Predators I Have Known

  There was no time for anthropomorphizing. Others crowded the deck behind me, anxious and awaiting their turn. I was the first to step forward, and I was holding up the increasingly restless procession. What the devil am I doing here? The hell with it. Putting a hand over my face mask to keep it from being pushed off, I stepped out and down.

  Into an instant Jacuzzi. A mad froth of bubbles exploded around me, obscuring my vision. My booted feet slammed into the grillwork bottom of the cage. A hasty check of my regulator showed that it was working fine, feeding me air from my tank, and I hoped I was not breathing too fast. Moving clear of the overhead opening, I grasped the metal webwork of the cage and dug my toes into the open bottom in order to steady myself upright in the rocking current. My head swiveled wildly.

  There was no need. It was right there, coasting like a heavy bomber flying in slow motion, half obscured by the poor visibility and dark water. I heard the rush of bubbles and felt the momentary displacement as another diver entered the cage behind me, but I didn’t turn to look in his direction or check his condition. I was intoxicated beyond words by what I was seeing—an awkward condition for a writer.

  The shark turned and came around for a leisurely look at this new bait. Heading straight at you, a great white shark flashes the most unexpected and perverse frozen smile, sort of a cross between Bela Lugosi and the Cheshire Cat. Porpoises also possess a natural smile. This was different. Carcharodon sits at the top of the food chain and knows it. Warm-blooded it may be, but it’s no mammal.

  I realized that I was being inspected and evaluated as potential food.

  The nine-foot shark looked twice as big underwater as it did from the safety and perspective of the Nenad’s deck. In the half-open mouth, teeth gleamed, each one as sharp as a double-edged razor. No other shark, no other living creature has teeth like that. The extinct Tyrannosaurus rex did. You can describe but not amplify upon them. A newspaper ad for a special shark exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History may have said it best: “Come see the first Cuisinart.”

  There is nothing flip, nothing frilly about the great white. Unlike many fish, it is neither gaudy nor brightly colored. It does not choose to advertise its remarkableness. In Charcarodon’s case, Nature has seen no need to elaborate, no justification for adding meretricious physical adjectives. Unlike fictional monsters with their horns and frills and iridescent hues, the great white is all business. Any drama inherent in its appearance is incidental to its single-minded task of feeding.

  The shark gently bumped the cage with its snout and turned away, gliding weightlessly past. Reaching out, I let the tips of my fingers caress it as it swam by. “It’s perfectly safe to touch them,” Rodney had told us, adding without a hint of irony, “Just wait for the mouth to go past.” The flesh and skin feels much like the unyielding head of a rubber mallet. Not rough at all. I started to extend my arm to try and grab the tail, then remembered the presence of the other shark and quickly drew my hand back into the cage.

  For two days, we dove and marveled and photographed. The weather remained uncooperative; the seas rough. One night, I stood a two-hour watch alone on the stern deck as thousands of foot-long cream-white squid darted and shot through the water around the boat, attracted by its spotlights. The sharks were out there, too, making regular passes astern, the eeriness of their presence magnified by the silence and the darkness and the starry void overhead. I was transported as if to another world.

  On the third day, it started to get crowded.

  By the end of the fourth day, there were six great white sharks circling the Nenad, feeding and snapping, biting at the cages, at the divers within, at the boat and the bait. The inch-thick ropes that tethered the cages to the boat were repeatedly bitten through, severed as cleanly as if by a headsman’s ax. The sharks nudged the cages. They gnawed at them. They slammed into them, all in vain attempts to get at the possibly tasty bipedal morsels they could see hovering within. Rodney avowed these were the most aggressive great whites he’d ever seen. We were too euphoric to be apprehensive.

  Sebastian, our novice, stayed in the center of the cage and clung like a determined spider to the upper bars, as far away from the sharks as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of us obtained some of the most incredible still and video footage of sharks feeding and attacking.

