OCEANIC WHITETIPS

Then there's the oceanic whitetip. Its Latin name describes the creature so perfectly that I'll burden you with it: Carcharhinus longimanus, or “long-hands.” This shark's pectoral fins are extraordinarily long and graceful. They look like the wings of a modern fighter jet. Longimanus tends to stay in the deep ocean. Nobody on earth has the vaguest notion about total numbers of long-hand attacks. That's because the people they do attack are either adrift, alone, or survivors of shipwrecks, who don't much care what species of shark it is that's harassing them.

I do know, however, that longimanus is unpredictable, scary, and capable of killing a human. There's a story about one that attacked two U.S. Navy divers in the deep waters of the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas. The shark took a big bite out of one of the divers. Then, as the diver's buddy tried to hold on to his friend, it dragged the diver into the abyss. Finally, at a depth of about three hundred feet—far beyond safe scuba depth—the buddy had to choose between letting go of his friend and dying himself. He watched as shark and body disappeared into the gloom.

Long-hands are one of the few species of shark that genuinely terrify me. A couple of decades ago one made an honest effort to eat me. I don't blame the shark for trying, because my situation fell well within the bounds of Stupid Things You Should Avoid at All Costs. But the near miss still scared me—and scarred me permanently.

I was with an ABC-TV crew, also in the Tongue of the Ocean, in open water more than a mile deep. We had tied our boat to a navy buoy. The buoy had become a popular spot to film because it had been in the water for so long that the sea had claimed it, transforming it into an artificial reef. Microscopic animals had taken shelter in the buoy and the chain and had been followed by tiny crustacea and other small critters. Then larger and larger creatures had come to feed. Finally—in the magical way the sea has of generating life on all levels—the entire food chain had come to use buoy and chain as a feeding ground.

A school of yellowfin tuna was swarming around the buoy, attracted by something. In the brilliant sunlight of the summer day the colors were gorgeous. So we decided to take some footage for the film segment about the Bahamas that we were working on for The American Sportsman.

I, as the so-called talent, was sent into the water. Stan Waterman followed to film whatever happened. We had only expected to film the contrasting colors of the beautiful fish against the greenish blue sea, interrupted now and then by a black-rubber-suited human.

Back then I was still a pretty raw blue-water diver. Blue-water diving is diving in water with no bottom visible or reachable. I wasn't used to diving in water more than five thousand feet deep. Once in a while I was haunted by a vision of my body drifting down, down, down, from light blue to darker blue, to purple and violet and the unknown black.

So, naturally, whenever I had to dive in blue water, I carried a security blanket: a sawed-off broomstick about three feet long, attached to my wrist by a rawhide thong. Exactly what it was supposed to protect me from I'm not sure. But I thought if cameramen carried cameras they could use to ward off attackers, and assistants carried cameras and lights, why shouldn't I be allowed to carry a broomstick?

Thus armed, I jumped overboard and swam among the yellowfin tuna—or, rather, they swam around me. I held on to the barnacle-covered buoy chain to keep from being swept away by the current. The school of tuna, which had scattered when I splashed into the water, reformed and circled me. The shafts of sunlight piercing the surface glittered on their silver scales and yellow fins. It seemed to me that Stan must be gathering an entire library of beauty shots.

The water was very clear. I was sure visibility was more than a hundred feet, though it's hard to tell in blue water, for there's nothing visible against which to gauge distances.

At the very edge of my vision I saw a shark swimming by. I couldn't tell what kind it was, and I didn't much care, for it showed no interest in me or the tuna.

Meanwhile, far up on the bow of the boat, one of the crew—bored and tantalized by the sight of so many delicious meals swimming so close to the boat—rigged a fishing rod. He dropped a baited hook into the water and let it drift back into the school of tuna. He had not asked permission, nor had he told anyone what he was doing. After all, he was staying out of the way and minding his own business. When he hooked a fish, he would simply haul it aboard, and no one need be the wiser.

Stan gestured for me to move away from the buoy so that he could frame me and the fish cleanly against the blue background. I let go of the chain and kicked my way out into open water. Obligingly, the tuna followed.

Suddenly I was gone, jerked downward by an irresistible force, with a searing pain in my lower leg, arms flung over my head, broomstick aimed at the surface. I could see Stan and the tuna receding above me. I looked around, panicked and confused, to see what had grabbed me. The shark? Had I been taken by the shark? I saw nothing.

I looked down. I was already in the dark blue; all that lay below was the violet and the black. Wait … there, against the darkness … what could it possibly—

A tuna, fleeing for the bottom, struggling, fighting … fighting? Against WHAT?

Then I saw the line, and the silvery leader. The fish was hooked! Somehow it had gotten … No, impossible, no way it could have—

A cloud billowed around my face, black as ink, thick as … blood. My blood.

I leaned backward and kicked forward, wanting to see my feet.

