Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [34]
We looked at one another. Nobody said anything. We were eager and anxious in equal measure. The captain nodded, gratified that we understood.
Cameras were prepared, checked, and passed sternward in silence. One by one, we slipped into our bc’s (bouyancy compensators—the gear-laden vests you see on scuba divers), hefted our tanks, and executed giant-stride entries off the edge of the stern dive platform. The instant I hit the warm water, I let go of my mask and regulator and looked down.
There they were: three big, husky, gorgeous silvertips, circling effortlessly directly beneath us. No gray reef sharks these, no nervous little resident whitetips. Had they been great whites . . .
Had they been great whites, of course, no one would have been jumping into the water.
We sank down, everyone trying to look in three dimensions at once. As we descended, more silvertips arrived. Five, six—within minutes of our hitting the water, there were eight of them carouseling around and among us. Our presence was noted—you could see the golden eyes with their black pupils following your every move. But otherwise, we were ignored. Edible we might be, but our shapes were all wrong, as was our smell. Shark wary of human and human wary of shark, together we infused the ridgelike reef with an almost palpable aura of mutual respect. With each diver locating a place where there was little or no live coral, we settled down and waited for the show to begin.
When dumped over the side of the Tiata, the frozen-solid contents of the chum barrel made a much bigger splash than I expected. Recognizing the by-now familiar sound, the sharks instantly homed in on the slowly descending and rapidly defrosting cylindrical mass and began to tear it to pieces. The faster it thawed in the eighty-three-degree water, the more swiftly it was consumed. Not every shark attacked the sinking glob simultaneously. They were excited and somewhat agitated, but methodical in their assault. There was no panic among them, no fighting, and certainly no “feeding frenzy.”
After a while, two things became clear to those of us looking on: The sharks were in no great hurry to feed or had already consumed a share of the spoils, and they were quite comfortable with our proximity. Perhaps more so than several of us with them. During the briefing, we had been told (warned?) that having become acclimated to the presence of divers, they might approach us more closely than was customary for their species. Also that they might be just as likely to eat their fill and then swim off into the blue.
We were not told, however, just how close they might come.
Having a brawny eight-foot shark pass within arm’s reach of you is one thing when you are in a protective cage and the shark is outside. The feeling is utterly different when there are no bars separating you from one of Nature’s most perfect predators. The shark’s eye looks at you, you look back at the shark. It is not an intelligent eye like that of a mammal or a cephalopod. It is not cold and unfeeling so much as it is alien, otherworldly. You realize as you meet its gaze that there is something going on behind that eye, but whatever it is will remain forever beyond your ken. Above all, there is an overriding sense of awareness of your presence. You are being speculated upon. You are being sized up. To a shark, you can be one of two things: a threat, or food. Above all, you realize that this is not a movie, the shark is not an actor or a computer-generated image or an animatronic puppet being propelled by a motor and directed by offscreen handlers, and you are not at home sitting on your couch munching popcorn while watching the Discovery Channel.
A shark can strike as fast as a snake. This is a fact better understood in the abstract than in reality.
So beautiful, so graceful. The idea of killing such a magnificent animal just for