Predators I Have Known Read Online Free PDF

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