12

Max's foot slipped on the slick boulder, and before he could catch himself he skidded down its face and found himself standing in water up to his ankles.  He called himself a few names, then sloshed through the shallow water till he came to a place where the rocks were smaller.  He climbed them and continued his circuit of the island, stepping carefully from rock to rock, aware now of the truth of what Tall Man had told him:  low tide makes for slippery rocks.

Tall Man had given him two fish to feed to the heron.  He had approached the bird gingerly, for it was big, its beak was long and sharp and its dark eyes followed him as if he were prey.

Max had dropped the first fish, fearing for his fingers, and the heron had snatched it from the water, craned its neck and swallowed it whole.  The heron had seen the second fish, and had taken a step toward Max.  Max had forced himself to stand his ground, dangling the fish from his fingertips, and the heron had plucked it from him with surgical precision, its beak missing Max by millimeters.  Then Max had tried to touch the heron, but it had turned away and marched back to the center of its tidal pool.

Max had nothing special to do, his father and Tall Man were both busy, so he had decided to go exploring.  At low tide, Tall Man had said, you could walk all the way around the island on the rocks, and he had already made it nearly halfway around, had reached the far southern end of the island, before skidding off the slimy boulder and soaking his sneakers.

He came to a small pool — a big puddle, really — where the tide had receded from a basin in a boulder, and he knelt down and bent close to the water.  He saw tiny crabs scuttling among the stones, and periwinkles clinging motionless to the bottom, as if patiently awaiting the next high tide.  He watched the crabs for a moment, wondering what they were doing that made them look so busy — feeding?  Fighting?  Fleeing? — then stood up and continued on.

The larger rocks were spattered with guano and littered with clam shells dropped from the air by gulls, which would then swoop down and peck the succulent meat from the shattered shells.  The smaller rocks closer to the water were coated with algae and weeds, and in niches between them Max saw matchbooks, plastic six-pack holders and aluminum pop-tops from soda cans.  He picked up those he could reach and stuffed them into his pockets.

He came to a spot where the rocks looked too slimy and their faces too slippery for him to climb over them safely, and so he walked up the hillside and crossed twenty or thirty yards of high grass toward the biggest boulder he had ever seen:  at least twelve or fifteen feet high, probably twenty feet long, a remnant of the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age.  He circled the boulder, looking up at it with awe, then began to search for a way down the hill to the rocks.

He walked between two bushes, tested his footing and started down.

Something caught his eye, something in the water, not far out, no more than ten yards away.  He looked, but saw nothing, and tried to articulate for himself what it was he had seen; movement, a change in the shape of the water, as if something big was swimming just beneath the surface.  He kept looking, hoping to see the dorsal fin of a dolphin or the shimmering shower caused by a school of feeding fish.

Nothing.  He kept going, walking slowly, stepping carefully among the wet rocks.

He heard a sound behind him:  a splash, but a strange kind of splash, a plopping splash, as if an animal had risen out of the water and submerged again.  He turned and looked, and this time he did see something — a ring of ripples spreading from a spot just offshore.  There was a vague hump in the surface of the water, but as he watched, he saw it disappear.

He wondered if there were sea turtles around here.  Or seals.  Whatever it was out there, he wanted to see it.

But again, there was nothing.  He walked another few yards and looked up to gauge the terrain ahead.  The rocks on this side of the island seemed to be smaller, more cluttered with debris.  There were pot buoys and big chunks of plastic and...

What was that?  Ten or fifteen yards away, something was caught in the rocks, half in the water, half out.  An animal of some kind.  A dead animal.

He walked closer and saw that it was a deer, or the remains of a deer, for the corpse had been savaged, its flesh torn and stripped.  There was no sickly smell of rot, no gathering of flies, which told Max that the deer had not been dead for long; this was a fresh kill.  He couldn’t imagine what had done this to so large an animal.  Hunters?  He looked for bullet wounds in the body, but saw none.

He was about to turn away, when he saw something in the head of the deer, something strange.  He stepped forward, bent down, reached out.  His foot slipped; he flung out his arms and tried to straighten up to regain his balance, but overcorrected and fell backward into the water.

The water wasn't deep, only three or four feet, and Max quickly found footing on the loose gravel.  He stood up.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him — movement, a change in pressure, as if a mass of water was being shoved at him.  He turned and saw the same vague hump in the surface.  This time it was moving toward him.

He splashed water to try to frighten it away, but it kept coming.

