Predators I Have Known Read Online Free PDF Page B

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