Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [94]
A shark attack on a human being, like the crash of a modern airliner, evolves from an unlikely sequence of rare events, and rescue attempts, too, are governed by chains of extraordinary occurrence. So it was that Matawan lawyer and developer Jacob Lefferts, at thirty-four one of the most prominent men in town, was motoring downcreek in his boat, issuing shark warnings, when he witnessed the Dunn attack. And not far behind him, in the Skud, came Captain Cottrell.
Lefferts, fully clothed, dove into the creek toward the attacking shark, while at the same time Michael Dunn swam to his brother's aid. Man and boy grabbed Joseph Dunn and attempted to wrestle him from the mouth of the shark. The shark clamped its huge teeth, but somehow Joseph and his rescuers made it as far as the dock ladder. “As he drew himself up on the brick company's pier, with only his left leg trailing in the water, the shark struck at that,” The New York Times reported. “Its teeth shut over the leg above and below the knee and much of the flesh was torn away.”
At last the shark let go of Dunn, and his companions dragged him, yelling, up onto the pier. The boy's wounds appeared ghastly. After making hasty attempts to stop the bleeding with makeshift bandages, Lefferts, Captain Cottrell, and Michael Dunn lowered the stricken boy into Cottrell's motorboat.
As the Skud led the rescue party upcreek, Captain Cottrell noticed how far the tide had gone out. It was only the shallowness of the creek at the brickyard docks, he thought, that had prevented the shark from swiftly making off with Joseph Dunn in its jaws. It had been pure luck that he had reached the boy in time. In the old days, when the big boats went all the way up to Matawan, before the creek silted in, the shark would have had a deep and clear path to the bay. Racing back along the S curves of the creek, looking down at the tattered and bloodied limb of the small boy in his boat, Thomas Cottrell wondered if luck would matter.
Fleeing for Safety
The shark had vanished from human view, camouflaged by the dark creek water, leaving no trace of its presence but the distant shouts of men and a small wake washing diluted blood to the banks. Releasing huge stores of energy summoned during its attacking frenzy, the shark was fleeing for safety. It did not know fear but responded to danger, and certainly there was threat from the men and boats on the creek.
The attacks on Stanley Fisher and Lester Stilwell had not sated the shark for long; more than ten pounds of human flesh was a small meal. The shark's life consisted of taking ten, twenty, forty pounds of fish in a single meal and moving ever onward for more, never knowing when the next meal would come. All that had changed was that the meals now included humans. The brackish water weakened the shark, and the confines of the creek were disorienting. So the big fish hurtled downcreek, seeking a return to that open world, the world of the sea.
Yet everywhere it traveled in this small space, driven by hunger, it sensed the lure of prey. Far ahead in the creek, pulses exploded underwater, sounds and scents that shortened the closing distance. Above in the deepening sky the moon was wheeling toward an eclipse, waxing and intensifying its brightness and its pull on tides and fish and the predatory instincts of sharks. The shark made a series of adjustments in the set of its pectoral fins and the thrust of its tail, hunting now in a frenetic state.
To See Its Body Drawn Up on the Shore
At four-thirty the sky was tinted with hints of russet and gold yet still bright with the intensity of the longest summer days. Shadows lengthened along the creek, but the views of the surface were clear for the men with rifles standing in the tall grass. Matawan Constable Mulsoff had come down to the creek with a police detective from Keyport. With a nod from the constable, the group turned away from the old steamboat docks, climbed into town, and filed onto Main Street.
On the