To Rona I said, “Grab that stainless rail. Hang on tight,” and turned sharply, not slowing until I’d closed on the pod of boats.
It was the shark. The boats were following it, each skipper vying for a better view. Understandable. It was a very big shark that couldn’t submerge because it was tangled in a mess of ropes, plastic floats, and netting.
Beside me, Rona said, “That thing’s ...
alive
? I thought it was a small plane at first. Like maybe it’d just crashed, and these people were trying to help. But a
shark
—now I see why it’s an emergency.” She turned her head, searching the empty deck. “How are you gonna do this? Do you have a gun? Or maybe a harpoon, or something?”
I’d slipped in between the boats and the fish. Looking at it, I thought about my little deformed
leucas
back at the lab. This was what they were coded to become: a bull shark, fully mature. It was ten or eleven feet long, and three times the girth of my chest. Probably five or six hundred pounds.
I told Rona what she was looking at, adding, “I’m going to cut it free, not kill it. What I’ve got to figure out is, how?”
The shark’s side fins, or pectorals, were each more than a yard long. They extended from its sides like wings. The top lobe of its tail, or caudal fin, was even longer, curved like a scythe. Tangled between the left pectoral fin and the tail was a section of gray monofilament netting.
The shark had probably gone after fish caught in the mesh. Not uncommon.
So the creature was now towing a thirty-foot shroud of rubbish—a clutter of buoyant floats and nylon that restricted its movement, and also kept it riding on the surface. The rope had cut so deeply into the caudal fin that I could see exposed cartilage. It made the tail stroke uneven, causing the creature to swim in wide, counterclockwise circles as it drifted with the incoming tide.
I was taking off my shirt, my glasses, stepping out of my rubber boots, in a hurry to get to work. “Consider yourself a lucky woman. In all the years I’ve dealt with bull sharks, I’ve only seen one other specimen this size. In fact ...”—I considered the shark’s bulk and length; the blunt head, the density of its dark eyes, before continuing—“... in fact, this could be the same fish. It was a year or so ago; I was windsurfing. At night. I could see its outline because the water was glowing with phosphorus. It sparkled as it swam.”
It startled me, the realization. As I continued to prepare gear, I thought about it, replaying the events of that night. It was near the marina, Dinkin’s Bay. I’d never seen a specimen as large before or since. Until now.
The same animal?
Possibly. No ...
probably.
The unexpected connection injected a new urgency, as well as irony—ironic because this shark had attacked me. Pursued and attacked my surfboard, anyway. The only person I’d told about it was Tomlinson, who, of course, assigned the incident an exaggerated importance.
He’d used a Buddhist term that I’ve now forgotten.
Rona watched me as I picked up goggles, gloves, and bag. Her eyes went wide. “Oh no ... you’ve got to be joking. Please tell me you are not going in the water.”
I said, “I’ll be fine. That shark’s the least of my worries. All these boats charging around, though, are
dangerous.
Were you serious when you said you knew boats? I need you to take the wheel.”
“Yes ... sure. I guess so. I grew up driving ski boats.” She was studying the gauges, the throttle arm. “This is the same kind of setup?”
I was holding my fins. Should I wear them? Decided no, and dropped them on the deck.
Stepping around the console, I said, “Try to stay between me and the other boats. Mostly, keep the engine in neutral, make them avoid you.”
I slipped into the water.
The tide had put thirty yards between the shark and me. I wanted distance because I didn’t want to spook the thing.
With lungs inflated to maintain buoyancy, I drifted with the current, doing a slow sidestroke, head up, watching as the shark continued to swim in a wide, slow circle. The December water was cold, and my chest spasmed adjusting to the temperature.
I’d have no trouble catching up. But what then?
We were less than a hundred yards from shore, but close enough to the channel that there was probably ten to twenty feet of water beneath us. Because the net was tangled on the shark’s left side, the shark circled left, getting closer and closer to shore. Which was good. I wanted to end up in water shallow enough for me to stand.