  The sharks were uncannily silent in their approach. One time, I sat down on the floor of the cage to check my camera, only to be told later by Klaus Reith that as I was doing so, a 2,000-pound, fourteen-foot female great white was nibbling intently at the bars not an arm’s length directly behind my just-out-of-reach head.

  I never heard it, and I never saw it. Great white: the stealth shark. Did Tyrannosaurus rex similarly lie in wait to ambush its prey?

  Having singled out a victim, the great white charges, bites, and then retreats and circles. Seals and sea lions have sharp teeth and claws, so the shark waits for its flailing prey to bleed to death or expire from shock. Only then does it move in and feed. It was this precise behavior that likely saved Rodney Fox’s life on that dreadful December day in 1963. The shark bit him and backed off, waiting for his life to seep away. Only his wet suit, acting like a giant Ace bandage, held him and his insides together long enough for him to reach the hospital.

  You think of these things when you’re in the water with half a dozen great whites, the largest of which Rodney estimated to be more than fifteen feet and 2,500 pounds. The biggest he’s ever seen in nearly thirty years of diving with them was more than eighteen feet long—when he was assisting on the filming of the live-action shark sequence for the movie Jaws.

  A fifteen-foot great white is much, much bigger than the cage. When its jaws are open to their greatest gape while taking some bait, its mouth becomes a small reddish cavern about a yard in diameter. If it’s coming toward you, you can see right down its throat, past the gills. It looks like a small railroad tunnel, black and bottomless at the far end.

  One day, the instant Carl jumped in to join me, a great white slammed into the cage in hopes of intercepting him, and by sheer coincidence, jammed its snout right through the unbarred camera port. With astonishing presence of mind born of a lifetime spent in the sea, Carl whirled around at this most disorienting moment of entry and gave the shark a couple of friendly pats on the nose with his gloved hands. At once fascinated and aghast, I observed this performance from the far side of the cage. Fortunately, the camera portal was large enough for the shark to partially enter but too small for it to open its mouth once it had its head partly inside. Tail churning the water to foam, it furiously backed out. Carl’s mouth smiled around the edges of his regulator, his eyes twinkling with delight. Once again, I had to remind myself to breathe properly.

  Days and sharks slid past. Having taken a dive interval, I was ready to return to the cage. Old stuff now to a veteran like myself. Routine. But there were three divers in the cage, and it was difficult for all of them to crowd far enough to one side to allow me ingress. I waited while Mateo repeatedly prodded one of the divers with a boat gaff to get them to move over. With weights and tank, I struggled to keep my balance on a choppy sea. Stepping down onto the diving platform, I found it increasingly difficult to maintain my equilibrium. I jumped.

  My timing was bad.

  A tremendous pain shot through my side, as though I’d just tried to run through the Pittsburg Steelers defensive line. Gasping in surprise and discomfort, I sank feetfirst to the bottom of the cage. My side was numb. As the shock of the initial impact began to wear off, the pain returned. Misjudging my entry, I had slammed my left side into the inch-thick center roof-support bar of the cage. This length of metal was intended to withstand the impact of flailing two-ton sharks without crumpling. It did not yield an iota to me.

  I straightened and gingerly felt of my side where I’d hit. Contact made the pain no worse. I knew I should have signaled for help and aborted the dive, but I could not bring myself to do it. If something was seriously wrong, I
might not be allowed another dive. With this foolish decision ruling my actions, I became aware that my mask was slowly flooding. The impact caused by my lousy entry had doubtless loosened something. I recalled my dive training. Keep calm; in the ocean, panic is the greatest danger.

  Laboriously, I cleared my mask. It steadily refilled with cold salt water. I repeated the clearing procedure three, four times. Finally, I yanked off my wet-suit hood and angrily shoved my hair back. That solved the problem. The next time I cleared my mask, it stayed sealed. Meanwhile, I was losing heat through my exposed head, but I didn’t care. At least, now I could see.

  I spent valuable airtime rechecking myself and my camera. The latter seemed to have survived my awkward entry without damage. While this was transpiring, one by one the other divers were exiting the cage. It was lunchtime, I knew, and I was hungry, too, but I was damned if after all I had gone through I was going to climb out without seeing anything. Readying my camera and myself, I did a slow scan of the surrounding water. There were sharks everywhere.

