The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (24 page)

Being on this island, I decided, bestowed the luxury of forgetting. Forget the news, the chaos, the jihad, all the crazy zealotry and eviscerating hate. Forget the relationship travails of Britney Spears and forget transfats and absolutely forget about fourth-quarter results. This didn’t make the world seem smaller. Instead, it was liberating, like slipping off a lead backpack. And the sense of freedom was so enormous that it made everything else—lack of first-run movies, or never having clean pants—seem trivial. This place was harsh, but when you were here, your world was manageable. There were never more than seven other people to contend with, and every boundary was sharply defined: from where the land ended and the ocean began, to how much food was left in the pantry. You couldn’t control it, perhaps, but you could defend it.

In spite of the geographic isolation, no one was ever truly alone on this island. It was a fact that spun me 180 degrees away from my New York life, where I often felt cut off both from the natural world and from any close-knit group of people, and where I spent my time stamping out rather predictable days. Here, nothing went as planned because there were no plans. You just never knew what was on the agenda. Great white sharks would swim up to you and hoary bats zipped into the trees and Steller’s sea lions formed harems and blue whales practically brushed the shore and mountain bluebirds and yellow-breasted chats and dusky warblers fluttered down like wayward confetti. The common denominator was this: Only wild things came here.

SEPTEMBER
25–29, 2003

The weather was changing. Drifting in zinc-dark water off Indian Head, the sky pressing down on us like damp laundry, Peter and I sat in the whaler and fished. Since the Giants weren’t playing today, the transistor radio stayed in the glove box, and out here, away from the bird gallery on the island, there was silence. I cast a line from the bow, and on the glassy surface I could see exactly where it hit. It was one of those times when you could practically feel the barometer falling and the ocean taking a step back, winding up for something nasty. The light was steely and the air had turned so cold that we both wore parkas. Peter dialed the radio to the marine weather forecast. An official-sounding, computer-generated voice came on: “Point Arena to Point Pinos, winds northwest ten to twenty knots, seas three to five feet at eleven seconds…,” it droned, sounding totally self-assured, the way only software can. All day and all night the omniscient Weather Voice churned out readings from data-collecting buoys along the coast. These automated buoys were anchored at sea, and they collected minute-by-minute measurements of wind speed and direction, pressure, wave height, and period (the number of seconds that pass between two waves). A shorter period meant rough water, with the peaks tumbling fast and relentless. When the period was equal to—or less than—the height of the wave, there was trouble. Ten-foot waves coming every ten seconds was an equation that sailors dreaded, the oceanic equivalent of a bucking bronco. Ten-foot waves coming every eight seconds was worse. And, of course, conditions could get much meaner than that, and did.

The Voice was hypnotic, looping on and on with a metronomic cadence. In the past, live people had provided the marine weather, but when thick accents and even some broken English started creeping into the reports, making it possible to mistake, say, “winds
fifty
miles an hour” for “winds
fifteen
miles an hour,” the robot voice was instituted. At the Farallones, close attention was paid to the readings from the Point Arena buoy, only one hundred miles north of here. This spot usually received the same weather that was headed toward the islands, but about five hours earlier. As we listened, it became clear that Point Arena was getting punished, and that later tonight so would we.

In the gloomy light I could still see clear to Middle Farallon, poking out of the water with all the insouciance of a predate zit. One time, during shark season in 1988, several admittedly hungover biologists had peered out from Southeast Farallon and been startled to note that there were actually
two
Middle Farallones. When advised of this, Peter ran to the lighthouse to check it out: sure enough, a second twenty-foot mound lay next to the original. Further examination revealed the new lump to be the carcass of a blue whale, and everyone wanted to take a closer look, so an expedition was hastily arranged. The Dinner Plate couldn’t be launched due to a boom malfunction at East Landing, so Peter had pushed off from North Landing in a Zodiac, along with another biologist who’d decided to bring his six-month-old baby along for the ride. As they neared the whale, they began to see the fins, two-and three-foot-high black dorsals, slicing like knives. There were at least four great white sharks on the case, ripping immense horseshoe-shaped chunks of meat from the whale, and suddenly, being three miles away from the island in a ten-foot rubber dinghy with a six-month-old baby on your lap seemed like an ill-advised equation.

There was a heavy tug on my line, and I began to reel it in. Catching something never took more than a few minutes here. Our quarry was rockfish, wacky-looking bottom dwellers, ancient and armored, with long spines and quills webbed into an elaborate weaponry of fins. Because they came in endless combinations of vivid colors—tangerine with mustard speckles or olive green dappled with neon lime, or vermilion and scarlet swirled together in an iridescent sheen—they seemed like Dr. Seuss characters. They had cartoon names, too, like the treefish and the gopher and the quillback, the chilipepper, the cowcod, and the dwarf. There was even a fish down there called the sarcastic fringehead.