I watched as the shark tried once again to turn into the tide. Its tail slapped the water feebly ... strained briefly against the rope ... then slapped the surface again, its gray body contorted, pectoral fins flapping as if made of rubber.
Pathetic. Female bull sharks drop only one to thirteen pups per birth cycle, and the mortality rate is high. Only a small percentage live the dozen or so years it takes to reach sexual maturity. By examining thinly sliced cross sections of vertebrae, a shark’s age can be determined using a process similar to counting a tree’s growth rings. I once did a necropsy on a bull shark that was twenty-five years old. It was nowhere near the size of this creature.
How many decades had it swum freely? In the world of sharks, size is a valid indicator of genetic ascendancy. This animal had not only survived against great odds, it had achieved a rare degree of oceangoing invulnerability. It had outsized all enemies—only now to fall victim to a bunch of plastic trash.
I waited until the shark turned, tail to me. Then I fixed my goggles in place and began to swim hard.
I caught the last section of nylon rope in my left hand, careful to match the bull shark’s speed because I didn’t want to add additional drag. We swam together for a time before I gradually began to kick and pull on a slightly different course, toward shore. I discovered that by applying light pressure via the rope, I could steer us toward the shallows.
I also began to work my way up the rope, closer and closer to the fish’s huge, beating caudal fin.
We didn’t have much time. The shark was visibly less animated. It was exhausted, and exhaustion can kill a fish just as surely as a weapon, because the muscles, saturated with lactic acid, begin to fail. The acid overload causes a domino effect of physiological imbalance in organ tissues and nervous system. Exceed a certain level of stress, and all the complicated mechanism shuts down.
So I was rushing—maybe too much.
When I was close enough to touch its tail, I nearly killed the thing inadvertently. I’d been using my survival knife to cut away sections of net. The reduction in drag, I reasoned, would reduce the energy drain. I also anticipated that it would cause a minor surge in speed.
The result was just the opposite. The floats attached to the net were keeping it afloat, so, when I cut the rope, the shark gave one last feeble tail thrust that instead of pushing it forward drove it head-heavy toward the bottom like some dead, inanimate weight.
For a moment, I stayed on the surface and watched: watched the great shark sinking with the trajectory of a dark and cooling star.
Then I was after it, pulling myself down through the murk.
Almost immediately, I saw the tail and grabbed it. A shark’s skin is covered with placoid scales, or denticles, which are similar to teeth. They’re saw-edged and pointed, which is why shark skin was once commonly used as sandpaper.
The tail was abrasive, but also lifeless. I held on without difficulty as it pulled me downward. Through goggles and green water, I could see that my hand appeared tiny on the caudal lobe, and that the shark’s body had turned from gray to black. The fish was too heavy for me to swim it back to the surface, and so I waited the few seconds it took for us to bump bottom. Then I went to work.
I got my feet under me, wrapped the animal in both arms, and began to walk it underwater, cross-tide, toward shore. The key to doing anything strenuous while free diving is to do it slowly. Conserve oxygen and you gain bottom time. So I took long, deliberate strides, switching my body into what I think of as conservation mode: used only the muscles required, everything else relaxed.
As my oxygen supply dwindled, I also began to play a little tune in my head, something I’ve always done when struggling to extend bottom time. Concentrate on the intricacies of the tune and I pay less attention to the capillary burn of lungs.
We’d hit bottom in maybe ten or fifteen feet of water. I covered enough distance toward shore that by the time I had to bounce to the surface for another gulp of air, the water wasn’t more than a foot over my head.
I submerged a second time, lifted the shark into my arms again, then walked it over sand, sea grass, and shell until my eyes ... then my nose ... then my head breached the surface. I continued walking until I was in waist-deep water, using my knees to gently boost the animal upward whenever I lost my grip.
The backpack was still strapped over my head and shoulder. I found wire cutters, and soon had the web of net, rope, and floats cut away. I inspected the rope abrasions—they weren’t too bad—and applied antibacterial cream to the wounds.
