Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [84]
As Renny Cartan left the creek to get his wounds bandaged, he shouted at his friends to get out of the water, but his warning fell on deaf ears. After Renny left the swimming hole, Johnson Cartan was swimming happily along the surface of the creek, his friends nearby. They shouted and splashed and jumped from the dock, unaware that sonic cues were now exploding along the narrow banks of the creek to a great white shark, a shark that had taken the measure of the noisy mammals and was slashing now through the brackish water, highly stimulated.
The next morning, Wednesday, July 12, as ketches and small craft moved slowly on the creek, Thomas V. Cottrell, a retired sea captain, set out from his house at the mouth of the creek for his customary walk.
Captain Cottrell strode the creek with a prodigious energy for his fifty-eight years, making a pace that was the envy of his contemporaries, the few still above sea level. But that morning he was a bit more excited than usual, and excitement wasn't good for him. The old captain was an incorrigible storyteller and jokester, a man of a hundred friends and a thousand tales, who never troubled his wife or his seven children with his heart disease. It was known he wasn't well, but the captain had plenty of years left, everyone figured, and he kept his health problems to himself. He had the redoubtable strength of a man who made friends easily and was an admired local citizen.
As the captain strolled along the creek that morning, the sun was high and water lapped softly on the banks, and he found himself staring at the brown water more intently than usual. The captain had heard of the boy who cried wolf the day before, about something in the creek that bit or scratched him—the boy's aunt was Sarah Cottrell Johnson—and he felt bad for the boy, and a bit curious over what manner of fish Renny Cartan had seen.
No one monitored the waterway like Captain Cottrell. He lived in Brown's Point at the mouth of the creek, in the handsome old port town of Keyport, whose Victorian homes overlooked the bay. His walks took him out of town and over hill and meadow and down dusty roads bordered with split-rail fences and views of silos and horses and cows. He strode as if people were too numerous and the world too small, as if, having spent the prime of life sailing the seven seas in clipper ships, he couldn't shake the urge to stretch his legs, whistling as he went his favorite song, “Beautiful Island of Somewhere”:
Somewhere the day is longer,
Somewhere the task is done;
Somewhere the heart is stronger,
Somewhere the guardian won.
His walks always took him back to the creek. The captain had been born in Matawan in 1857, when it was still called Middletown, named for its position on the creek, once plied by steamers and paddleboats. As a young man, he had moved to Brown's Point at the mouth of the creek, where the Cottrell clan had built the first boats on the bay. He was of a prideful, seafaring family, and if a drawback of a garrulous old sea captain was a want of fresh stories, Thomas Cottrell would presently have that problem solved. For as he took his constitutional on that morning, walking over the new trolley bridge spanning Matawan Creek, he saw something for which neither man nor God, tide nor typhoon, had prepared him.
Rippling up the muddy waters of the creek, toward the bridge, was a large dark-gray shape trailing a long, pointed dorsal fin. In the moment it took for shock and disbelief to subside, Captain Cottrell recognized it as a shark, a big one, no different from the many he'd spied in the Pacific and Atlantic and Indian Oceans, winding slowly up the tidal creek past fields of oat and barley, chickens and dairy cows.
As the shark swam closer to him, it loomed bigger still, a wide, gray-brown fish, possibly nine or ten feet long,