The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (14 page)

Manning the crane controls was another scientist named Russ Bradley. He was in his late twenties, tall and fit, with curly blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, handsome even in a full-length slicker streaked from top to bottom with gull shit. In fact, as my ears adjusted to the bird noise and I looked around, I noticed that every last object was extravagantly splattered.

We gathered on the landing while everyone got pughed up. Russ warned that the gulls had a tendency to dive-bomb from above. Hats, therefore, were advisable. And any item of clothing one might ever want to wear again should be taken off or covered up. Or, better yet, left at home. “Part of the gull’s defense strategy is to give you an idea of how much they don’t want you here,” Russ said. “And they have a lot to give.” He indicated the drippings running down his jacket.

Something off to the side caught my eye. Three feet away on a flat rock ledge, a dead sea lion lay in a crumpled heap. It was oddly deflated-looking, and its head twisted backward at an unnatural angle. Russ, following my gaze, explained that there were more sea lions than usual at the islands and that some of them were starving. He stated this as a simple fact, in a businesslike voice.

I suppose I had always known that the Farallones was all about living and dying. But during seabird season, the killing, as I would witness, proceeded at a pace that would startle Darwin. It was never more than a few inches away from you, death. And the gulls were master assassins. The entire world population of western gulls totals fifty thousand birds, and from the months of April to August, twenty-five thousand of them congregated here, packed onto this sixty-five-acre island. They pillaged the murres as they always had, plus the cormorants and the auklets and any other bird that came around, and they killed their own too, with cannibal gusto. The adults—always agitated, always screaming—stood side by side with their chicks, which started out in life as spotted fuzzballs the size of a shotglass but within six weeks would grow as large as their parents. The young gulls were identified by their brown color, spotted markings, and odd bit of down. But their time-lapse photography growth spurt was disturbing and mutant-like, as if you had delivered a baby one day, and a week later it was wearing your clothes.

While Pete stayed at the East Landing buoy with
Kingfish,
Russ gave a quick tour of the island. It was already clear that Tony, Margaret, John, and Pelle couldn’t wait to hit the road. We were halfway up to the lighthouse, being harassed from above and slipping around on dead bird carcasses when Tony turned to me, his beret knocked askew and splotched with white. Struggling to be heard over the shrieking, he yelled: “You’re staying for
how
long?”

IN ADDITION TO RUSS AND PETE, THERE WERE THREE INTERNS ON THE
island: Jen, Meghan, and Melinda. The women were all in their early twenties and all beautiful; despite their lovely appearances, all looked right at home in their work outfits of hard hats and encrusted coveralls, with flea collars fastened around their ankles to keep the bird vermin from crawling up their legs. They had been out here for more than three months, and today’s grocery delivery was a welcome event. Feisty seas had dashed several recent landing attempts, and food supplies had run low. Fruit was long gone; all that remained of the vegetables were a few spongy zucchini; milk and cheese were finished; eggs, gone. Last night Melinda had tried to make a quiche and quickly given up. This morning’s breakfast had consisted of dry cereal.

Kingfish
had also brought their mail and a few recent newspapers, and after they had unpacked the groceries they sat in the kitchen, lost in their reading. The group seemed tightly familial. It was an interesting mix, an experiment in unlikely utopia that appeared to have taken. Pete and Russ, like Peter and Scot, knew how to handle this unruly island, and they were seasoned scientists as well. Russ had tracked birds in places even more remote than the Farallones, studying albatross in the far western Hawaiian islands and hacking his way north through British Columbia in search of endangered murrelets. He’d crawled into damp tents and slept on moldy pillows and gone hungry in the field enough to have developed a thorough appreciation for the basics—at least there was a house here. And most of the time, there was plenty of food. When Russ spoke, the words tumbled out in a stream of enthusiasm punctuated with heartfelt inflections—awestruck whispering, yelps of mock outrage, intense emphasis placed on a single word—and every description required a string of superlatives: “It’s just an
unbelievably beautiful
bird. I was
incredibly fortunate
to see it. Their wingspan is
sick.”

Tall, rugged, red-haired Pete was a New Yorker. Like most of his kind he was tough, terse, and skeptical on the surface and then, after he got to know you, he’d suddenly flash a shy smile and reveal his warmth and his wicked sense of humor. Pete was twenty-eight years old and had come to realize that cities weren’t his thing; recently he’d experienced a serious bout of claustrophobia when he came off the island. At the end of seabird season, he was heading for Alaska.

