Predators I Have Known (12 page)

Hoping for a quick pickup from the dive boat, I decided to surface while I still had some air left in my tank. Spreading my arms and legs wide to make myself look as big as possible, I started upward.

The instant I did so, the sharks turned and swam off.

Having completed my safety stop and returned to the surface, I dipped my face back into the water to anxiously scan my immediate surroundings. Not one of the juvenile gray reefs remained within view. My toes, and the rest of me, were safe. I went from feeling mildly threatened to feeling slightly foolish.

Most people know what a puppy’s toy feels like, but it’s not often one gets the chance to know what it feels like to be one.

* * *

As I mentioned previously, when great white shark experts and guides Rodney and Andrew Fox put out chunks of tuna or mackerel around their boat to keep visiting great whites interested and available for viewing, the pieces of fish were attached to one or two balloons to keep them floating at the surface. These were not specialized great-white-watching gear, but ordinary party balloons purchased at a local store. I retain a vivid memory of one great white that had taken our bait cruising by my cage with a bright blue child’s balloon trailing on a string from the right side of its mouth. The balloon and the length of twine attached to it soon took their leave of the patrolling animal, but in my mind that particular great white will forever be ignominiously remembered as the clown shark.

Largely because of the plethora of bloodthirsty television documentaries in which they are featured, people rarely, if ever, associate sharks with humor. Of the few artists who regularly draw amusement from the actions of
Carcharodon
and its relatives, the most notable is Jim Toomey of the widely syndicated cartoon strip
Sherman’s Lagoon
. In this he was preceded, frequently and to much mirth, by the inimitable Gary Larson’s
The Far Side
. In addition to sharks, Larson extracted dry and frequently skewed humor from both the animal and plant kingdoms, places where humans were often reduced to little more than bipedal straight lines. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen, and enjoyed, every cartoon Gary Larson ever drew.

I never thought I’d find myself acting in one. . . .

* * *

West Australia, April 1992

MORE THAN HALF THE POPULATION
of Australia lives in or near its five largest cities. Not for nothing is the rest of the country called the Outback. The Outback itself is broken down into smaller, though still enormous, subregions with names of their own. The Top End, for example, refers to the finger of land that points toward New Guinea. In the vast northwest of the continent lie the districts of the Pilbara and the Kimberley. An area the size of Great Britain, the Kimberley is home to barely enough people to populate a good-size American or European town. It’s an enormous, often dry, sometimes cyclone-swept region of spinifex scrub, exotic animals, descendents of the continent’s first human settlers, spectacular sheer-sided gorges, unique insects, and a rugged rust-red coastline that is as magnificent as it is unpopulated.

We were heading north along this coast after having paused to photograph and film the famed whale sharks of Ningaloo Reef. The purpose of the voyage was to allow Brent Mills of Nature Films (based in Chattanooga, Tennessee) to produce a documentary on Rodney Fox. Having previously written two articles for
National Geographic
magazine on this little-known and visually dramatic part of Australia, Rodney wanted to revisit the area without the pressure of having to write to a deadline. This coincided neatly with Brent’s desire to make a documentary about him, and so the expedition was born.

I was invited to participate because—well, to this day I’m not exactly sure why I was invited to participate. Partly, I think, it was because Rodney and I got along well. Partly, because he knew I shared his enthusiasm for such exploration. And partly, perhaps, because on a previous journey he may have sensed that I can get along with most anyone under nearly any circumstances. The latter is a facility not to be undervalued when one is to be packed into a too-small, inadequate boat with a bunch of strangers for an un-air-conditioned tropical journey of a month’s duration.

The rest of the production team was a decidedly mixed bunch. There was a professional underwater photographer, much of whose previous work had been in, amusingly, Antarctica. Joining Rodney was his remarkable wife, Kay. The crew consisted of the boat’s owner and captain plus his irrepressible mate and all-around deckhand. Brent Mills was joined by a good friend of his, Robbie Lauren Kyle Mantooth, scion of another notable Chattanooga family. One of the kindest and most beautiful young women I have ever met, she was also the expedition’s official still photographer. Not long after the expedition, she moved to Hollywood and willingly surrounded herself with carnivores of a species whose predatory habits and lifestyle it is not within the scope of this particular book to describe. Looking back over the years, I have a feeling that deep down she was more at home with the fish.

