The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (16 page)

I went upstairs to my bedroom. It was past one o’clock, but no one had returned yet. Falling asleep to the sound of a quarter-million shrieking birds took some practice, not unlike becoming accustomed to the car alarms and the sirens when you first move to Manhattan. I tossed for a while in my sleeping bag, heard the others come in, and then drifted off.

An hour or two later, I’m not sure exactly what time it was, something struck the side of the house with a heavy thump. I woke with a start. The birds had gone quiet. Jen lay asleep in her bunk across the room. Suddenly, in the still air, I had the feeling of not being able to catch my breath. There was a tight, unyielding pressure on my chest and it was not at all subtle. Breathing took effort; it became something I had to do consciously. Panicking, I sat up and looked over at Jen, who had her back turned. At that moment, she lifted her head, twisted around in her bunk, and stared straight at me, eyes wide open. “I’m cold,” she said, in a high-pitched voice.
“I’m so cold.”
I could tell she was not really awake, that she wasn’t seeing me. Then she lay down again and was silent.

I felt my chest ease up, as if something heavy had been lifted, and I was able to inhale again without having to think about it. I lay with my heart pounding, trying to come up with a logical explanation. Everyone knew Jen talked in her sleep. This was just a weird coincidence. Wasn’t it? I wasn’t entirely dismissive of ghosts, but I wasn’t a wild-eyed believer either. What
was
it that I felt? It had been definite and strange, but not hair-raisingly scary. The vibe was weak, and it was sad. Like a child struggling to breathe. Like one of the lighthouse children who had lain here, perhaps, in the last, fatal stages of diphtheria.

AUGUST
8–10, 2003

“What year is it? Hey, it’s an odd year. Stumpy could be here!” Peter was standing on the whaler’s gunwale, hands in the pockets of his vest, looking hopefully at the bright yellow surfboard that was floating off the stern. Shubrick Point rose in the background. “Or Trail Tail, who used to hang out with Stumpy. She was this unbelievably big female. The first time I saw her it was like a bus went by. Scot tagged her. I’m not even sure she noticed.” He took a few nonchalant steps along the whaler’s edge in his knee-high rubber boots. It made me nervous when Peter walked around on the rails without a handhold.

He’d arrived in the shark boat earlier this morning with two trophy salmon that he caught en route. On his way from Bolinas the gold morning light had flashed across relatively silky seas and things were just hopping, rockfish flipping around like popcorn and shearwaters swooping off his bow and humpbacks rolling through the channel, and it seemed wrong not to at least dip a pole into the water. A few hours ago, he’d hailed the island on the marine radio so that Russ could come down to crane him up. Everyone gathered at the landing to greet him; for young ornithologists, Peter stopping by was like John Coltrane suddenly walking into a class of saxophone students. Each of them had a well-thumbed copy of his book
Identification Guide to North American Birds,
also known as the bible of bird banding. Peter, of course, would never mention this unless pressed, but in the course of my reporting, I’d discovered gushing reviews and a roster of awards he’d received for the volume.

It hadn’t taken us long to relaunch the whaler and make our way out here. After a few days saturated with birds and ghosts, I was itching to get off the island, and Peter thought the water looked “sharky.” To me it looked like it usually did: blue-black and sinister. Of course there were sharks in it.

A Stumpy sighting, not only seeing a Sister looming underneath the boat but discovering it to be the queen herself, was a long shot. Yet despite her discouraging hiatus, she was so invincible that no one had really given up hope. As we drifted across her turf, Peter recalled how during the filming of the BBC documentary, he’d been sitting in the Dinner Plate on this very spot, in similarly flat water, with an island intern and the film’s director, Paul Atkins. The three men were waiting off to the side while preparations were being made for a shot from another boat. Abruptly, the little boat rose on a foot-high crest of water. And there was Stumpy, looking directly at them with her ink-black eyes. After a moment of scrutiny she dropped back down, circled the boat, and vanished. When Stumpy’s fuselage of a noggin lifted up from below, the intern had imagined her to be staring straight at him and he’d panicked, yelling, then hyperventilating. Afterward, he had declared his refusal to go out in the boat ever again. “She was just letting us know that she knew we were there,” Peter told the intern, like that was going to reassure him.

No action in Sisterhoodville today. No boils, no outsized tail fins, no curious sharks giving us a once-over. We drove slowly around the island in a counterclockwise direction, heading south past Tower Point, past Sugarloaf, into the sneaky, double-reefed waters of Maintop Bay, and then, approaching the western tip of the island we came up on Indian Head, also known as Rat Pack headquarters. The surfboard followed behind us, stoic and unmolested. “Okay. Now we’re in the money spot,” Peter said, stopping one hundred yards away from the sharp rock walls.

