Extinct

by Charles Wilson

  But was that going to continue to be the case? The world’s commercial fishing fleets, forced far offshore by countries all over the world trying to protect their inshore waters, had congregated in the deep ocean the last couple of decades. Giant, super-efficient fishing vessels from the more technologically advanced countries such as Japan, pulling nets up to forty miles long, had wiped out entire schools of fish that had once swum these waters, not only taking them from the food chain but also any young they might have produced. With these fishes’ dramatic decline, he knew that the great ocean predators that had depended on them for subsistence since time began had started moving into the shallower waters of the continental shelves in search of prey. Sharks never before seen close to shore or only seen there once in a great while were starting to be seen frequently in shallower waters.

  He was a witness to that. He had been assigned to the Pentagon for only the last few months. Before that he had been a junior officer on a destroyer. Only two months prior to being transferred from that vessel, he had been on its deck as it made its way up the eastern side of the Gulf of Mexico and had looked down over the rail to see a twelve-foot deep-water mako staring back at him.

  He thought of the perception people had of a shark attack—a person struggling, yelling for help. But the general public really didn’t know. Maybe that scenario was true of what happened during an attack by some of the smaller, shallow-water sharks common to the American coasts. But it was not the case with the great giant creatures from the open seas—some of them reaching fifteen to eighteen feet in length and weighing two to three tons. When they attacked it was swift—no struggle, a swimmer often swallowed nearly whole, or bitten completely in half. He had a shipmate on the destroyer who had been present at such an attack. Swimming off a beach in the Philippines with a friend, the shipmate had looked away from his friend for a moment, and then looked back to see nothing but open water. Seconds later he had glimpsed the top of a thick dorsal fin momentarily breaking the surface, moving away from him—and nothing more.

  And now I’m going to dive in waters not all that far from where I saw the Mako, Douglas thought. He knew that, despite the almost universal misconception of a shark’s poor vision, such creatures in reality could see half again farther than a man could underwater, and several times farther than a man in poor light or murky water. So watching carefully did no good—a person would never see a shark before it saw him. And even if sharks were blind, the advantage would still be overwhelmingly theirs. They could hear and feel vibrations for over a mile. The predominant portion of their brains was devoted to olfaction. They could often smell prey farther even than they could hear or feel it. There was no possible way a swimmer could enter the water and stay very long and that presence not be known to every shark for miles in every direction.

  And even if somehow an intended victim sensed an attack coming, to flee was useless, even when relatively close to a place of safety. Makos like the one he had seen had been clocked swimming at speeds in excess of thirty miles an hour—and that when they were not even up to attacking speed.

  Douglas closed his eyes at the thought of his upcoming dive. He had actually wanted to be an English professor, teaching at some small college where he could spend a great deal of time involved with his interest in poetry. But his uncle was an admiral. So despite his mother maybe thinking the military silly, as his uncle had stated, she had directed him that way. And he had acquiesced. Her advice had always proved wise in the past.

  Man, he thought, why did I listen to her?

  And he cursed his uncle silently under his breath—almost meaning it.

  “Sir,” the Coast Guardsman behind him said.

  Douglas turned to face the shorter man.

  “Sir, did you bring swim trunks?”

  Douglas nodded.

  “We have your scuba equipment ready inside,” the man said.

  Douglas stared toward the center of the boat.

  And then, a somber expression across his face, he followed the man down the deck.

  CHAPTER 14

  “How many of you have seen a beaver dam before?”

  Paul raised his hand. “I have,” he said. Fred cut the outboard’s throttle. The boat glided broadside against the bank. San-hi guided the trailing boat in behind him and Armon stepped off its bow onto the soft ground.

  “Easy, men,” Fred said as the boys in front of him began rising. Paul stood in the rocking boat. His backpack in one arm, his rolled sleeping bag in the other, he wobbled to the side of the craft. Put in motion by the feet pushing off of its side as the other boys stepped to the bank, the boat began to swing out into the water.

  “Grab it, Armon,” Fred said.

  At that moment Paul stepped out of the boat into knee-deep water, stumbled at the unexpected depth of the step, and splashed forward onto his stomach at the edge of the bank.

  Armon smiled as he caught the side of the boat.

  Fred stared at him.

  Armon shrugged, but couldn’t help but continue to smile.

  San-hi caught Paul by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet. His jeans and shirt and preserver soaked, his backpack dripping, his sleeping roll soggy, even his thick, dark hair hanging wet down across his forehead, Paul came up on the bank and grinned.

  “Whew,” Armon said, wiggling his nose. Paul looked in the direction of the strong stench coming from the trees off to the side as the rest of the boys started unloading the trailing boat.

  Except for the pair of blond-haired brothers in the group. Ten and twelve years old, and almost identical in looks except for a slight difference in their heights, they slipped their life preservers off, lifted their backpacks over their shoulders, and stepped back to the boat for the cane fishing poles lying lengthwise along its center. In a moment they were walking around the edge of the slough.

  “Don’t overload yourself,” San-hi called after them.