  I suddenly realized that I was entirely alone.

  The other cage bobbed nearby in the current, empty. Moving faster than at any time since the start of the trip, I spun around in my own cage. Likewise empty. And just like that, suddenly and unexpectedly, everything changed.

  I was alone in the cold, cold water of the great Southern Ocean with half a dozen great white sharks.

  The stern of the Nenad was twenty feet away. Only a pair of ropes connected my cage to it. For the first time since the first dive, the distance seemed more like half a mile even though I knew the longer distance was all in my head. Ninety feet below me, the sea bottom was invisible. And all around me, effortlessly circling, were the great whites.

  I knew nothing could go wrong. I knew that they couldn’t bite through the bars or break into the cage. I knew I had plenty of air, and that at any time I could open the cage’s hinged roof and signal for help. Unless everyone was inside eating lunch (no, surely not!). My calm and rational self-reassurances did nothing to calm my abruptly altered emotional state. Now that I was alone in the water, all was different, strange, wonderful, and frightening.

  This must be what the solitary Cro-Magnon hunter felt while huddling within his temporary shelter listening to the saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves howling outside, I thought. It is not an easy feeling to convey. There is a heightened sense of awareness. Every sense seems suddenly much sharper. You try to see every which way at once. Experiencing this, I was exalted. I was fearful. I was very much alive.

  I shot footage like mad, swinging my video camera in all directions. For the first time, I had the whole cage to myself. There were no other divers to worry about or stumble in front of my lens. I moved freely as the sharks bit the cage, bumped it, tried to nibble off my toes. I was the food, and we both knew it, but it didn’t matter. They were grand and beautiful as they swept past, unutterably regal in their power and strength. And for twenty-five minutes, they were all mine.

  I was recording one biting the cage when I heard a distinct, sharp snap, like a dry tree branch breaking. A small bright white object appeared at the corner of my vision, tumbling through the water as the shark slid raggedly off the side of the cage. It was a tooth. Not a very big one. A small side tooth. Earlier, I had queried Carl about the possibility of obtaining such a souvenir.

  “No one’s ever gotten a tooth,” he told me patiently. “I nearly did once. Grabbed at it three times, and had to watch it spin away through the floor of the cage. Wanted to cry.”

  You can’t grab small things underwater. The faster and harder you clutch at them, the more water you push in front of your hand and the farther away goes the object you’re trying to grab. As I futilely willed time to slow down, my thoughts raced madly: Let go of the camera; let it go! But the camera held all the underwater footage I’d taken and was buoyant enough in its EWA housing to rise swiftly upward and break against the bars if I let it out of my grasp.

  So I held on to the camera housing while with my free hand I flailed forlornly at the rapidly descending tooth. Like a jitterbugging imp, it danced maddeningly around my fingertips while keeping well clear of actual contact. I forced myself to clutch at it more slowly. No matter. The current was helping it along; like a child’s runaway top, it continued to pirouette swiftly downward, mocking me all the way. I took another futile swipe, knocking it slightly sideways.

  Gone, I told myself. Now you know another reason why nobody’s ever emerged from a dive with one of these.

  The tooth struck the bottom support bar—and teetered there, caught between the grillwork floor and the outside.

  Hardly breathing, I knelt and slowly extended my thumb and forefinger. The cage rocked back and forth in the surface current. My hand seemed an alien appendage, my fingers clumsy tools, the whole primate apparatus a clunky crane fit only for shifting boulders. My fingers closed around the tooth and contracted. I didn’t care if I cut myself.

  I had it.

  Holding it up before my mask, I gazed at my prize in wonderment. It was all of an inch long. There the serrated edges, there the sharp point. Just like in the flat, dead book illustrations. Unlike in such illustrations, however, small bits of white flesh hung from the root. There was blood on the left side. Great white shark blood. Great white shark flesh. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shout, both difficult to do with a regulator gripped in one’s mouth. Where to sequester safely this singular trophy? Bending, I unzipped one bootie and slid the tooth inside, then zipped the neoprene back up. I could feel the tooth pressing against my ankle, hard and unyielding and still sharp.

