Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [54]
As graceful as Bruder appeared from shore, his movements were sprawling, rough, almost obscenely graceless for a creature of the sea, his limbs thudding flat and hard on the surface like a board, radiating erratic and insistent waves of sound. It was only natural that the shark, patrolling nearby, aroused by Robert Dowling's earlier swim, would decide to investigate. Through the murk of the darkening sea, the great white sped, trailing sonic waves, until it was close enough, within fifteen feet, to see plainly, with its small, emotionless black eyes, the source of the sounds.
Bruder, unaware he was no longer alone as he swam, was twelve hundred feet from shore. The water was over his head, but less than ten feet deep in the low tide. Had he turned around, the view toward shore would have been glorious. Almost a quarter mile back on land, the turrets of the E & S seemed to scrape the clouds. More impressive even was the domed immensity of the New Monmouth Hotel. So small were the distant figures on the beach, he barely made out the figures of the bellhops, frolicking in the surf near shore. The surfmen hadn't moved from their post, which flushed Bruder with pride. Most anyone else would require a boat to travel out this far.
As self-conscious as Bruder was of his gracefulness and form as seen from shore, he gave no thought to the strange and complex beauty he presented below. Below, in the water column, the long outline of his body was compressed and bizarrely distorted in a dark bluish-gray world dusted with sunlight. Yet in the murk was a pleasing form too, a loveliness to the proper observer: a whirling dance of light. As the pale bottoms of Bruder's feet turned this way and that, they emitted a faint light in the gloom—a light that shone more brightly in contrast to the tanned top of his foot. His palms were small points of light, too, as he stroked his arms in a crawl, tiny flares wriggling up, down, and around, darting to the surface and plunging down. The darkened flesh on the outside of Bruder's hand and on his wrist brightened the contrast of the pale palm. The whirl of light was imperceptibly dim to human eyes, but the shark's rod-rich, cone-poor retina gave it heightened ability to distinguish an object from a contrasting background. No more than a dozen feet away, the shark's brain processed the flickering light as the movement of a fish.
Moving closer, beneath its prey, the shark had seen its quarry in full silhouette, etched by sunlight—outlined, in a glimpse that triggered both excitement and wariness, as not a school of fish but a mammal. After its struggle with Vansant and his rescuers, the shark had good reason to fear the large, slow coastal mammals. Yet perhaps Bruder's shape suggested seal, and the shark considered an investigatory bite. The evidence suggests that the juvenile great white, driven by necessity or insanity, was deliberately stalking undesirable prey for which competition was scarce: human flesh. No sharks in history have been known to travel so far to locate and consume so much human flesh.
Something else about Bruder greatly appealed to the shark. He was alone—no one within hundreds of yards—a prerequisite to the vast majority of shark attacks on humans. A lone swimmer is particularly defenseless. Unlike the shark, for whom every movement is calculated for advantage in the struggle of life and death, the man swam with no protection, no attempt at concealment, no sense of urgency. Charles Bruder swam as if he were alone in the sea, as if he were invincible.
Bruder never saw it coming. The great white's surprise attack was launched with overpowering force from behind. Such drama eludes other man-eaters. The ferocious bull shark angles in slowly with little force compared to the white. In Florida shark attacks, in which white sharks have not been implicated, more than half of initial attacks are reported occurring “with minimum turmoil,” George Burgess reports. More than 92 percent of white shark attacks on humans, however, have been reported to be