Shark Trouble Read Online Free PDF

in the reef until, one by one, we ran out of air and surfaced and put new tanks into our backpacks and descended again to resume our posts.
    We swam free, without cages, for back then (a generation ago) most divers considered cages necessary only when dealing with great white sharks or when filming large numbers of big sharks with reputations for aggressiveness.
    The water was warmer than eighty degrees, and our wetsuits kept us comfortable for a long time, but eventually the hardiest of us chilled and began to shiver and, again one by one, we surrendered to the cold and surfaced for good.
    With one day to go in this first half of our schedule, we had no film, not a single frame, of any shark in the water, with or without people. Now began the litany of woe from the experts. No one could
imagine
where the sharks could possibly have gone. Bronze whalers were
always
around this area. Why, man and boy, the local crew, had been here, all told, for more than fifty years, and
never
had they seen anything like this. If only we’d been here two weeks ago, the sharks were jumping everywhere. And so on—every excuse ever uttered by every fishing guide and boat captain who has ever struck a dry hole in the ocean.
    Our tenth and last day began exactly like the others: clear, hot, flat calm, no breeze, and very little current. The corpse of a big stingray was secured to a brain coral as bait. I dove down and took my position in the sand, kneeling (as instructed) exactly thirty-one inches from the stingray—the optimum distance for Stan’s lens to capture, in the same frame, me and any shark that might show up.
    After about an hour I had emptied my tank of compressed air, so I surfaced, stretched, warmed myself in the sun for a few minutes, changed tanks, and descended again to resume my station.
    Almost weightless, rocked gently by what current there was, snug and cozy in my rubber suit, immersed in the warm, soothing amniotic ocean, I think I fell asleep. I must have, for I have no memory of time passing or of seeing or hearing anything, until I felt Stan tap my shoulder and I opened my eyes and saw, less than an arm’s length away, a shark the size of a school bus about to assault our stingray bait.
    It was a tiger shark—no mistaking the stripes on its flanks, the peculiar catfishlike protrusions from its nasal passages, the broad, flat head, and the curved, serrated teeth identical in top and bottom jaws—one of the few species of shark that had well earned and long held the title man-eater. Its mouth was open, and the upper jaw had dropped down and rolled its teeth into what is known as bite position.
    The so-called nictitating membrane, a defense mechanism in many sharks designed to cover the eyeball and protect it from the claws or teeth of struggling prey, had slid up and over all but a tiny slit of the yellowish eye—a sign that the shark had decided to bite—had, in fact, begun to bite. It looked, I thought, like a maniac.
    Startled as much as afraid, I must have flinched backward, for I felt Stan’s hand pushing me forward.
    Thirty-one inches,
I thought.
That thing is thirty-one inches from my face. My shirts have thirty-
six-
inch sleeves!
(Yes, I know—so what? But in moments of shock my brain often blows a circuit.)
    The tiger shark grabbed the stingray and began to shake it. The huge body (thirteen feet, minimum, was the estimate later) writhed, stirring up a cloud of sand and generating pressure waves that rocked me backward. Conscious of the needs of Stan’s lens, I looked for something to hold on to to steady myself, but the only solid structure within reach was the brain coral to which the ray was tied, and I thought that to put my hands
into
the shark’s mouth might be … inadvisable.
    The shark’s teeth sawed off one wing of the stingray, then, swallowing, it swam away, swinging in a slow circle to approach the bait again.
    As the cloud of sand cleared and