  Outside, several hundred similar teeth are cruising back and forth, still in firm possession of their owners. Mine will not be missed. I resumed shooting.

  Back on board, my fellow divers expressed envy and delight at the sight of the tooth. It looked smaller on the boat and in the daylight, but what it represented to me grew greater by the minute.

  Later, when I removed my wet suit, I was in so much pain I couldn’t climb into my bunk. I had to lever myself in. Turning over was agony. For the remainder of the expedition, I didn’t sleep well, nor was I able to return to the water for another dive.

  No matter. I’d had my half hour alone with the masters of the earth’s oceans. I would be returning home with my memories and with video—and with the tooth.

  I also returned with a hairline fracture of one or more ribs, but somehow that didn’t matter, either.

  III

  FELIX

  Mount Etjo, Namibia, November 1993

  ARIZONA HAS BEEN MY HOME for a third of a century. It’s a visually arresting corner of the world—towering flat-topped buttes, winding canyons of multihued candy-striped stone, rivers that sink out of sight and turn to sand in the dry season, hardy vegetation that half the time is unable to decide if it’s cactus or not, indomitable animals and insects that manage to eke out a rugged existence in a tough, unforgiving, highly variable climate, and birds that, of necessity, seem to possess vision just a little sharper than that of close relatives that have an easier time of life elsewhere.

  It looks just like Namibia.

  But while the vegetation in Namibia is no less confused than its North American relatives and the birds that patrol its startlingly unpolluted sky have sight equally acute, the animals and insects are very different. As a general rule, the insects of Southwest Africa, whose barren and melancholy shores Namibia fronts, are relatively harmless. For one thing, they’re too busy trying to collect enough moisture to stay alive to spend time producing poisons. But the animals—ah, the animals . . .

  You know you’re not in Arizona when a pack of baboons runs across the highway in front of your car.

  Yes, Arizona has its predators. Foremost is the cougar, or mountain lion, star of many a Hollywood film and hysterical news report as well as innumerable nature documentaries. Then there is its smaller cousin, the bobcat. The Mexican wolf has been reintroduced in Arizona, wit
h sporadic success. If infrequent rare sightings are to be believed, the occasional solemn and ghostly jaguar also intermittently crosses the border from Mexico to hunt, mate, and scout ancient traditional territories from which single-minded ranchers expelled it a hundred years ago. There are also foxes and, most notably, the ubiquitous coyote. Contrary to its enduring and endearing cartoon adventures, the coyote is far too smart to engage in futile pursuit of lightening-quick roadrunners when the countryside is full of plump rabbits, nut-stuffed ground squirrels, and more frequently these days, clueless suburbanite mini-mutts.

  But from there the larger mammalian population of Namibia diverges sharply from its Arizona relations. Perhaps it’s just as well. One wonders at the psychic shock a pack of American coyotes would suffer were they suddenly to be confronted by a foraging elephant.

  Far from the overdeveloped, overpopulated centers of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, Namibia still boasts healthy numbers of leopards, lions, jackals, hyenas, and numerous smaller carnivores. For many people, the most admirable member of the Namibian pantheon of predators is that fastest and most gracile of all the big cats: the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). Sleek of line, limber of build, with a strikingly marked face that is more doglike than that of any other feline, the patient cheetah was a favored pet of ancient Egyptian nobility. Or so the legends say.

  It’s difficult for those of us who are non-royalty to envision successfully keeping a big cat as a pet. At one time or another, my wife and I have shared our home with half a dozen house cats that lumped together wouldn’t weigh as much as a healthy cheetah’s full belly. The outrageous thought of having one of the pharaoh’s favorites freely roaming the kitchen and the rest of the house was a notion destined to remain forever a fragment of little more than dreams and fantasy.