Shark Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

water, to make sure it retained its watertight integrity—that is, that it wouldn’t spring a leak and flood his camera with salt water.
    He strapped on a scuba tank, and I, eager to accumulate as much experience as possible under conditions guaranteed safe (so I had been assured), imitated and followed him. We sat on the swim step at the back of the boat—the gaudy reef and sandy bottom were clearly visible through no more than thirty feet of gin-clear water—rinsed our masks, and rolled forward into the sea.
    The first couple of seconds of every dive are discombobulating. Surrounded by bubbles escaping from your regulator and your equipment, you’re blind and deaf; up feels like down, down like up. Very quickly, though, your eyes adjust, your inner ear orients you in this new space, and you hear the comforting sound of air being inhaled and exhaled through your regulator.
    Senses regained, Stan and I nodded to each other and started down.
    He saw it first and recognized it immediately; I might have seen it, too, I don’t remember, but I certainly didn’t know what it was: the pointed snout, the blue gray upper body and stark white underbelly, the perfect triangle of pectoral fins and dorsal fin and—one of the dead giveaways I would soon learn to recognize—the apparently toothless upper jaw, lip rolled under, concealing the rows of sheathed daggers.
    It was angling up toward us, slowly, as if idly curious.
    Stan touched my arm and looked into my eyes, and there was something so earnest in his gaze—the eyes that normally shone and sparkled were as flat as slate—that I knew instantly what he was saying: Stick with me, do what I do, for we are being approached by a Great … White … Shark.
    My first instinct, of course, was to turn and flee, but by now the shark was within ten or fifteen feet of us, and even in my terror I knew that flight would send a one-word message to the animal: food. So I followed Stan.
    Holding his camera housing before him, Stan swam slowly down, directly at the shark. I could see that this was not, in fact, a big white shark, though part of my brain registered it as the size of a rhinoceros. It was about ten feet long, a young male, probably still adapting to the variables in his life, such as water temperature, hunting grounds, feeding methods, and now analyzing prey.
    I found myself wondering what we looked like to the shark. Large, loud, bubbling creatures, possibly reminiscent of seals or sea lions in our black wetsuits but substantially different: unafraid (after all, we weren’t running but were actually approaching), possibly even aggressive. Still, nothing to be feared; the only things this animal would fear would be larger versions of itself and killer whales.
    Silently, we descended; even more silently, it ascended.
    Are you crazy? Why are you playing “chicken” with a great white shark?
    When we were no more than five feet apart, the shark blinked. Without seeming to flick its tail or alter the pitch of its fins or move a muscle, it changed its arc from up to down and passed beneath us. We stopped and turned, and watched the shark disappear into the gray canyons of the deeper reef.
    Once safe back aboard the boat, I protested. “I thought … you said … you promised …”
    â€œI know,” Stan said with a grin. “Amazing, isn’t it? Can you believe the luck? And I didn’t even have my camera!”
    â€œBut what about—”
    â€œThe first law of sharks,” he said, “is this: forget all the laws about sharks.”
    For the next nine days we waited and watched and baited and dove—day and night, hour after hour—and we saw no sharks of any species or description. We set out chum slicks of fish guts and oil; the crew speared fish and we hung the corpses off the stern of the boat; we prepared savory baits and tied them to brain corals and then hid quietly in crannies