Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [61]
After examining Bruder's body, Nichols held a small conference with reporters in Spring Lake to discuss his findings. To the surprise of the newspapermen, the ichthyologist declared it was not a shark that had killed the young man. Dr. Nichols's leading suspect was Orcinus orca, the killer whale. Bruder's legs had been torn off in dull, jagged cuts, wounds that recalled to Nichols the enormous blunt conical teeth with which the orca rips the lips and tongues from the great whales.
Nichols's choice in 1916 was not surprising. Since antiquity, the killer whale had been reputed to be a man-eater, a voracious, merciless predator that killed everything that lived in the sea. Spanish whalers in the eighteenth century christened the species “killer whale” after witnessing schools of orca descending upon and killing other whales, like a pack of wolves. It was only in the 1960s and '70s, after killer whales were trained to perform at Sea World, that scientists began to appreciate the orca as the smartest member of the dolphin family, and to accept the fact that there are no documented cases of an orca ever killing a man.
The killer whale, Nichols told reporters in Spring Lake, was called orca and was “commonly 30 feet long” with “short, stumpy teeth which are very efficacious in dragging things under the surface”—which explained why Bruder was repeatedly pulled beneath the waves. The orca kills the giant blue whale, the largest creature on earth, Dr. Nichols pointed out, and could easily destroy a man if it chose. “It is not settled that the killer whale attacks humans,” concluded The New York Times, “but Mr. Nichols thought there was as much reason to suppose it was a killer whale as to suppose it was a shark.”
Arrival of a Man-Eater
Far from shore the great white moved into deeper waters. In the literature of shark attacks, men often describe man-eaters as enraged, snapping at anything near: small fish, fishing lines, buoys. But the white shark now was likely doing what it always did: swimming steadily forward, dorsal fin high, searching for the next meal. All of Charles Bruder would certainly have sated the shark, but the legs left it hungry, imparted slightly more urgency to the search that never ended. If the attack on Bruder taught it anything—it was capable of crude learning, and attack was its only subject—it was that the mammals of the coast were vulnerable but not easy prey.
The great white had been frightened off by White and Anderson's lifeboat, which it perceived as a bigger predator, or it was simply spooked by a large foreign object, which sharks hastily avoid. Had the fish been mature, eighteen feet and three tons, neither boats nor men, oars, bullets, nor a larger shark would have stopped the feeding. Had the surfmen not rescued Bruder, the shark may have soared almost completely out of the water and plunged down, jaw agape, on the young man, taking him deep in the water. According to A. Peter Klimley's research in the 1990s of Carcharodon carcharias attacks on pinnipeds, white sharks carry struggling prey as far as three quarters of a mile away from the point of attack to allow the prey to bleed out. Then the shark can feed without distraction.
Now the great white moved off the coast of Spring Lake, deeply irritated, electric with hunger. Yet the shark had entered the only region of the world where a white shark population existed without the abundance of seals and sea lions, its favorite foods, to sustain it. To a great white, a man is a bony, unpalatable, low-fat choice, distressingly muscular. Enormous quantities of fat, scientists believe, fuel the great white's energy needs. The preference is striking: Whites feeding on a whale carcass have been witnessed carefully stripping away the blubbery layers.
Survival for a young