White Shark

by Benchley-Peter

  * * * * *

  The bucket filled, Bobby pulled on the rope, but even without the drag of motion, the bucket was heavy — two gallons of water weighed sixteen pounds. Bobby pulled the rope hand-over-hand.

  Suddenly the rope went taut, as if the bucket had snagged on something. Then it jerked away from him, as if a huge fish had grabbed hold of it.

  Bobby lost his balance, turned to grab at the transom, but he was too far away, his fingers found only air and he tumbled overboard. As he hit the water, he thought, I hope it wasn't a bluefish that grabbed the bucket.

  * * * * *

  It spiraled downward, clutching its prey in its claws, gnawing with its teeth at the soft white flesh. It sucked and drank and chewed and swallowed.

  By the time it reached the bottom, it could eat no more, so it squatted on the sand and, with claws and teeth, tore the prey to pieces. One tooth caught in a mass of gristle and broke off. Another tooth, from the row behind it, rolled forward and took its place.

  * * * * *

  Tony Madeiras hung the binoculars on their hook, put the boat in gear and pushed the throttle forward. The engine growled, the bow rose and the stern settled.

  "Where the hell's my rod?" he shouted without looking down. There was no response.

  Part Four

  Predators

  20

  When Chase nosed the Whaler into its slip, just after noon, he saw Mrs. Bixler walking down the path to the dock. She was carrying an ancient wicker picnic hamper, and Chase knew what was in it: a sandwich, a thermos of iced tea, a spool of fishing line and some bacon rind or beef fat or stale bread. Mrs. Bixler loved to spend her lunch hour hand-lining off the dock for little fish to feed to the heron. The heron saw her coming and took a couple of spindly steps toward the dock.

  As soon as he had turned off the motor, Chase heard barking from the inlet beyond the hill.

  "It sounds like Dr. Macy and her sea lions made it safe and sound," he said to Mrs. Bixler.

  "Yep, her and her whole menagerie."

  "Are those the sea lions barking?" Max asked excitedly. "Can I go see them?"

  "Sure," Chase said. "But mind your manners, introduce yourself. We've never met Dr. Macy."

  Max nodded, hopped out of the Whaler and ran up the path.

  Mrs. Bixler glanced down into the boat. "Somebody been on a killing spree?" she said, gesturing at the dead animals: two gulls and a juvenile bottlenose dolphin.

  "Or something." Chase picked up the little dolphin. It was less than three feet long; its slick skin, which in life had been a lustrous steel gray, was now dull and flat, like charcoal ash. There were deep slash marks on its back; its belly had been torn open. "I brought it back for Dr. Macy to have a look at. She knows more about mammals than I do."

  "What can she tell you that anyone can't? Something slaughtered it."

  "Yeah, but what?" Chase returned the dolphin to the bottom of the boat. "I'll pack it in ice till we can do a proper autopsy." He stepped out of the boat, tied it fore and aft and climbed the steps to the dock. "Did you get Macy settled in?" he asked.

  "I showed her around; Tall showed her stuff."

  "What's she like?"

  Mrs. Bixler shrugged. "Seems to be full of enthusiasm, dresses like she's going on safari. But at least she doesn't parade her degrees like most of them do."

  Chase started up the hill, and when he reached the crest, he heard Max's voice — screaming, he thought at first, but then realized what he was hearing wasn't screams but laughter.

  He looked down and saw Max splashing in the shoulder-deep water in the tank Chase had built for the sea lions. Four dark shapes zoomed around him, streaking by him underwater, paddling behind him on the surface, deftly avoiding him as he lunged at them.

  A woman stood on the lip of the tank, gesturing to the sea lions and laughing with Max.

  Because neither she nor Max had noticed him, Chase was able to study her as he walked down the hill.

  Tall and sturdily built, Amanda Macy looked like either a model for the Lands' End catalog or the ambassador from the court of L.L. Bean. She was wearing Top-Sider moccasins, knee-length hiking shorts, a khaki shirt with epaulets, a Croakie to secure the sunglasses that hung around her neck, and a stainless steel diver's watch. Her legs were tan and muscular, her hair sun-bleached and short.