My catch was a ling cod, a spotted, flatheaded fish with a face that would scare small children. I hauled it up on deck, backing away as it jerked and shimmied, heaving its gills and slapping its tail. Peter reached down with a tape measure. It was twenty-three inches long, one inch undersized. Picking up the ling cod, something that I was deeply reluctant to do myself, Peter gently pried the hook from its wraparound lips. Then he slipped it back into the water. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Bud,” he said, as the fish shot back to its home in the netherworld.

We were going to have to keep fishing. Grocery-wise, I was down to a hunk of Ghirardelli chocolate, two boxes of crackers, four fast-blackening bananas, and a case of wine. Rockfish were a major addition to the menu. The other day Peter had brought out some eggs from the island, and we’d scrambled them with the meat of an olive rockfish that was accidentally killed when its air bladder burst through its mouth. Many of the rockfish lived a good ways down, fifty feet and deeper, and when they were yanked to the surface, the rapid pressure change sometimes caused this to happen. When it had been lifted into the boat, the fish looked like it was blowing a giant, tissue-colored bubble. It was gross, and both Brown and I had turned away, pretending to be very interested in something on the horizon while Kevin and Peter tried to figure out the most humane way to put the tiny olive out of its misery. They debated piercing its swim bladder, a supposedly painless option, but even though Kevin actually
had
a needle, neither of them knew precisely how to do it. So they’d opted for the gaff, and behind me I’d heard the fish’s head make a squelching noise, like a ripe cantaloupe hitting the pavement.

I had no choice but to embrace my new rockfish diet. This morning, Kevin had departed on
Superfish,
and arriving shortly thereafter was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee, who would remain on the island for the next eleven days, along with a team of coast guard contractors. They were here to execute the elaborate maintenance project and debris removal that had prompted Peter to base this year’s Shark Project from a floating platform in the first place.

Marching orders from the mainland were to stay out of the way while all this work was going on. Both landings would be shut down and, except for Tubby, no boats could be launched. In general, this restriction didn’t make much difference; it had been anticipated, Sharkwatch could continue, and we were already working from the water. However, federal officials on shore meant no more casual visits for me—for food, for a change of scene, for anyone’s birthday. Not even for emergencies.

“Okay, sharkies. It’s twelve minutes to high tide,” Peter said, looking at his watch and then up at the sky, where he picked a flesh-footed shearwater, “a pretty rare bird,” out of a pack of sooty shearwaters zinging by under the low ceiling. He had just cast his line, and I was trying to spot the flesh-footed oddball through my binoculars when suddenly Peter saw a dorsal fin. It was an almost imperceptible blip, just a few inches of dagger above the surface, and if there had been any chop at all, it might have been invisible. He whirled around. The fin popped up again, only ten feet away now and circling tighter. “Mako!” he said. This was a different brand of shark, a five-foot missile with a shorter, slightly rounded dorsal fin. The mako pirouetted around the whaler as though it were cutting through glass. As the shark flashed by we could see its aluminum-blue back, so metallic that it seemed like it ought to have rivets. “He’s looking for a ling cod,” Peter explained. Makos were notorious for dogging the catch as it was brought to the boat, neatly severing the flesh so that fishermen felt a quick release of pressure on their lines and then found themselves reeling in a disembodied head.

Makos and great whites are cousins, two of the lamnid sharks, with salmon sharks and porbeagles rounding out the family. The lamnids are warm-blooded, unusual for a fish, but great if you happen to be a predator. Tunas are also warm-blooded, and it’s no accident that they, along with the lamnid sharks, are among the ocean’s sports stars—their muscles are always warmed up. So are their eyes, brains, and nervous systems. Makos, for instance, can swim sixty miles per hour and leap twenty feet into the air. Salmon sharks carve away as much as 25 percent of the annual salmon run in Alaska, and white sharks…well, we know what they can do. Warm-bloodedness also revs up digestion and, in particular, fat metabolism—a handy feature for an animal that habitually polishes off two-ton elephant seals. An efficient heating system known as the
rete mirabile
(Latin for “wonderful net”) keeps the bodies of lamnid sharks up to twenty degrees warmer than the water they’re swimming in, allowing them to hunt and travel in colder regions where they otherwise couldn’t survive. Cooling anything slows it down, so when the water is chillier, cold-blooded fish are at a disadvantage for dodging a souped-up mako with dinner in mind.

