Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [50]
The shark could see colors. It could see several feet out of the water, could have seen people in a small boat looking down at it were a vessel circling over it, and now it noticed the salmon-yellow light in the sky changing and slightly darkening like the water. The fish had traveled some fifty miles along the coast in five days, and it was hungry. It is not known how often it came near shore during those five days, explored bays and harbors or straddled inlets, fed or failed to feed. But judging by its actions, its need to consume prey had become acute.
Nature had equipped the shark more splendidly than anything that lived to find prey. The shark possessed eight organs like complex interrelated systems for detection, stalking, and identification, systems that worked at all hours and in total darkness, supported by numerous backup systems in case of failure. Shark researcher Xavier Maniguet has compared the approach of a shark to that of a modern torpedo “whose various electronic means of reaching the target make ‘contact' almost inescapable.” As the shark detected the lower salinity and the mass of organic debris in the coastal waters that afternoon, its genetic memory was triggered, drawing it inexorably toward shore. Toward the coast town of Spring Lake.
As the shark neared Spring Lake, sound ratcheted curiosity up toward urgency. The noises were deep, low-frequency sounds, bass notes beyond human perception: The noise emitted by a speared fish, thrashing about, or by a human being splashing in the water. Or by a swimmer, more than a mile away.
Dowling and Hill were far into the Atlantic by then, miles apart and miles from shore, unaware they had entered the tracking range of a great white.
The shark now turned its head slowly, side to side, letting water wash into its nostrils, widely spaced below the mouth, and out again. The horizontal balancing movement of the head allowed the shark to test a wide corridor of smell. Its nose was “thinking,” and, turning its head reflexively in the direction of the nostril that received the strongest smell, the fish proceeded that way. Like a hunting dog, the shark's nasal cavity contained numerous folds to increase the surface area and number of olfactory sensors, but this nose was spectacularly more sensitive than a hunting dog's. Sharks can detect one part of blood in one million parts of water, yet the olfactory ability of the great white that day may have been far stronger. A shark is even capable of responding to concentrations of fish extract of one part in ten billion. To survive as a great white shark was extraordinarily difficult, so nature had supplied it extraordinary weapons.
A quarter mile distant, the great white could smell its prey. It had entered an “odor corridor,” a wide swath of scent in the rough shape of a crude Stone Age arrow, broad at the base and tapering to a point. The shark simply needed to follow the narrowing scent to its source.
The shark was in the water with them.
The thought would soon come to both Dowling and Hill. Yet it is perhaps not surprising that both men were unaware and also unafraid of the potential presence of a shark relatively near shore. The Edwardians were the first generation for whom the ocean had lost its terrors; the sea was a haven of leisure and entertainment, an illusion maintained a century later. “We've forgotten what the ocean is,” says ichthyologist George Burgess. “The ocean is a wilderness. We would never enter a forest wilderness without being aware of its dangers, its predators. Yet we think of the ocean as our giant backyard swimming pool.”
On the Atlantic Coast, sharks are constantly near shore,