The chemistry could so easily have gone wrong. And had in the past. Crack-ups, hookups, breakups, and even, according to Peter, four divorces could all be chalked up to the Farallon crucible. Nervous breakdowns snuck up on people after an eight-week run of bleak weather, a few missed grocery drop-offs, a piggish housemate or two, and days spent watching animals kill and eat each other. Tempers exploded, psyches unraveled. Wind, in particular, could really wreak havoc with people’s mood, as could fog. One couple who’d come out together as interns broke up when the woman fell for another biologist and moved into the bedroom across the hall. (The next boat was ten days away.) Another intern threatened lawsuits after tripping on the back steps of the house. Someone’s fist went through the wall. On a few occasions people had panicked when they realized they couldn’t leave the island at will; one of them ended up chartering a helicopter to get off. And one disgruntled visitor, no one was really sure whom, had spray-painted scarlet graffiti, a mess of streaks and whorls, across the vaulted ceiling of a sea cave.

One recent night Russ and Pete had been sitting in the coast guard house, watching
Survivor
. A contestant was whining. He was freshly shaved and looked chipper, but psychologically he was coming apart at the seams. “It’s been twenty-eight days,” he moaned. Russ and Pete looked at each other, ungroomed for weeks, facial hair running amok. “It’s been
seventy-eight days
!” Russ yelled at the screen.

Even so, the five of them were loving their time here, never mind that they had to work fourteen hours at a stretch to keep up with the birds. Simply put, they were happy. There was no whiff of the driven, anxious, upwardly-mobile-or-die young professional. They’d made a career choice that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the fact that they’d never lost the child’s sense of amazement about nature. It was as though the “career goal” entry on their résumés read: “To stay as far away from an office cubicle as humanly possible.”

In the early evening I sat at a desk by the front window of the living room, flipping through old logbooks. It was dead calm on the water. About ten miles out, on the edge of visibility, I could see breaching humpback whales and freighters heading to Asia, toys rolling across an iron tabletop.

I was making my way through twenty-five years of shark season notations, accounts and stories of great white doings scrawled in a dozen different pens. Scot’s entries, set down in his distinctive architectural handwriting, were succinct, and often dryly funny. While some people poured out exclamation-point-studded epics that went on for pages—one enthusiastic writer had broken a shark attack down into minute-by-minute musings—Scot saved his detailed observations for the Shark Project’s reports, and his contributions to the island log read like telegrams:

Auditing the month of August for shark action, I was encouraged by what I found; on average, there seemed to be an attack or two per week. (By October, every day brought reports of spilled blood.) Leafing from one August to the next, I came across an entry that read, “Ron Elliott was aggressively approached by a sixteen-foot female shark.” It was accompanied by a cartoon drawing of Ron fighting off a shark and yelling, “Back off Whitey! I’ve got urchins to pick!” The logbooks made for addictive reading, and when I finally tore myself away from them, hours had passed and everyone else was asleep. On this trip I was bunking with Jen in a large bedroom down the hall from Jane Fonda. This was fine with me. Two nights ago at an Inverness restaurant, Peter and Scot had informed me that the Jane Fonda bedroom was notoriously haunted. “There’s a ghost there,” Peter said matter-of-factly, after a few beers. “It’s a woman.”

“In the
house
?” I’m not sure why I found this surprising. If any place deserved to be infested with ghosts, it was the Farallones.

“Around the island. There was a body found in a cave.” He went on to explain that a century ago, the well-preserved skeleton of a woman had been found in Rabbit Cave, down by East Landing, close to the site of the original Russian settlement. Most people assumed she was an Aleut slave; it was their custom to entomb their dead. But others believed she was a Caucasian, a claim they insisted could be confirmed by her dental work. The truth is that no one really knows, and there is no record of her death. Her bones remain on the island, buried near the cave’s entrance.

In the years since there had been reports of odd, ghostlike encounters: trouble breathing was commonly cited, as were chills, whispering voices, glimpses of shadowy silhouettes moving across the cart path, footsteps and doors slamming in the night. Now, it’s one thing for a few people sitting around on heebie-jeebie island to wind themselves up thinking about ghosts. It’s another thing altogether for that group to be composed entirely of scientists, most of whom would rather eat dirt than admit to any sort of belief in the paranormal. But at the Farallones some very logical minds had been flummoxed and terrified by unexplainable encounters.