Here was where Cuttail had lunged six feet out of the water in a tailstand, chasing Peter’s pole camera, the underwater casing of which happened to be colored seal-meat red. Here was where Scot was bumped so hard in the Dinner Plate that its stern lifted clean out of the water. Where Ron watched a shark in pursuit of a seal rocket to the surface five inches from his flipper. Where an abalone diver named Mark Tisserand had been shaken by his left ankle for fifteen seconds before the shark released him and he swam seventy feet to the surface with his foot hanging by a lone hank of skin. This was the spot where a six-hundred-pound elephant seal carcass had once drawn, Peter estimated, a dozen individual sharks, where the waters were stained by “the most blood I’d ever seen and ever will again.”

Rounding Indian Head, Peter felt hopeful. “I would be very, very surprised if we didn’t get a hit here,” he said. I watched the board with great concentration, willing a boil to emerge next to it. We dragged the surfboard back and forth several times down Shark Alley, and then we circled Saddle Rock and idled in front of the East Landing for a while longer. But there were no takers.

Because the sharks were so famished when they arrived here at the beginning of the season, they would promptly investigate anything that was dropped in the water. Sometimes, at first, Peter and Scot didn’t recognize sharks they knew well because they were so emaciated. Half Fin in particular would arrive looking downright gaunt and acting crazier than usual until he managed to cut himself in on a carcass. As the sharks fattened up throughout the season, sometimes to the point of whalishness, they were less likely to take a run at the trick fiberglass. But right now, in early August, if any Rat Packers were swanning around Indian Head, there was no way they’d be able to resist the decoy.

Peter turned to me with a sad look. “They’re not here yet.”

No sharks was an empty feeling, a core letdown. Coming into a silent room where you thought there’d be a party. Discovering that your sweetheart had left you and taken the dog too. The Farallones without great white sharks was a movie without a hero, a military campaign with armies and no general. It was boxing without a super heavyweight division. It wasn’t the same.

WHY DID I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THESE FISH? WHY DID WE ALL? THEY
were always in my thoughts, even when I was sleeping, and as I’d confided to Peter, not a day had gone by in the two years since I’d encountered the sharks when I didn’t think about them. After that experience I knew one thing for sure: Great white sharks are something altogether unknown in the lineup. Any description of them requires tossing aside the usual vocabulary and settling in with a six-pack of hyperbole—the most mysterious creature on Earth, the last untamed beast, the ultimate predator, the most fearsome monster imaginable, absolutely, positively, supremely adapted for its role. They’re simply
different
. As the legendary Australian diver and underwater cinematographer Ron Taylor once put it: “My own feeling was that there was a strong intelligent personality behind the black orb. Not evil, but more alien and sinister than that.”

Even the word
shark
is sublime, sleek and cutting and without frills, like a stick whittled into a sharp point. Its origins are not known for sure, but one theory traces it to the Mayan word
Xoc,
the name of a demon god that resembled a fish. Another popular theory holds that
shark
is related to the German
schurke,
which means “shifty criminal.” The word didn’t come into usage until AD 1570, though, so it wasn’t available to the ancient Greeks and Romans when they became aware of the concept that a fish could tear you apart. There were references to oceangoing men chewed down to their ankles, and the odd drawing of someone in the water being bitten in half. But they didn’t know much more than that. So they made stuff up.

In Pliny the Elder’s thirty-seven-volume natural history, which appeared in AD 78, the Roman scholar speculated that fossilized sharks’ teeth, which were then (and are still) found in significant quantities on land, rained from the sky during lunar eclipses. Later, a more sophisticated theory came along: The teeth were the tongues of serpents that had been turned to stone by Saint Paul on the island of Malta. They became known as
glossopetrae
(tongue stones) and were thought to have magical properties, most notably the ability to counteract venom and other toxins. Given that poisoning folks was a favored pastime, the teeth became popular as jewelry and talismans and were often sewn into special pockets in a person’s clothing. It wasn’t until the mid–seventeenth century that a Danish scientist named Steno deduced their true origin: He’d had the unusual opportunity to dissect the head of a great white shark that was captured off the coast of Italy and brought into the Florentine court, and got what was likely one of the first chances to examine its teeth.

About a century later, the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus created the scientific nomenclature system, a universal language by which all living creatures are classified. Finally, the great white shark had an official title:
Squalus carcharias
. Later, when more shark species had been identified, this was refined to
Carcharodon carcharias
, which means “ragged tooth.”