  The older blond suddenly began to struggle with the weight of the few poles he carried across his front. Staggering awkwardly back and forth beside his smiling brother, he continued toward the mouth of the creek at the end of the slough.

  San-hi stepped to Paul and took the sleeping bag and backpack from his arms. Unbuckling the top of the backpack he slid the soggy sleeping bag under the flap, pulled the straps back through the buckles and pushed the backpack into Paul’s hands. Paul smiled and slipped it around his shoulder.

  Armon stared at the two. “When you finish baby-sitting…,” he said. He stood beside the trailing boat, unloaded now except for the boxing equipment.

  As San-hi walked toward him, Armon placed one foot over inside the craft to hold it steady against the bank. He began to stack San-hi’s arms with tubes of tape, small boxes of gauze, jumping ropes, and headgear. The last thing the stocky youth lifted from the boat was the heavy-bag, big around as a tree trunk and heavy as a bag of cement.

  Balancing the bag on its flat end on the bank, he looked toward the other boys. It took two of the smaller ones, one at each end of the bag, to carry it toward the creek.

  Armon stared into the trees and wiggled his nose again.

  “Something big,” Fred said.

  He stared at the smallest boy on the team, up on top of the dam and disappearing over the jumble of protruding logs and limbs into the gap at its center.

  “Come on, Edward, get out of there.”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Fred waited a moment. Edward was the only boy on the team who couldn’t swim.

  “Edward!”

  The boy’s head reappeared.

  A moment later he came back along the top of the dam. He carried a bill cap and a rod and reel in his hands.

  * * *

  Admiral Vandiver had a thought. He had several thoughts, actually, all of them leading toward the same possibility.

  He had said to his nephew, So why, Douglas, I ask you, if any creature was originally present down there—why would he not still be there? He had quickly made
light of his question by saying he wasn’t suggesting the possibility that megalodons might actually still be present, but only that they lived a lot longer than was popularly thought. What else could he say and keep any credibility with a nephew he wanted to be especially observant when he studied the bottom where the Coast Guard had found the tooth? To emphasize to Douglas how much he didn’t believe megalodons still existed, he had stated that with the modern technology now probing the seas in the form of submarines, submersibles, and robot probes, it was hard to fathom that the giant creatures could still be alive and not have blundered into something that would have recorded their presence. Certainly a full-grown megalodon, not only alive but moving into water as shallow as that between the Keys and the Everglades, would have likely been seen somewhere during the many days and nights it would have taken for it to travel from the nearest great depths. There was one possible explanation.

  The white shark was the only shark that marine biologists credited with intelligence—not simply instinct. Whites were known to stand up with their heads out of water and look around, observing what was outside their kingdom as well as within it. Other sharks had that physical ability, but they didn’t do it. Whites obviously distinguished between boats and the people within them. There were several cases in particular when whites had tried to come up over the sides of boats after the occupants. And whites, when attacked, would almost always come after the attacker. The tiger shark, the hammerhead, the oceanic white-tip, and the other giant so-called man-eaters usually fled when injured, unless already engaged in a feeding frenzy or an attack they had launched themselves. It was instinctive to flee when injured.

  But what Vandiver thought most about was the notion held by some experts that whites were possibly even capable of planning.

  If nothing else, the white’s preferred method of attack suggested this. While other sharks were generally known to attack their victims from whatever angle they originally spotted them, or circle in clear view of the victim before attacking, whites, when given the opportunity, preferred to dive deep after spotting a victim and come up under them, unseen. More than one swimmer, treading water, had been jerked under the surface by his legs. More than one surfer had fallen prey to an attack after first being bounced into the water by a white slamming into the bottom of the surfboard to dislodge him.

  But there were also a number of other, more dramatic instances of the white’s actions which led to the speculation that they could plan. Probably the most dramatic was the story of the English sloop Byrum in the late 1800’s.

  A white shark followed the sailing vessel for days, eating the garbage the cook threw overboard every night. During the day the white stayed next to the ship. Day after day. The crew became accustomed to seeing the great fish. Sailors on the vessel swore afterwards that they had noticed the white’s eye rolling up to follow them when they passed along the rail. But, in any case, they became comfortable with the creature’s presence. One day one of the men went around the outside of the rail to work on some lines to the rigging. The white, witnesses say, swimming some thirty feet from the vessel’s side at the time, suddenly veered hard toward the hull and came up out of the water and snatched the man off the rail—almost as if the shark had been waiting for that moment.

  Planning? Waiting patiently for days to execute that plan? Or simply an easy meal presenting itself to the white? Who would ever know with certainty? But even putting that action aside, there was still the evidence of intelligence in the mere fact of the white rising to look around and in not reacting to a base survival instinct and fleeing when under attack, but rather responding—turning on its attackers.

  Was the megalodon, the direct ancestor of the white shark, as intelligent as the white of today? Or more intelligent? In either case, was it possible that the megalodon had enough reasoning ability to simply avoid being seen if it didn’t wish to be seen … for whatever the reason?

