Randy White - Dead of Night

With lungs inflated to maintain buoyancy, I drifted with the current, doing a slow sidestroke, head up, watching as the shark continued to swim in a wide, slow circle. The December water was cold, and my chest spasmed adjusting to the temperature.

I’d have no trouble catching up. But what then?

We were less than a hundred yards from shore, but close enough to the channel that there was probably ten to twenty feet of water beneath us. Because the net was tangled on the shark’s left side, the shark circled left, getting closer and closer to shore. Which was good. I wanted to end up in water shallow enough for me to stand.

I watched as the shark tried once again to turn into the tide. Its tail slapped the water feebly… strained briefly against the rope

… then slapped the surface again, its gray body contorted, pectoral fins flapping as if made of rubber.

Pathetic. Female bull sharks drop only one to thirteen pups per birth cycle, and the mortality rate is high. Only a small percentage live the dozen or so years it takes to reach sexual maturity. By examining thinly sliced cross sections of vertebrae, a shark’s age can be determined using a process similar to counting a tree’s growth rings. I once did a necropsy on a bull shark that was twenty-five years old. It was nowhere near the size of this creature.

How many decades had it swum freely? In the world of sharks, size is a valid indicator of genetic ascendancy. This animal had not only survived against great odds, it had achieved a rare degree of oceangoing invulnerability. It had outsized all enemies-only now to fall victim to a bunch of plastic trash.

I waited until the shark turned, tail to me. Then I fixed my goggles in place and began to swim hard.

I caught the last section of nylon rope in my left hand, careful to match the bull shark’s speed because I didn’t want to add additional drag. We swam together for a time before I gradually began to kick and pull on a slightly different course, toward shore. I discovered that by applying light pressure via the rope, I could steer us toward the shallows.

I also began to work my way up the rope, closer and closer to the fish’s huge, beating caudal fin.

We didn’t have much time. The shark was visibly less animated. It was exhausted, and exhaustion can kill a fish just as surely as a weapon, because the muscles, saturated with lactic acid, begin to fail. The acid overload causes a domino effect of physiological imbalance in organ tissues and nervous system. Exceed a certain level of stress, and all the complicated mechanism shuts down.

So I was rushing-maybe too much.

When I was close enough to touch its tail, I nearly killed the thing inadvertently. I’d been using my survival knife to cut away sections of net. The reduction in drag, I reasoned, would reduce the energy drain. I also anticipated that it would cause a minor surge in speed.

The result was just the opposite. The floats attached to the net were keeping it afloat, so, when I cut the rope, the shark gave one last feeble tail thrust that instead of pushing it forward drove it head-heavy toward the bottom like some dead, inanimate weight.

For a moment, I stayed on the surface and watched: watched the great shark sinking with the trajectory of a dark and cooling star.

Then I was after it, pulling myself down through the murk.

Almost immediately, I saw the tail and grabbed it. A shark’s skin is covered with placoid scales, or denticles, which are similar to teeth. They’re saw-edged and pointed, which is why shark skin was once commonly used as sandpaper.

The tail was abrasive, but also lifeless. I held on without difficulty as it pulled me downward. Through goggles and green water, I could see that my hand appeared tiny on the caudal lobe, and that the shark’s body had turned from gray to black. The fish was too heavy for me to swim it back to the surface, and so I waited the few seconds it took for us to bump bottom. Then I went to work.

I got my feet under me, wrapped the animal in both arms, and began to walk it underwater, cross-tide, toward shore. The key to doing anything strenuous while free diving is to do it slowly. Conserve oxygen and you gain bottom time. So I took long, deliberate strides, switching my body into what I think of as conservation mode: used only the muscles required, everything else relaxed.

As my oxygen supply dwindled, I also began to play a little tune in my head, something I’ve always done when struggling to extend bottom time. Concentrate on the intricacies of the tune and I pay less attention to the capillary burn of lungs.

We’d hit bottom in maybe ten or fifteen feet of water. I covered enough distance toward shore that by the time I had to bounce to the surface for another gulp of air, the water wasn’t more than a foot over my head.

I submerged a second time, lifted the shark into my arms again, then walked it over sand, sea grass, and shell until my eyes… then my nose… then my head breached the surface. I continued walking until I was in waist-deep water, using my knees to gently boost the animal upward whenever I lost my grip.

The backpack was still strapped over my head and shoulder. I found wire cutters, and soon had the web of net, rope, and floats cut away. I inspected the rope abrasions-they weren’t too bad-and applied antibacterial cream to the wounds.

As I worked, I kept the shark’s head pointed into the tide so that current swept through its gills. The shark remained motionless. Seemed near death. If I could get the respiratory system going, though, get sufficient oxygen into the bloodstream to dilute the overload of lactic acid, the animal still had a chance.

To increase the flow of water, I began to walk against the tide, slowly, slowly. I waded toward Lighthouse Point, floating five or six hundred pounds of shark along with me.

There’s a row of condos near that section of shore. People were watching me from their balconies. One was a buddy of mine. He used his index finger to make a spinning motion next to his ear, then pointed at me: You’re crazy.

Hard for anyone who lives at Dinkin’s Bay to argue.

I walked the shark for ten minutes or so before I felt an intramuscular tremor that was not unlike a small generator trying to fire. Then the tail fin began to move… swung slowly and randomly, at first, then with increasing purpose and control. It fanned the current like a metronome, steady, steady, rhythmic as a heartbeat.

The fish was alive but weak. Not yet strong enough to release, or even endure the minor stress of being tagged. It would take another fifteen minutes to get sufficient oxygen into the bloodstream, but the tail thrust was increasingly powerful. Soon, I wouldn’t be able to control the animal’s body. Release it too soon, though, it would swim off and die.

So I tried a technique I learned years ago while working with a team of locals on the Zambezi River in Africa. Turn a big shark upside down and it will go limp in the water within twenty or thirty seconds. It’s a physiological response called “tonic immobility.” Keep it inverted and the fish will remain motionless for as much as half an hour.

Gently, I now rolled the bull shark onto its side, waited for it to stop struggling, then used its pectoral fin to push it over onto its back. I held it there, letting water flow through its mouth and gills-a sort of makeshift ventilator.

I got my first look at its underbelly. The most obvious indicators of a shark’s sex are the absence or presence of twin penile-shaped claspers used singularly to deposit sperm. They’re located just behind the pelvic fin. Because they calcify with maturity, male sharks have the equivalent of a permanent erection.

This was a male.

I also got my first close look at the great fish’s eyes. The opaque, nictitating membrane, which is a protective third eyelid, was closed like a curtain, but its eyes were visible beneath. The optic discs were yellow, the pupils black. In bright light, a shark’s pupils contract to a vertical, feline slit. In darkness, they dilate, becoming a million times more sensitive to light than human eyes.