  She looked younger than he had imagined, though why he had assumed she would be his age or older he didn't know. He tried to see her face, but her back was to him. Suddenly an alarm sounded in his head, an alarm he had not anticipated. Oh Lord, he thought as he drew near, don't let her have a pretty face.

  Some men were fixated on women's breasts, some on their buttocks or their hands or legs or feet. Chase had always been a sucker for a pretty face. All his life he had fallen for faces, irrationally — and fully knowing it was irrational — ignoring the neuroses, personality disorders, stupidity, greed and vanity that often lay beneath the skin of those faces.

  He would have to work with this woman for three months. The last thing he needed was the added complication of being smitten.

  Then Max saw Chase and shouted, "Dad!" and waved, and Dr. Macy turned around.

  Chase blew out a breath of relief. Her face was nice, and well proportioned, handsome, even, but not a heart-stopper. He held out his hand and said, "Simon Chase."

  "Amanda Macy," she said, taking his hand with a firm, confident grip, and smiling with lips that wore no lipstick.

  "I see Max wasn't exactly shy."

  "Oh, he was very polite," Amanda said. "It was me that cut off the small talk. I told him that if he wanted to get to know the sea lions, the best way was to jump right into the water with them. He's a natural in the water, by the way, and seems more gifted with animals than a lot of kids. They took to him right away."

  "Dad!" Max shouted. "Watch!"

  Chase looked into the tank. Two of the sea lions were facing Max, their heads out of the water. Max splashed one of them, and suddenly both sea lions exploded in a blur of flippers, splashing Max like playground bullies. He shrieked with laughter and ducked underwater, and the sea lions dashed after him, brushing him with their silky bodies, spinning him in circles.

  "Amazing," Amanda said. "They usually take a long time to trust someone. They must sense a benevolence, a kind of innocence, in children... or in this child, anyway."

  "They never bite?"

  Amanda laughed. "That's a parent asking, right, not a scientist?"

  "Right," Chase said.

  "The only reason an intelligent mammal like this will bite anything or anybody are food, fear and aggression. These four are all females, so there's no problem with sexual aggression. They're well fed. And they don't have anything to fear." She paused. "They're not at all like sharks."

  Chase's eyes followed Max as he frolicked with the sea lions. "So I see," he said.

  "To me, these animals are a lot closer to people than to sharks. They need attention and affection, from each other and from me. They like to have their teeth brushed and their coats stroked. I've raised them since they were pups."

  Max popped to the surface, laughing, and Chase waved him to the side of the tank. "Come on out of there," he said. "You're turning blue."

  "But Dad..."

  Amanda said, "The sea lions need a rest, Max, same as you. You've given them quite a workout."

  Max hauled himself out of the tank, and Chase rubbed his shoulders and back. "You feel like a Popsicle," he said.

  Max pointed at the sea lions, which, as soon as he had left the tank, had scrambled up onto the rocks and were sunning themselves.

  "They're called Harpo, Chico, Groucho and Zeppo," Max said. "I don't know which is which, but Dr. Macy told me that when I get to know them better, I can pick one to be my special friend."

  Chase felt Max shivering under his hands, and he said, "Go take a shower and put on some warm clothes."

  Max started away, then turned back and said to Amanda, "Later can I play with them
some more?"

  "Sure," Amanda said with a little laugh, "but only when I'm here with them. You have to learn the signals, just like they did."

  Chase had constructed a shed against the rocks behind the tank, and Amanda ducked inside and came back with a bucket of fish. "Lunchtime, ladies!" she called as she approached the edge of the tank. The sea lions slid off the rocks and into the water and, barking impatiently, swam over to her, lined up in a row and waited.

  She fed them each a fish, then another and another, and when they had all had their allotted five, she rubbed each on the head and behind the ears.

  She replaced the bucket in the shed, then said to Chase, "This is a wonderful place. Were you brought up around here?"