  * * *

  The blond-haired brothers stared at the fishing pole, its butt pushed down into the soft ground at the edge of the bank and the line hanging limp from its end into the water.

  Fred stopped behind them.

  Three bass, their bodies swollen and blue, floated on their sides a couple of feet out in the water. A stringer ran through their gills and back to the bank where a branch pressed down into the soft ground held the line secure close to a minnow bucket, with its lid half off.

  “Snake got them,” one of the brothers said, looking at the round, dark fang marks easy to see against the pale blue color of the bass’s bloated stomachs. Edward looked at the minnows floating in the bucket and twisted his face at the smell. Fred stared at the pole a moment more, and then over his shoulder in the direction of the stench that had been plain at the dam.

  “Wait here for a minute,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Armon said.

  Fred nodded. “Keep the other boys here, San-hi,” he said.

  * * *

  The stench came back as Fred and Armon neared the trees. It became stronger as they walked between the thick trunks. A few steps farther, it became nearly overpowering. A sound like the buzzing of a beehive came from behind the trunk of a wide oak a few feet ahead of them. Fred stepped around the tree to see the swollen carcass of a large boar lying on its side, its thick forelegs held stiff out in the air. Its right rear leg was missing where it had joined the hip. Bloated blue flies buzzed loudly as they swarmed the cleanly severed wound, the boar’s fixed eyes, and its gaped mouth where sharp tusks eight inches long curved out and up into the air.

  “You thought it was a body?” Armon asked.

  Fred nodded. “Could have been.”

  “An alligator got him?”

  Fred nodded again. “Must have grabbed him when he was at the bank drinking.” He looked at the ground where the boar had plowed deep ruts with its tusks in its dying agony. In the soil off to their side he saw where the hog had fallen and dragged the stub of its hind quarter, leaving a wide strip of soil darker than the surrounding ground. More flies swarmed a smear of blood low on the trunk of a gum tree a few feet farther back toward the slough.

  “Would think the alligator would have at least smelled him and come after him,” Armon said, “wouldn’t you?”

  “Something will,” Fred said, and turned back in the direction of the slough.

  * * *

  When they stepped out of the woods, Armon looked toward Paul standing in the middle of the line of boys staring toward the trees.

  Armon shook his head in a seemingly worried manner as he neared the group. “Two big old bull alligators fought and killed each other. You never can tell what they’re gonna do when they get like they are this time of year—mating season. Guess someone’s gonna have to stand guard out by the water tonight to keep them from getting into the tents.”

  He looked directly at Paul.

  Paul grinned. He had been in the marshlands and up and down the river more than any of the others.

  Fred knelt at his backpack and pulled its top flap back. He pushed aside a light blanket and felt down past a flashlight and a bottle of Maalox to a cellular phone. Lifting it in front of him, he punched in a number.

  As he waited he stared toward the cane pole, stuck in the mud, its thin end bending toward the water and the bass floating tethered beyond the bank.

  “This is Fred Herald. I’m on the Pascagoula, a few miles above the Interstate bridge at what’s left of a beaver dam. There was a rod and reel and a cap hung on a limb near its bottom. Didn’t think too much about that—people always losing something. But now there’s a cane pole stuck in the ground back off a slough here, hook still hanging in the water, a bucket of minnows, some dead fish on a stringer. Like somebody just up and vanished—maybe two somebodies.”

  Paul didn’t grin this time.

  * * *

  Fred’s call was relayed from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department to a young, dark-haired deputy standing at the bottom of a narrow dirt landi
ng leading into the river. He looked up the landing at Eddie Fuller’s old Ford pickup. “Might know where they went now,” he said.

  The older, gray-haired deputy next to the truck looked down at the younger man and walked toward him.

  Their boat sat tied to a tree branch off to his side.

  CHAPTER 15

  The heavy-bag hung from a limb of a cedar. The limb was springy, and every time Armon pounded his tight, gauze-wrapped fists into the bag, it bounced. He came with an uppercut and the bag sprang several inches into the air.

  “Got ’em good that time,” Armon panted, sweat dripping from his dark face. “That’s how I’m going to do it, put them up into the air and catch ’em coming down.”

  Fred stared at his stopwatch. “Not with you at only ten minutes and starting to breathe hard already.”

  “Rounds are only two minutes,” Armon said, glancing over the shoulder of his T-shirt, continuing to dance back and forth in front of the bag. “Man, I’m working hard, Mr. Herald.”

  A few feet away, Edward, not quite six inches taller than Paul, wrapped San-hi’s hand with gauze. He stopped wrapping and stared up at San-hi. “How am I going to get this right if you don’t keep your fingers spread?”

  “Shut up, Edward, and wrap.”

  “Thirty seconds left,” Fred called out.

  Armon dropped lower, squared his muscular shoulders evenly with the bag, and started pounding it with sharp, hard punches.

  “Fifteen,” Fred said.

  Armon’s fists became a blur.

  “Ten.”

  The smacks into the bag became one long staccato sound. Paul’s eyes widened.