Another characteristic these sharks share is a striking economy of movement. Powered by thick, scythe-shaped tails, their swimming motions appear effortless, almost as though a current was sweeping them along. And then there are the teeth. The lamnids all have serious arsenals in their mouths, arrayed in multiple rows. No spindly needles or snaggly hooks here. Adult white sharks have broad, flat, triangular teeth with distinct serrations, designed to tear twenty-pound gulps of flesh from large mammals. Makos and salmon sharks, with their daggerlike, nonserrated teeth, are better equipped for dining on fish. Because the teeth are embedded in cartilage rather than bone, they fall out with regularity. That’s what the extra rows are for. When a shark loses a tooth, the one behind it simply rotates forward like a bag of chips in a vending machine. An average shark loses thousands of teeth in its lifetime.

One thing’s for sure: the sharks in these waters were earning a living. There was no lounging on the bottom (nurse sharks, wobbe-gongs) or garbage eating (bull sharks, tigers). Peter gave me his rundown on the locals: “Blues are graceful, the perfect shark. Makos are compact and edgy. Whites are just…cool.”

Even to me, it was obvious that makos did not have the charisma of great whites, nor their haunting presence, although the fish was beautiful in its machine grace. Peter pulled in his line, not wanting to subject a hapless rockfish to the double indignity of being first hooked and then eaten alive. We watched the mako trying to look inconspicuous for a while, and then, eventually, it faded into the twilight depths.

We both cast. Almost instantly, Peter pulled in a monstrosity. It was a cabezon, the toad of the sea. The fish was mottled brown and beige, with vicious-looking quills and a great beast of a head atop a long, snaky body. It looked at us with baleful eyes and unmistakable hatred. This one was almost three feet long, the heftiest we’d seen, although the cabezons and lings used to regularly grow five feet long. It was the same sad refrain here, as elsewhere: Those larger fish were gone now.

Rockfish were especially vulnerable to overfishing because they tend to stay near one spot for their entire lives—and their lives could last more than one hundred years. When the long-liners and the bottom trawlers raked the area, the curmudgeonly rockfish stood no chance. Both fishing methods were still legal within the marine sanctuary.

I heard the thunk of the gaff. Earlier, I’d halfheartedly expressed the desire to kill and clean my own catch, but after an attempt or two that resulted in fish being flung across the whaler, Peter had quietly taken over this chore and between the two of us there was no more talk of me gaining backwoods know-how.

He knelt on the deck and cleaned the fish in several swift, almost savage motions. It had little teeth. Peter’s hands and forearms were smeared with dark blood, which he wiped on his pants. The process was fast and surgical—he wanted every last scrap of meat. This, to him, was the only justification for killing: because you needed to eat.

This attitude put him at odds with some of his fellow biologists. To many specialists, the name of the game was “collecting,” taking a handful of whatever you found, or one of anything that seemed rare or unusual. In the past, being an ornithologist had basically meant being a good shot, striding through the marsh or the tundra or the jungle with a pair of binoculars in one hand and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. A scientific journal called the
Oologist
summed up the philosophy in 1892: “The murre, common as it is, is a beautiful bird, and a nicely mounted specimen vies well with most seabirds in one’s collection.”

As a rule, Peter was opposed to “collecting” and had butted heads with other biologists at the Farallones who’d wanted to bag some of the off-course migrants. However, he once worked on a Pacific seabird survey where it had been unavoidable, where the taking of a few individuals would truly help the entire species, and when that was the case, his rule was this: waste
nothing
. Every last snip of information needed to be gleaned. “We looked at every feather,” he recalled. “Took their stomachs out. Analyzed the contents. We learned everything we possibly could out of every death, and that was really important to me.”

Peter simply hated waste of any kind. He was the island’s leftover king, and when it was his turn to cook dinner he’d make a kitchen-sink hash of whatever was languishing in the refrigerators. Sometimes meals would make three or four appearances at the table before people finally balked on the grounds of potential food poisoning. Only then would Peter throw the food out—which meant feeding it to the gulls. Scot had the same inclination, but on the mainland he took it even farther, pulling his truck over to the side of the road to scrape up roadkill deer. “If it’s warm, I’ll take it home,” he’d said to me, describing how he would skin and dress the squashed and dented critters, making jerky out of them, or vacuum-packing the meat. One time, he had actually discovered a dead great white shark washed ashore at nearby Limantour Beach and, research permit in hand, had performed an impromptu dissection. Afterward, he’d brought chunks of its meat to a barbecue. I was beginning to understand that people who lived this close to nature couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it. When you got right down to it, animals were food. In the aftermath of one particularly bloody shark attack, Peter had grabbed an abandoned morsel of elephant seal, taken it back to the house, and grilled it up with a few onions. “It was steaklike,” he recalled. “Very rich and oily with a bit of a liver aftertaste. Not bad, but you’d get tired of it quick.”