As for Brent, through no fault of his own, he was a representative of a subgroup of humanity that I often find it difficult to deal with: people who inherit money. However, in his case, a more amiable and almost self-consciously self-effacing individual would be hard to imagine. He was kindly and considerate to a fault, which I think sometimes resulted in people taking advantage of him. But his dedication to the project at hand was assured and unbreakable.

Finding a boat and a captain willing to forgo usual business to take off for a month’s expedition up what many would consider to be the most dangerous coast in Australia, a place that boasts the second highest tidal shifts in the world after Canada’s Bay of Fundy, had proven a difficult challenge even for Rodney. Normally employed for fishing charters, the
Nordon
left many things to be desired, most notable of which was a complete lack of internal climate control. In the fierce Australian sun, the only relief from the boat’s stifling interior was to be had out on deck while the boat was in motion. And at times, various members of the expedition found the only way they could get any rest was to move outside and sleep on deck.

Brent’s footage of visiting whale sharks at Ningaloo was stunning (Eugenie Clark and a formal
National Geographic
crew arrived there several weeks after us), and the conditions on board notwithstanding, everyone was in good spirits as we set a course northward along the coast. We paused to visit the Montebello Islands where the British had carried out nuclear weapons’ testing in the 1950s. Rodney and I were the only ones willing to dive there. As I recall, this had something to do with a proprietary concern among the younger members of the expedition regarding the future viability of eggs and sperm. Those who didn’t dive missed little. Rodney and I encountered virtually no life on the bomb-blasted seafloor save for the occasional enormous and isolated oyster. All through the following week, these gargantuan shellfish provided excellent fodder for innumerable jokes focusing on radioactive mutant oysters. Also for a pot of Rodney’s fresh oyster stew, which—I regret to say—came out awful. At least, no one glowed following consumption.

Continuing on up the coast, we stopped at isolated towns and outposts to take on fresh water and fuel. I remember a bikini-clad Robbie and her friend, a distance runner from Virginia, pausing on an industrial dock to take an extended outdoor freshwater shower. This unassuming girlish interlude succeeded in bringing a sizable commercial operation to a complete halt as every goggle-eyed employee within eyeball range (and a couple who hurriedly managed to locate binoculars) stopped everything they were doing to watch.

Eventually, we reached Broome, the only community of any size on the entire Kimberley coast, where we laid over for a couple of days to rest and reprovision for the remainder of the journey north.

Here, I must beg your indulgence for a moment as I find myself compelled to relate an anecdote involving ice cream.

Old-town Broome was largely deserted on the morning I decided to take a sightseeing stroll. Every other member of the expedition was at a local hotel, luxuriating in the presence of air-conditioned rooms and ice and other modern amenities. I found myself wandering alone among the single-story buildings, passed the closed Paspaley pearl showroom, and in the simmering heat eventually found myself confronting a mirage. It had to be a mirage.

But this mirage was open for business.

It was a small establishment, nothing fancy, with a windowless entrance opening directly onto the street. An ice cream shop. Had it been the hottest Hollywood starlet-of-the-moment half-closing her eyes and beckoning to me with pursed lips, I could not have made a more determined beeline for it.

As the owner, a short but stout sunburned Aussie, waited patiently, I forced myself to take time enough to thoroughly peruse the neatly printed menu board that hung from the ceiling just inside the unshuttered opening.

“You’ve got coffee ice cream?”

“Yes,” he replied, gracefully forbearing from chiding me for vocalizing the obvious.

“Could I get a coffee milk shake? Double-thick,” I remembered to add. In Australia, if you ask for a milk shake, you get a drink made only with milk and flavoring. To have one made with ice cream, you need to ask for a double-thick.

Turning from me, the proprietor began to assemble the necessary ingredients to combine in a tall, steel mixing container. Looking on, I struggled to control my flow of saliva. Those of us on the
Nordon
had not had ice cream or anything like it for two weeks.

