The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (23 page)

As weatherworn as it was, the house glowed in the incandescent light of dusk. Kevin sat in the workroom, surrounded by tags, typing on a computer. His desk faced a window with a panoramic view of Mirounga Bay and beyond, to an infinity of ocean where gray, blue, and humpback whales were feeding, throwing off impressive geysers. In the kitchen, Mark, a tall, affable intern from Louisiana, was cooking dinner. A vat of spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove.

Brown and Nat were out somewhere, and Peter took their absence as an opportunity to hunt for a birthday present. Pickings were slim, to say the least. Maybe for Brown’s birthday he’d get a three-minute shower, which he could take navy-style, shutting off the water while he was lathering, or an elephant seal skull that someone came across, or an extra beer. But Peter had a private stash of memorabilia he’d amassed over the decades, and it was in this tangle of stuff that he hoped to find a worthy and meaningful gift. We walked next door to the coast guard house, where he pulled out a crate filled with photographs and feathers and assorted other flotsam, the kind of memento stockpile that you find in attics. He began to rifle through it. “A lure? Nah, he doesn’t like fishing.” Peter was especially fond of Brown and had acted as a kind of mentor to him. They were a generation apart, but the things they shared—sharks, baseball, surfing, birds, and, of course, this place—vastly outweighed their differences. The main points of contention were technological: Peter’s insistence on using DOS-era computer programs to store data, for instance, and his reluctance to adopt digital video for filming the sharks. As a result, Brown often found himself bent over software manuals from the seventies and eighties, trying to unlearn every bit of user interface progress from the past ten years, or patching together shark images from diverse sources on the Farallones’ ancient computer equipment. He kept a healthy sense of humor about it, but you could tell he’d rather not have to.

Peter thumbed quickly through a thick batch of pictures. “Lots and lots of shark attack stuff,” he said dismissively. His wedding photos were mixed in there too, along with endless bird images and shots of various seals and sea lions missing gaping hunks of flesh and looking stunned. “Oh, here’s a Steller’s sea lion with a big bite out of its chest.” I couldn’t put the pictures down, but in his opinion, none of them was special enough to mark the occasion. “I used to have more things I found in the tide pools,” he said. “If you want, we can go to one of my secret spots to look for elephant seal teeth.” I looked at Peter, bent over underneath his omnipresent Giants cap hunting through his box of nature souvenirs, like a kid showing another kid something cool in his treehouse. These islands, I realized, were his sacred hideout—both spiritually and literally. One time, I’d asked him if there was anything about the Farallones that he
didn’t
like. I imagined he’d take the opening to complain about the weather, or the lack of hot water, or some other gripe. Instead he’d frowned, and gaped at me like I was sort of slow. “No,” he answered without hesitation. “Why would there be?”

It dawned on me that Peter took any criticism of this place almost as a personal insult. One time I’d overheard him telling Brown that he loved the island, which he often referred to as “the rock,” more than life itself. And he’d declared it like a sworn truth, and not with any kind of exaggerated drama. Ten years ago during seabird breeding season, the marine operator had hailed the Farallones with an urgent message for Peter; he was patched through to his mother, Leilani, in Honolulu. His younger brother, Lew, who had been struggling with leukemia, had “moved on,” she said. The news wasn’t entirely unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less wrenching. When Peter and Lew had spoken the week before, his parting words had been “Hang in there.” Suddenly, that sentiment seemed flip, inadequate. Peter climbed to the murre blind and sat there for the rest of the day. When the coast guard offered to helicopter him off the island, he declined; it would be several days before he could face the mainland.

After another fifteen minutes of rummaging, he settled on a framed photograph of Bitehead majestically cruising in profile. We wrapped the present in an old newspaper and headed down to dinner.

Nat was in the kitchen, making the last adjustments to Brown’s birthday cake. So were the other two interns, Kristie and Elias. Fine-boned and alert, Kristie spoke in a singsong voice that reminded me of a bird itself. Elias was smallish and rugged-looking, with a full beard. He seemed laid-back, except on the subject of birds. Earlier, I’d overheard him ask, in a tight, urgent voice: “Excuse me, Peter? Can I bother you about the molting strategies of pigeon guillemots?”