Certainly, no one could have guessed that the ancestors of these raggedy-toothed animals had survived at least four global mass extinctions and been patrolling the seas since the Devonian period, 400 million years ago. That era, 200 million years before the first dinosaurs put in an appearance and 395 million years before our ancestors clomped into the Great Rift Valley, is now known as the “Age of Fishes,” because there were so many oddities swimming and slithering around, as though nature was previewing various designs. There were eel-like fish and fishlike eels and giant sea scorpions and creatures with armored shields wrapped around their heads, and extravagant dentition for all. Bony fishes had been around for a while (150 million years, give or take a few) when a new line of cartilaginous fishes, or sharks, made their debut in the Devonian. The sharks were bad news for the other fish—perfect predators right out of the box. There was the
Dunkleosteus
(loosely translated: “terrible fish”), over seventeen feet long and sporting protective plating and self-sharpening hatchet jaws; there was the
Cladoselache
, a six-foot-long tube of muscle fronted by a curtain of fangs. Some of the late Devonian fish made it onto land and evolved into four-leggeds.

And the party was just getting started. The Carboniferous period which followed—now referred to as the “Golden Age of Sharks”—featured such unique creatures as
Helicoprion,
a shark with a wheel of teeth that precisely resembled a buzz saw, and
Edestus giganteus
, a twenty-foot-long hyperpredator with teeth that protruded beyond its jaw like a pair of Ginsu pinking shears. But undoubtedly the most impressive set of teeth to have ever graced the Earth belonged to a shark called
Carcharodon megalodon,
which lived between 20 million and 1.5 million years ago—yesterday, basically, when you put it into perspective. Megalodon is best imagined as a great white blown up to parade-float size. Its teeth, which could exceed seven inches in length, are plentiful enough to have become a fixture on eBay (though the most highly preserved specimens sell for lavish amounts of cash among fossil collectors). A large megalodon tooth is the size and weight of a child’s liver, and they’re broadly triangular, with serrations, just like the white shark’s. But there’s one significant difference: Chompers this size indicate jaws large enough for a quarter horse to stand in without nicking its head.

It’s hard enough to conjure up the true scale of a Sister, a twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-wide, six-foot-deep animal. Consider for a moment a
fifty-foot
version of same. Megalodon is candy to the cryptozoological set, who love to imagine that somewhere in the unexplored Challenger Deep, skulking in the Marianas Trench or some such unfathomable abyss, it still lives. After all, other long-lost and unknown creatures have been retrieved from the depths. When a brand-new shark called the megamouth, a fourteen-foot weirdo with Jaggeresque lips the size of Chevrolet bumpers, was hauled up in 1976, no one had ever seen anything like it. And when a coelacanth, member of a species thought to have been extinct for at least eighty million years, was caught off the South African coast in 1938, people began to wonder what else was still out there.

But sadly for monster lovers, by general consensus megalodon has flatlined. Hiding, even in the pit of the sea, would be tough for a fifty-foot fish, but more important, megalodon never adapted for the deep water. If Meg was still around, she’d be more likely to hang out near pods of whales, her primary food source. Anyway, a piece of good news for surfers: There’s not a shred of evidence pointing to megalodon’s present-day existence.

And so it has fallen to great white sharks, which appeared in their current form about eleven million years ago, to occupy the bean-shaped niblet of our cerebral cortex reserved for fear of being eaten by something—particularly something that lurks, hidden, in another element, waiting to burst into ours. Great white sharks, emerging out of lightless depths with a maniac smile, neatly encapsulate every fear on our list. And given that they’ve lived far longer than we have, it seems reasonable to think that in some way these sharks shaped human evolution, that megalodon coming at you like a bullet train was a very good reason for quickly crawling out of the ocean in the first place.

In any case, it’s not just me that’s a little bit fascinated by them. Throughout cultures sharks have been worshiped as gods and feared as devils without much neutral ground in between. Pacific islanders considered sharks to be reincarnations of the dead and offered them human sacrifices served up on underwater altars. Religious wars occasionally broke out between tribes when one of them barbecued the species of shark that was another tribe’s sacred totem. The Hawaiians were in on this too; they had several shark gods, including Kamohoali’i, whom they credited with the invention of surfing. And when the navy began to construct its base at Pearl Harbor, workers stumbled across underwater remains of pens where, it was discovered, men faced off against sharks in aquatic gladiatorial matches. The largest pen covered approximately four acres and was encircled with lava stones. Given that the shark was in its own element, playing with a full deck of teeth, and the men had to hold their breath and fight with a weapon not unlike a sawed-off broomstick, odds favored the shark.