A surge of panic washed over Max; he turned back toward shore, leaned into the hip-deep water and paddled with his hands.  He gained a yard, two yards, and now he was scrambling up a slope on his hands and knees, scattering rocks and gravel behind him.  He pushed with his feet and reached for a handhold.  His hand found the head of the deer, and he pulled.  Something sharp dug into his palm, cutting it, but he held on and kept pulling.

He reached the dry rocks, lurched to his feet and ran.  He didn't stop until he got to the top of the hill.  Gasping ragged breaths that were more like sobs, he looked down at the water.  The hump had vanished, and rings of ripples were fading from the glassy surface.

Trembling from cold and fear, Max ran toward the house.  He had covered half the distance before he felt a stinging in his palm.  He looked at his hand and saw, protruding from the fleshy bulb beneath his thumb, the thing that had cut him.

*          *          *          *          *

Chase looked up from his desk and saw Max standing in the doorway, soaked from the shoulders down; a puddle was forming on the floor around his sodden sneakers.  He was shivering.  His face was gray, his lips nearly blue.  He looked terrified.

"Max!"  Chase jumped up from his desk, knocking his chair back against the wall, and crossed the room.  "Are you okay?"

Max nodded.

Chase knelt down and began to unlace Max's sneakers.  "What happened?  You fall off the rocks?"

"A deer," Max said.

"A deer?  What deer?"

Max tried to speak, but stammered as a spasm wracked his chest and shoulders and made his teeth clatter.

"Hey," Chase said, "it's okay."  He removed Max's sneakers, socks, jeans and underwear, balled them up and threw them out the front door onto the lawn.  He took two bath towels from a linen closet in the hall, dried Max off with one and wrapped him in the other.  Then he led him to the sofa in his office and sat him down.

"Deer swim over here," he said.  "Usually from Block Island but sometimes all the way from town.  I don't know why they bother, there's nothing here for them they can't find somewhere else.  They're a nuisance:  they eat everything Mrs. Bixler plants, and they're loaded with ticks, Lyme ticks.  They—"

Chase stopped, for he saw that Max was shaking his head.  "What?"

"It was dead," Max said.

"What?  In the water?  It drowned.  Yeah, they—"

"Something killed it... tried to eat it... did eat it, a lot of it."  Max spoke haltingly, for he was still shivering.  "I was on the rocks by the point... near that giant boulder Mrs. Bixler said her family always called Papa Rock...  saw something in the water, caught in the rocks... saw its head and part of the rest of it...  I got closer...  saw there was nothing left behind about here..."  Max touched his rib cage.  "I thought maybe bluefish had got it...  like they did to that bird."

"It's possible, if it was bleeding.  One of them might take a bite out of it, and then the others see how easy it is and get in a frenzy and—"

"No."  Again Max shook his head.  "I thought maybe a shark, but when I got real close I saw... the deer had no eyes.  Everything around the eyes was all torn.  A shark wouldn't do that... couldn't."

"No.  So you were right the first time... bluefish, probably."

Max ignored him.  "I saw something sticking out of its cheek...  something shiny...  I tried to reach for it but couldn’t, so I took a step and slipped...  fell in."

"What was it?"

Max opened his right hand.  The wound in his palm was small and shallow, and already the bleeding had stopped.  He passed the shiny thing to his father.

"Looks like a shark tooth," Chase said as he took the thing and turned out of the shadow cast by his own torso.

"That's what I thought, too."

But then, as Chase moved to the light on his desk and examined the thing in his hand, he started, and felt his pulse leap.

It did look like a shark tooth, a great white shark's tooth, perhaps fossilized, for it was a dingy gray color.  It was a triangle, about half an inch on a side, and two of its three sides had finely serrated edges that, when Chase ran his thumb along them, shredded his skin as swiftly as a scalpel.  The third side was slightly thicker and had a flat base, and on each end of the base was a tiny barbed hook.  The two hooks faced each other.  One had been broken off just above the barb.

Chase took a ruler from his desk and measured the triangle.  It was not half an inch on a side but five eighths — exactly five eighths.  The thing was a magnificently machined, perfectly precise equilateral triangle.

Chase rubbed it between his thumb and index finger.  The gray patina felt like slime, and as he rubbed it, it transferred to his skin.

Now the tooth, or whatever it was, shone like polished silver.

Chase looked at Max.  "Is this a joke?" he said.  "Tell me you're jerking my chain."

"A joke?"  Max shivered and gestured at the goose bumps on his arms and legs, and at the wound in his hand.  "Some joke."

"Well, then,..  what kind of an animal is there that's got stainless steel teeth?"