The steel leader was wrapped around my ankle. The wire had bitten deep, and a plume of black was rising from the wound. That was a sign that I was already down very, very deep, for blood doesn't look black till the twilight depths. (The sea consumes the visible spectrum of light, one color at a time, beginning a few feet underwater. Red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, and so on. When you reach 150 or 200 feet, blood looks black.)

All I could guess was that as the fish had fled the surface, it must have passed between my legs, or circled around my feet, or somehow wrapped the leader around my leg. And all I knew was that, somehow, I'd better find a way to free my leg before I was taken so deep that I would never return.

I reached for my knife, to cut the line. But first I couldn't find the knife, and then I couldn't release it.

The tuna stopped diving and turned. That relieved the pressure against its mouth and must have convinced it that it was free, for it swam upward, toward me.

The line slackened, and I slid my foot and fin out through the widening coil.

Giddy with relief, I checked my depth and air gauges: 185 feet deep, 500 pounds of air. That was more than enough for a controlled ascent.

I started up, slowly, and now the black blood no longer billowed around me but trailed behind. The pain in my leg had waned, and my foot seemed to be working, which meant that no major tendon had been cut.

I passed a hundred feet, then ninety, eighty. … Things were lighter now, visibility had returned, and I could see the rays of the sun angling down from the shimmering surface. Everything would be okay, after all. There was noth—

The shark came straight for me, emerging quickly from the blue haze. Its fins formed a lopsided triangle because of the slight downward curve of the extraordinary pectorals.

Ten, maybe fifteen feet from me it veered away. It banked downward and passed through the trail of blood leaking from my ankle. Now it was sure that I was the source of the tasty scent it had picked up from far away. It rose again, leveled off before me, and began the final stage of the hunt.

It's hard to be sure of sizes underwater. The generally accepted rule is that animals look about a third again as large as they actually are. This shark looked ten or twelve feet long, which meant that, in fact, it was probably seven to nine feet long. But “in fact” didn't matter to me. All I cared about was that the closer this shark came, the bigger it looked, and it was very big.

It circled me twice, perhaps twenty feet away. Then it gradually began to close the distance between us. With each circle, it came closer, first by six inches, then by twelve, then fifteen.

I raised my broomstick and held it out like a sword, waving its blunt tip back and forth. I wanted the shark to know that I was a living being armed with the weapons and determination to defend myself.

Longimanus was not impressed. It circled closer, staying just beyond the reach of the broomstick. I could count the tiny black dots on its snout. Those dots are called the ampullae of Lorenzini, and they carry untold megabytes of information, chemical and electromagnetic, to the shark's brain.

The mouth hung open about an inch, enough to give me a glimpse of the teeth in the lower jaw.

I turned with the shark, trying to maintain some upward movement. I watched the eye—always the eye—for movement of the nictitating membrane. That would be the signal that the threat display was ending and the attack itself beginning.

It quickened its pace, circling me faster than I could turn. So I began to kick backward as well as upward, to increase the distance between us.

I jabbed randomly with the broomstick, never touching flesh, never causing longimanus even to flinch.

I glanced upward and saw the bottom of the boat, a squat, gray-black shape perhaps fifty feet away, forty-five, forty. …

The shark appeared from behind me, a pectoral fin nearly touching my shoulder. The mouth opened, and the membrane flickered upward, covering most of the eye. The upper jaw dropped down and forward, and the head turned toward me.

I remember seeing the tail sweep once, propelling longimanus forward.

I remember bending backward to avoid the gaping mouth. I remember the ghostly, yellowish white eyeball, and I remember stabbing at it with the broomstick.

I don't remember hitting, instead, the roof of the shark's mouth. But that's what must have happened, for the next thing I knew, the shark bit down on the broomstick. It shook its head back and forth to tear it loose. When that failed, it lunged with its powerful tail, intent on fleeing with its prize.

The broomstick, of course, was attached to my wrist. I was suddenly dragged through the water like a rag doll, flopping helplessly behind the (by now) frightened shark. It had taken a test bite from a strange, bleeding prey and now found itself dragging a great rubber thing through the water.

Breathing became difficult; I was running out of air.

I tried to peel the rawhide thong off my wrist, but the tension on it was too great and I couldn't budge it.

I was on my back now, upside down, my right arm over my head as longimanus towed me away from the safety of the boat. I could once again see blood trailing from my leg. At this depth it was dark blue, and it streamed behind me like a wake.

Everything stopped. At once. My arm was free, and I was floating about thirty feet beneath the surface. I looked at the broomstick—or at what remained of it. Longimanus had bitten through it.

Far away, at the outer limits of my sight, I saw the black scythe of a tail fin vanish into the blue.

I sucked one final breath from my tank, opened my mouth, and tipped my head back. I kicked a couple of times and rose up to the kingdom of light and air.

Not until I reached the swim step at the stern of the boat did the weakness of fear overcome me, and the shock.

I spat out my mouthpiece, took off my mask, and started cursing that so-and-so of a shark.

“No!” said the director. “No, no, no. You can't use that language on network television. Go back down and surface again and tell us what you saw.”