As I worked, I kept the shark’s head pointed into the tide so that current swept through its gills. The shark remained motionless. Seemed near death. If I could get the respiratory system going, though, get sufficient oxygen into the bloodstream to dilute the overload of lactic acid, the animal still had a chance.
To increase the flow of water, I began to walk against the tide, slowly, slowly. I waded toward Lighthouse Point, floating five or six hundred pounds of shark along with me.
There’s a row of condos near that section of shore. People were watching me from their balconies. One was a buddy of mine. He used his index finger to make a spinning motion next to his ear, then pointed at me: You’re crazy.
Hard for anyone who lives at Dinkin’s Bay to argue.
I walked the shark for ten minutes or so before I felt an intramuscular tremor that was not unlike a small generator trying to fire. Then the tail fin began to move ... swung slowly and randomly, at first, then with increasing purpose and control. It fanned the current like a metronome, steady, steady, rhythmic as a heartbeat.
The fish was alive but weak. Not yet strong enough to release, or even endure the minor stress of being tagged. It would take another fifteen minutes to get sufficient oxygen into the bloodstream, but the tail thrust was increasingly powerful. Soon, I wouldn’t be able to control the animal’s body. Release it too soon, though, it would swim off and die.
So I tried a technique I learned years ago while working with a team of locals on the Zambezi River in Africa. Turn a big shark upside down and it will go limp in the water within twenty or thirty seconds. It’s a physiological response called “tonic immobility.” Keep it inverted and the fish will remain motionless for as much as half an hour.
Gently, I now rolled the bull shark onto its side, waited for it to stop struggling, then used its pectoral fin to push it over onto its back. I held it there, letting water flow through its mouth and gills—a sort of makeshift ventilator.
I got my first look at its underbelly. The most obvious indicators of a shark’s sex are the absence or presence of twin penile-shaped claspers used singularly to deposit sperm. They’re located just behind the pelvic fin. Because they calcify with maturity, male sharks have the equivalent of a permanent erection.
This was a male.
I also got my first close look at the great fish’s eyes. The opaque, nictitating membrane, which is a protective third eyelid, was closed like a curtain, but its eyes were visible beneath. The optic discs were yellow, the pupils black. In bright light, a shark’s pupils contract to a vertical, feline slit. In darkness, they dilate, becoming a million times more sensitive to light than human eyes.
It was an hour before sunset; a bright, late afternoon. The shark’s pupils looked like obsidian bands set into molten gold. The eyes were goatlike from a distance. Closer, the impression changed. A shark’s retina has a prominent visual streak: a lucent horizontal band due to higher cell density in both cone and ganglion layers. Because of the streak, the eyes reminded me of a faraway nebula that I’ve seen many times through my telescope. The nebula is found in the belt of the constellation Orion.
That glittering streak on the optic disc, silver on gold, gave the impression that there was astronomy in the shark’s eyes. Comet streaks, galactic swirls, and the black vacuum of space.
I walked it another twenty minutes before I risked turning the big fish onto its belly again. It was soon conscious, but remained docile. I paid close attention, gauging the steadiness and the strength of its caudal stroke. The respiratory system was working, flushing water through its gills. Its head swung in opposition to its tail.
I continued to walk against the tide; walked until the animal began to thrash against my grip. I held it for a few moments longer, then released it with a firm and final push toward deeper water. He swam tentatively, as if dazed, big dorsal cutting the water ... then exploded—torpedoing off at speed, throwing a burrowing wake.
Behind me, I was surprised to hear applause coming from the boats.
I waved Rona to shore and climbed aboard.
“That was incredible,” she said as I toweled off. She was bubbly, energized. “I’m so darn glad I came. I was dreading the trip ... but to see something like that ...”
I’d been cleaning my glasses but stopped. “Dreading what? I don’t get it.”
I watched her excitement drain. “Watching you save that shark, I’d almost forgotten. I wish I could forget. I wanted to wait, though, until you were done working before I told you.”
What the woman had come to tell me was that my friend Dr. Frieda Matthews had been involved in a terrible accident.