Brown sat at the head of the table, sunburned, wearing a UPS T-shirt that said, “What Can Brown Do For You?” His ponytail was gone now, but he still didn’t look anywhere near thirty-one. Kristie and Kevin were setting out the silverware, and Peter was opening the wine, and the rest of us were just about to sit down when Nat said, “Oh, I’d better let the bats out.”

During the day, hoary bats slept in the three trees near the houses and could be plucked out like fruit. Hoary bats are almost as tough to study as great white sharks; they’re equally elusive, even though they range widely throughout the boreal forests of North America. But unlike many bat species, which will cluster by the millions in a single cave, hoary bats are happy-go-lucky hoboes, traveling solo, stopping to rest wherever and whenever the urge hits, and not even bothering to nest. To find them at all required a full-out scavenger hunt, except at these islands, where bats that flew off course in their migrations stopped by regularly, just like the land birds. This made chiropterists—bat scientists—crazy to come here, to spend time with hoary bats as they could nowhere else. Since that wasn’t possible, Nat and Brown had begun to monitor the bats, taking snips of their fur, watching their behaviors, counting and weighing them. The information would then be dispersed to the bat community.

I followed Nat as she walked to the coast guard house, entering through the back door into the kitchen. Two wooden crates, each the size of a suitcase, sat on the floor. She grabbed them and carried them outside. When opened, the boxes were divided into eight small compartments, like private berths in a railcar. Each contained a hoary bat. The bats were a mottled sienna color, with veined, complicated-looking wings that gave the appearance of gothic hang gliders. They had giant ears. As Nat gently lifted them one-by-one out of the cage, they unfurled themselves to fly off, making pissed-off clicking and hissing noises.

I reached out a finger to stroke one of the cute little angry bats. Its head snapped forward to bite me; it was in no mood for placatory gestures. Nat, wearing leather work gloves, liberated them all, although she almost missed one that was wedged deeply inside its compartment, curled behind a branch. The bat showed us its mouthful of pinlike teeth, rasped and clicked a blue streak, and then whirled off into the night.

Back at the birthday dinner, celebratory shots of Jack Daniel’s were being tossed back as aperitifs. “I think this is a big year for bats,” Peter said. “We’re already at seventy.” As it happened, Peter was the first person ever to observe hoary bat sex. “It looked like one bat, just one fat bat,” he said. “But then I realized, ‘Hey, they’re doing it!’” He’d taken photographs and sent them to bat experts, who had become very excited. All these years, all the technology in the world, and no one had managed to get an eyeful of this event before. Nor had many people been privy to humpback whale sex, until one day in 1986 when three of them swam up to Saddle Rock and mated on the spot, while Peter watched through a scope. Thus, he became one of the first to know that humpback whales have sex in threesomes, with the third whale acting as a sort of assistant.

Just another item to add to Peter’s astonishing list of sightings, along with the unheard-of great white shark behaviors and the countless rarer-than-rare birds and the time sixty-one blue whales cruised past the island and the morning in 1996 when he came upon the first northern fur seal pup to be born at the Farallones, after the species had been virtually wiped out 160 years earlier.

But perhaps the most bizarre thing he had ever witnessed here, in recent history anyway, involved a shark named Jerry Garcia.

Jerry had gotten his name on a cold and blustery fall day in 1995, when Peter had watched as an expensive-looking powerboat arrived at the Farallones, hung offshore for about fifteen minutes, turned, and left. It was odd for a boat to make the pilgrimage in weather so rough. “The wind was blowing thirty knots,” Peter recalled. But he suspected he knew what the boat was up to. Jerry Garcia (the leader of the Grateful Dead, not the shark) had died the previous August, and Peter had it on good source that sometime during the week friends and relatives would be coming out to scatter his ashes in the vicinity. He looked on with Ed Ueber, the manager of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, who was visiting the island, as the boat tossed in the waves and Garcia was flung to the elements. “They really should have a chumming permit,” Ueber noted. “But…I didn’t see anything.”

The next day Peter encountered a new shark, a twelve-foot male with a crooked, partially lopped-off tail, and in homage to the previous day’s events, he christened the shark Jerry Garcia. From then on, he and Scot spotted Jerry regularly in Maintop Bay, where he was observed hanging out with other Rat Pack sharks. (There was some consideration given to changing the Rat Pack’s name to the Deadheads, but it never quite took.)