  "Not on the island... in Waterboro."

  "Where did you go to school?"

  "All over the place," Chase replied, thinking. Here it comes. Briefly, he debated planting a lie, but because in his experience lies tended to grow until they became unsustainable, he told the truth. "The last place was URI — Rhode Island."

  "They're really good in oceanography. Is your degree specifically in sharks, or all the elasmobranches?"

  "No." Chase paused, then said, "It's in process."

  She started. "You mean you don't have your degree? You're director of an institute and you don't have a doctorate?"

  "That's right... Doctor," Chase said. "Can you live with that?" Before the words were out of his mouth, he felt like an ass.

  Amanda blushed. "Of course... I didn't... I mean... I'm sorry... It's just..." She threw back her head and laughed.

  For a moment, Chase thought she was laughing at him, and he tried to think of a snappy put-down. Before anything came to him, however, something in her expression told him she was laughing not at him but at herself.

  "It's great!" she said. "I love it!"

  "What?"

  "I spend four years in college, two years getting my master's, five years getting my doctorate. I'm somebody! My Ph.D. is my armor. I could be a jerk, a turkey, a fool, but I've got a Ph.D. It's the official label of my exalted status." She laughed again. "And then I meet someone who doesn't have his doctorate, can't be anywhere near as exalted as I am, but he's done more than I've ever done, set up an entire institute of his own. And what's my first reaction? ‘Impossible!’ I love it."

  They started up the hill together. "Let me take the topic from the top," Amanda said. "If you ever do a dissertation, what'll it be on?"

  "Territoriality in white sharks," Chase said. "Which reminds me: there's been a white around here in the last week or two. We were tracking it for data till we lost our sensor. A couple of divers were killed, but I don't think the white's connected to it. Still, it's out there."

  "You think you could find the shark again?"

  "I'm going to try, but..." Chase stopped. "You mean you want to find it? A great white shark? What about your—"

  "My sea lions are savvy about white sharks," Amanda said. "There are whites all over California, they know how to stay away from them. Sure, I'd love to find it. I've always wanted to do a study of the interaction between marine predators: mammals that prey on mammals, mammals that prey on fish, fish that prey on mammals."

  "I thought you worked exclusively on whales."

  "So far, yes, but the images the sea lions are bringing back on videotape are so extraordinary, the behavior they're recording is so remarkable, that I don't see why we can't expand our research."

  "I don't get it," Chase said. "What can a sea lion with a video camera on its back see that a scientist in a boat, or even in a submersible, can't?"

  "Nature," said Amanda. "Nature in action. Whales, sharks, other animals, most everything will stay away from a boat or a submersible because it's alien to them, and possibly threatening. It's a big, strange, noisy intruder, and if it does get close to them, the animals' behavior will be anything but natural. On the other hand, they're completely accustomed to having sea lions swim around them, so they go on about their business — feeding, mating, whatever, and we get it all on tape. Besides, a submersible's slow and clumsy, and it costs a fortune. A sea lion can keep up with a whale, and they're cheap — they work for a few pounds of mullet."

  "How do they know what you want them to do?"

  "Conditioning, plus native intelligence. When it comes to smarts, sea lions are in the league with dolphins and killer whales. We built a full-size model of a gray whale and fit it over an electric-powered submersible, to use to train them. From a boat, I give them a series of hand signals: swim alongside it, swim beneath it, circle around it. It doesn't take long to teach them things; they want to learn."

  Chase thought for a moment, then said, "Do you think you could teach them to take pictures of something they're not accustomed to, something that maybe isn’t natural, behavior they've never seen?"

  "Like what?"

  "I wish I knew," Chase said. "But things aren't right in the ocean around here. Either something new is in the area, or something's gone berserk." He told her about the random slaughter of birds and animals, and about the mystery surrounding the deaths of the Bellamy's.

  "I can try," said Amanda, "once I get the sea lions used to the water around here, and to the humpbacks. My first priority, though, has got to be to find the whales. I've chartered a spotter plane, starting this afternoon."