I soon noticed something that gave me pause.

“You’re using vanilla ice cream.”

He looked back at me. “That’s right.”

“But I asked for a coffee milk shake.”

The man nodded. “All our double-thick milk shakes are made with vanilla ice cream, and then we add the appropriate flavoring.”

I checked the overhead menu again, just to make sure. “But it says you have coffee ice cream. Couldn’t you make mine with coffee ice cream?”

He shook his head. “We make all our double-thick milk shakes with vanilla ice cream and the chosen flavoring.”

I implored. “I’ll pay you double. Triple.”

A sorrowful shake of the head. “Sorry, mate. That’s not how we do it here.”

I pondered this solemnly. “Well then, can I get a sundae made with coffee ice cream?”

The owner smiled back. “Sure thing.”

“Good. This is what I’d like to do. I want to order a sundae made with coffee ice cream and a double-thick vanilla milk shake. Take the whipped cream, the nuts, the cherry for the sundae, and throw them away. Take the vanilla ice cream and throw
it
away. Then take the coffee ice cream for the sundae and put it in the milk-shake container with some milk and chocolate syrup, and mix it.”

A steely-eyed Outback stare met mine. Surely, even Ned Kelly himself never lasered a more unswerving gaze upon an intended victim. The owner’s tone firmed a little but otherwise did not change. “Sorry, mate—that’s not how we do it here.”

I caved. The milk shake made with vanilla ice cream and coffee syrup was refreshing enough—but somehow something had been lost, and not just in translation.

Two days later, fully equipped and laden with fuel, we headed out toward Rowley Shoals. These three perfect isolated atolls lie approximately 170 miles off the northwest coast of Australia. There is no vegetation on the sand cays that lie at the center of two of them. The water that separates Imperieuse, Clerke, and Mermaid Reefs from the mainland is deep and the currents between them strong, so no pollution or river runoff of any kind comes anywhere near the coral trio. Together, the three atolls comprise a marine park under government supervision. Regular patrols by aircraft are vital to ensure the protection of the sea life at the shoals from depredations by fishermen who attempt to sneak down from Indonesia in their sporadic efforts to poach the reefs’ pristine stocks of giant clams (
Tridacna gigas
) and bêche-de-mer (
Isostichopus badionotus
) and to fish.

Rowley boasts the clearest water I have ever seen. Hovering just off the sandy bottom at a depth of more than sixty feet, I could easily count the number of fingers someone in a boat stuck over the side and into the water. I’ve experienced “unlimited” visibility in places like the Bismarck Sea, the eastern Tuamotus, and Micronesia, but for perfect visibility nothing compares to Rowley Shoals. Diving there was like swimming in air.

After several days of exploring and photographing, including a couple of amazing drift dives in the six-knot currents that periodically swept into the lagoons, it was decided to try and get some tiger shark footage featuring Rodney. Reports insisted that tigers were frequently seen at the shoals, and this would make an excellent coda to the film Brent was doubtless already editing together in his mind. Rodney, as always, was agreeable to the idea, though I think his wife, Kay, was less enthusiastic.

Nothing was left to chance. The perfectly transparent water minimized the likelihood of a surprise shark appearance. Descending to the sandy bottom at about seventy feet, both cameramen took up positions alongside shielding coral bommies. Situated more than ten yards apart from one another, these setups allowed for two completely different camera angles on their subject. Brent was with one cameraman, expedition still photographer Robbie with the other. Settling himself down twelve yards distant from and midway between the two camera locations, Rodney began steadily waving back and forth the half tuna he had brought with him, filling the otherwise clear water with the powerfully attractive scent of blood and fish oil.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kay and several others had elected to skip this particular dive and remain on the boat.

I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I also knew that my sole task was to stay out of the way. While everyone else was positioning themselves, I retreated to a ten-foot-high bulge of coral well to the rear of both camera positions and stayed there, just behind the crest of the ridge. From this position, I had a clear view of both camera setups and beyond them, of Rodney.