Then, on October 4, 1997, two marauding orcas attacked a white shark in Maintop, flipping him onto his back and, working in efficient tandem, holding him there until he drowned. The smaller of the two orcas swam around for a while with the shark sticking out of her mouth, toothpick-style, and then proceeded to eat him in front of a boatload of wide-eyed tourists on
Superfish
. When the showdown commenced, Mick had radioed Peter and told him he’d better get out there, and fast.

Peter and two interns arrived in time to observe the two orcas pinning the shark down by his nose. It was Jerry Garcia. The kill was masterful. “Orcas clearly know what the hell they are doing,” Peter said.

No one had ever seen the ocean’s two top predators battle it out in gladiatorial style. News outlets around the globe ran Peter’s underwater video of the aftermath, during which the orca cruised by the camera with a scrap of Jerry Garcia’s liver hanging from her mouth. Scot and Peter’s favorite clip came from the
CBS Evening News,
which featured the story under the portentous headline: “Battle of the Century off the California Coast.” Dan Rather introduced the segment, informing viewers that the video they were about to see was the first filming ever of the “two sea titans facing off.” But, Rather added, “when push came to shove, it was no contest. It was brains and blubber over the lean, mean teeth machine.”

From a research perspective the most fascinating part was this: immediately after Jerry Garcia was killed,
all
of the Farallon sharks vanished. Just lit out of the place, every last one of them. Scot and Peter waited six weeks for the sharks to return, but no one showed. “It was like the cops had arrived and shut the party down,” Peter said. Ron concurred; no sharks. But as far as making a scientific pronouncement that the sharks had fled, hunch and a single event weren’t proof enough.

And then it happened again, on November 19, 2000. And again, Peter was there. The island was ultrasharky at the time; the previous day six sharks had visited the decoy board in succession, and there had also been an attack involving multiple diners. But when a pod of orcas hit a shark just north of Shubrick, scattering pieces of tissue in a giant slick, the other sharks bolted. This time, however, several of them were wearing satellite tags, and when the data came back they showed that within hours Tipfin, for one, had plunged over the edge of the continental shelf and hightailed it back to Hawaii. Attacks ceased instantly, and the ghost-town ambience underwater was once again confirmed by Ron. “It’s eerie when there are no sharks here,” Peter recalled.

Another incident meant more mysteries: How did the sharks collectively know to scram? Why didn’t the orcas move into the prime hunting grounds here, since they obviously could? In the course of my research I’d come across a reference to a band of orcas slashing its way through Fisherman’s Bay in 1937, snatching seals off rocks and terrifying a boatload of people who were being unloaded at North Landing. This didn’t happen anymore; orcas were rarely seen within a mile of the islands. But why? The food was here. What sort of subaquatic zoning rules allowed for the sharks to have the drive-thru more or less to themselves?

It was almost midnight when the journal entry was completed, the birthday cake was reduced to crumbs, and the dishes had been washed. Peter had planned to spend these next few hours spying on the squid boats from the lighthouse, documenting the seabird havoc, so rather than row me back to
Just Imagine,
he suggested that I stay on the island. This was a swell idea, I thought; the idea of rowing Tubby in the dark was not very appealing. Especially as during dinner, Peter had admitted that there was a part of Fisherman’s Bay that he dreaded passing over, noting that it was “definitely shark territory.” Brown had nodded in agreement. “You know as well as I do that they could just
annihilate
Tubby. Just get there. Go straight to the sailboat as fast as you can.”

The main house was full, so I carried an armful of blankets over to the coast guard house. I wore my headlamp as I walked up the stairs, which creaked ominously the way stairs always do in horror movies. Its beam illuminated stains on the ceilings. I threw my blankets down in the only bedroom that had a mattress, a terrifying old thing lying on a cracked linoleum floor. Black handprints smeared the wall at knee level. The air was heavy and dark and still, although the room was painted a soft peachy color.

Back home, if someone tossed me a pile of flea-bitten blankets and directed me to a filthy mattress in a haunted, rodent-infested house with no power or water, I would be less than enthusiastic about bunking down. But here I was, and, actually, I was content. Lying in the dark, listening to high-pitched mice sounds, I wondered why.