against the darkness ⦠what could it possibly
â
A tuna, fleeing for the bottom, struggling, fighting â¦
fighting? Against WHAT?
Then I saw the line, and the silvery leader. The fish was
hooked,
for God's sake. Somehow it had gotten â¦
no, impossible, no way it could have
â
A cloud billowed around my face, black as ink, thick as ⦠blood.
My blood.
I leaned backward and kicked forward, wanting to see my feet.
The steel leader was wrapped around my ankle. The wire had bitten deep, and a plume of black was rising from the wound, a sign that I was already down very, very deep, for blood doesn't become black till the twilight depths. (The sea consumes the visible spectrum of light, one color at a time, beginning a few feet under water. Red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, and so on, until, when you reach 150 or 200 feet, blood looks black.)
All I could guess was that, in some implausible fluke, as the fish had fled the surface it must have passed between my legs, or circled around my feet, or
somehow
wrapped the leader around my leg. And all I knew was that, somehow, I'd better find a way to free my leg before I was taken to depths from which no traveler returns.
I reached for my knife, to cut the line, butâencumbered by gear and disoriented by fearâfirst I couldn't find the knife, and then I couldn't release it.
The tuna stopped diving and turned, and the change in pressure against its mouth, the release of resistance, must have convinced it that it was free, for it swam upward, toward me.
The line slackened, the leader eased and spread, and I slid my foot and fin out through the widening coil.
Giddy with relief, I checked my air and depth gauges: 185 feet deep, 500 pounds of air, more than enough for a controlled ascent but nowhere near enough for a decompression stop, if one was necessary, a contingency about which I knew nothing. Diving computers were still years in the future (as were any computers for the common man). Because I hadn't intended to leave the surface, certainly not to venture deeper than, say, ten feet, I hadn't consulted the standard of the day: the U.S. Navy's decompression tables, a reliable guideâthough calibrated for a twenty-five-year-old male in peak physical conditionâto safe diving at various depths.
How long have I been at this depth? At any depth? How long have I been in the water? No idea.
I started up, slowly, and now the black blood no longer billowed around me but trailed behind. The pain in my leg had waned, and my foot seemed to be working, which meant that no major tendon had been cut.
I passed a hundred feet, then ninety, eighty ⦠things were lighter now, visibility had returned, and I could see the rays of the sun angling down from the shimmering surface. Everything would be okay, after all. There was nothâ
The shark came straight for me, emerging quickly from the blue haze, its fins forming a triangle of lopsided symmetry because of the slight downward curve of the extraordinary pectorals.
Ten, maybe fifteen feet from me it veered away, banked downward, and passed through the trail of blood leaking from my ankle. Convinced now of the source of the savory scent it had picked up from far away, it rose again, leveled off before me, and began the final, almost ritual, stage of the hunt.
Because seawater acts as a refractive lens, sizes are difficult to ascertain under water. The generally accepted rule is that animals appear to be roughly a third again as large as they actually are. This shark looked ten or twelve feet long, which meant that, in fact, it was probably seven to nine feet long. But “in fact” didn't matter to me; all I cared about was that the closer this shark came, the bigger it looked, and near to me or far, it was very big.
It circled me twice, perhaps twenty feet away, establishing for itself a pattern and perimeter of comfort, and then began gradually to close the distance between us. With each circle, it shrank the perimeter by six inches, then by twelve, then fifteen.
I raised my broomstick and held it out like a sword, waving its blunt tip back and forth to impress upon the shark that I was a living being armed with the weapons and determination to defend myself.
Longimanus
was not impressed. It circled closer, staying just beyond the reach of the broomstick. I could count the tiny black dots on its snout, the celebrated ampullae of Lorenzini, which carry untold megabytes of information, chemical and electromagnetic, to the shark's control center.
The mouth hung open about an inch, enough to give me a glimpse of the teeth in the lower jaw.
As I turned with the shark, trying to maintain some upward movement, I watched the eyeâalways the eyeâfor movement of the nictitating membrane, the signal that the threat display was ending and the attack itself beginning.
It quickened its pace, circling me faster than I could turn, so I began to kick backward as well as upward, to increase the distance between us.
I jabbed randomly with the broomstick, never touching flesh, never causing
longimanus
even to flinch.
I glanced upward and saw the bottom of the boat, a squat, gray black shape perhaps fifty feet away, forty-five, forty â¦
The shark appeared from behind me, a pectoral fin nearly touching my shoulder. The mouth opened, the membrane flickered upward, covering most of the eye, the upper jaw dropped down and forward, and the head turned toward me.
I remember seeing the tail sweep once, propelling
longimanus
forward.
I remember bending backward to avoid the gaping mouth.
I remember the ghostly, yellowish white eyeball, and I remember stabbing at it with the broomstick.
I
don't
remember hitting, instead, the roof of the shark's mouth, but that's what must have happened, for the next thing I knew, the shark bit down on the broomstick, shook its head back and forth to tear it loose, and, when that failed, lunged with its powerful tail, intent on fleeing with its prize.
The broomstick, of course, was attached to my wrist, and I was suddenly dragged through the water like a rag doll, flopping helplessly behind the (by now) frightened shark, which had taken a test bite from a strange, bleeding prey and now found itself dragging a great rubber
thing
through the water.
Breathing became difficult; I was running out of air.
I tried to peel the rawhide thong off my wrist, but the tension on it was too great and I couldn't budge it.
I was on my back now, upside down, my right arm over my head as
longimanus
towed me away from the safety of the boat. I could once again see blood trailing from my leg; at this depth it was dark blue, and it streamed behind me like a wake.
Everything stopped. At once. My arm was free, and I was floating, neutrally buoyant, about thirty feet beneath the surface. I looked at the broomstickâor at what remained of it:
longimanus
had bitten through it, and the strands of mashed wood fiber looked splayed, like a flowering weed.
Far away, at the outer limits of my sight, I saw the black scythe of a tail fin vanish into the blue.
I sucked one final breath from my tank, opened my mouth, tipped my head back, and propelled by a couple of kicks, ascended to the kingdom of light and air.
Not until I reached the swim step at the stern of the boat did the weakness of fear overcome me, and the shock.
I spat out my mouthpiece, took off my mask, and gurgled something like, “Goddamn ⦠son of a
bitch
!⦠motherâ”
“No!” said the director. “No, no, no. You can't use that language on network television. Go back down and surface again and tell us what you saw.”