  "A plane?" Chase whistled. "That's some kind of grant you got yourself. For that kind of dough, I'd strap on wings and fly myself."

  "The grant? The grant's a joke, seventy-five hundred a year for three years. It keeps me in fish, but that's about it." She hesitated, looking embarrassed, then continued. "Basically, I'm my own angel."

  "How do you manage that?" Chase asked.

  "How do you think? The luck of the gene pool. My great-great-grandfather was one of the whaling Macys — sometimes I think my career is penance for what he did — and he saw the collapse coming in whale oil and put all his money in petroleum. We've been loaded ever since." She smiled. "Can you live with that?"

  "Hell," Chase said, laughing. "I did." He told her about his marriage to Corinne. "If I'd had any brains, I'd've taken her up on her offer and let her finance the Institute. But no, I was too proud."

  "Never mind. You got something even better out of the marriage."

  "What's that?"

  "Max."

  "Oh," he said. "Yeah, I'm just now learning more about that."

  They had reached the small house on the top of the hill, in which Chase had prepared living quarters for Amanda: a bedroom, a kitchen and, because the living room had been taken up by the decompression chamber, another bedroom furnished as a sitting room.

  "Are you hungry?" Chase said. "We've got sandwich fixings in the big house."

  "Later," Amanda said. "First, I want to show you the present I brought you."

  "Present? You didn't have to—"

  "My parents always told me never to go for a visit without a house present." Grinning, she took his arm and led him beyond the house, where the land sloped down to a cove in which the bottom had been dredged to permit the approach of deep-draft boats. "There," she said, pointing at the cove. "I wanted to wrap it, but..."

  Chase looked and, when suddenly he realized what he was seeing, stopped walking. "My God..." he said.

  On a slab of ledge rock at the edge of the cove sat something Chase had longed for ever since he had begun his graduate work: an anti-shark cage. It was a rectangular box, roughly seven feet high, five feet wide and eight feet long, made of aluminum bars and steel mesh. There were entrance hatches on the top and one end, and foot-square openings — camera ports — on each side. Two flotation tanks had been welded to the top of the cage, and even from this distance Chase could see gleaming brass fittings that told him the tanks contained their own air supplies, which meant that the cage could hover well beneath the surface.

  Cages were a prime research tool for shark scientists, for they permitted safe underwater access to the animals in the open ocean. Mo
st sharks couldn’t bite through the aluminum bars, and those that could, like big tiger sharks or great whites, didn't. They might bite at the bars — testing them, determining if they were edible — but none had ever bitten through them.

  From the moment he had opened the Institute, Chase had tried to acquire a cage — a discarded cage, a used cage, any cage — so he could perform experiments in deep water. He had found, however, that used cages were never available: there was so much demand for shark films from cable-television companies that rental houses snapped up every cage they could find and charged usurious rates for them. Derelict cages were derelict for a reason: they were battered and broken beyond repair.

  And the price for a new cage, a good cage, started at around twenty-thousand dollars.

  This cage looked brand-new and very good indeed. "It's beautiful," Chase said, staring down toward the cove. "But how did you—"

  "It was part of my divorce settlement," Amanda said. "My ex-husband had it built three years ago; he was going to be a macho shark photographer, but he discovered a lot of competition, and switched to sea otters." She paused, then added with a wry smile. "He couldn't make a go at that either, so he decided to concentrate on bimbos. He got the Toyota; I got the shark cage. I figured you could use it."

  "I sure can. I've been hoping to—"

  "I know, I read your paper on bite dynamics and arthritis research. From the cage, you should be able to do some productive work with your gnathodynamometer."

  "You pronounced it!" Chase said with a laugh. Gnathodynamometer was a ten-dollar word for a simple concept, a method of testing the bite pressure exerted by a shark's jaws. "I've never met anybody else who could pronounce it."

  "No sweat," Amanda said. "Just don't ask me to spell it."

  When the reached the cage, Chase ran his hand over the aluminum bars and examined welds and fittings. "It's perfect," he said, smiling. "I can't wait."