Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [56]
ONE NIGHT THE moon was bright and full and huge, and its light sparkled and made the calm sea glow. The sharks, our daily companions, departed, leaving us with a quiet evening “at home.” We bailed in the usual water—our blanket—to warm our bodies as we huddled tightly together.
A few hours later our tranquillity was rudely shattered by a thump on the bottom of the raft so powerful that our bodies winced with pain and we were lifted a few inches off the ocean surface. Stunned and frightened, I looked over the side and followed a huge fin as it circled the raft. When it came alongside again, the monster’s tail flipped sideways, sending a wave of cold water over us. Then I got a good look at our visitor: a huge bluish gray shark maybe twenty feet long. A great white.
I put my hands on Mac and Phil and whispered, “Lay low and don’t move or make a sound.” Again, we were hit from below. Again, his tail inundated us with water. Hardly an accident, the shark’s purpose was to stir whatever he suspected might be alive in the raft and find out if it was edible.
We were petrified but managed to stay quiet and still as the great white repeated his routine for maybe an hour, though it seemed like half the night. Then, as mysteriously as he had appeared, the shark gave up, dove underneath us, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Mac, Phil, and I took deep breaths, and the air in our lungs never felt better. But the next morning Mac acted strangely different. Quieter. No, resigned. The great white had scared him good, and I think that was the turning point for him. Mac began to fade.
I REMEMBER SPEAKING to a men’s club in San Diego after the war and telling the story of the great white. A marine biologist criticized me. He said great whites were cold-water sharks and would not leave their natural northern feeding waters full of seals and sea lions for the warm southern Pacific. I couldn’t argue with him and from then on referred to the shark simply as a “huge denizen of the deep.” But as of February 2002, almost sixty years later, new research confirmed that great whites are, in fact, world travelers. Tagged, they have been tracked to the ocean off Baja California, Hawaii, and other tropical waters. They spend as much as five months a year in the open ocean and dive as deep as two thousand feet. Warm-blooded, like humans, they enjoy basking in the temperate waters of the Pacific, and I know I was right when I say one visited us on the raft that night long ago.
ON THE THIRTY-SECOND day I was still patching the raft, stopping to pump only about once every fifteen minutes, when Mac quit moving and sank into a daze. Was he just despondent? Or starved? Or both? He’d had as much food as Phil or I, sometimes more; but now his will to live and perhaps his body’s ability to use nourishment had failed. Each of us probably weighed no more than seventy-five pounds—too light even to make a satisfying snack for the sharks that had relentlessly stalked our raft. Our flesh was almost transparent, our bones plainly visible. But unlike Phil or me, Mac had finally all but shut down.
He asked Phil, “Can I have a drink of your water?”
Phil said no, which is what he should have said. We had about a mouthful apiece. The guy was almost dead, why give him water? Then he asked me, and like an idiot, I gave him a drink. It was a dying man’s request and I did not deny it.
The next afternoon Mac stirred a bit and asked questions about death, questions for which I had no good answers. Then he asked the only one that really mattered: “Am I going to die?” That was it: ‘ “Am I going to die?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking it would be unkind to promise him further agony. “I believe you’ll die tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” he agreed. “I think you’re right.”
Finally, a few hours