Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [37]
Largely because of the plethora of bloodthirsty television documentaries in which they are featured, people rarely, if ever, associate sharks with humor. Of the few artists who regularly draw amusement from the actions of Carcharodon and its relatives, the most notable is Jim Toomey of the widely syndicated cartoon strip Sherman’s Lagoon. In this he was preceded, frequently and to much mirth, by the inimitable Gary Larson’s The Far Side. In addition to sharks, Larson extracted dry and frequently skewed humor from both the animal and plant kingdoms, places where humans were often reduced to little more than bipedal straight lines. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen, and enjoyed, every cartoon Gary Larson ever drew.
I never thought I’d find myself acting in one. . . .
* * *
West Australia, April 1992
MORE THAN HALF THE POPULATION of Australia lives in or near its five largest cities. Not for nothing is the rest of the country called the Outback. The Outback itself is broken down into smaller, though still enormous, subregions with names of their own. The Top End, for example, refers to the finger of land that points toward New Guinea. In the vast northwest of the continent lie the districts of the Pilbara and the Kimberley. An area the size of Great Britain, the Kimberley is home to barely enough people to populate a good-size American or European town. It’s an enormous, often dry, sometimes cyclone-swept region of spinifex scrub, exotic animals, descendents of the continent’s first human settlers, spectacular sheer-sided gorges, unique insects, and a rugged rust-red coastline that is as magnificent as it is unpopulated.
We were heading north along this coast after having paused to photograph and film the famed whale sharks of Ningaloo Reef. The purpose of the voyage was to allow Brent Mills of Nature Films (based in Chattanooga, Tennessee) to produce a documentary on Rodney Fox. Having previously written two articles for National Geographic magazine on this little-known and visually dramatic part of Australia, Rodney wanted to revisit the area without the pressure of having to write to a deadline. This coincided neatly with Brent’s desire to make a documentary about him, and so the expedition was born.
I was invited to participate because—well, to this day I’m not exactly sure why I was invited to participate. Partly, I think, it was because Rodney and I got along well. Partly, because he knew I shared his enthusiasm for such exploration. And partly, perhaps, because on a previous journey he may have sensed that I can get along with most anyone under nearly any circumstances. The latter is a facility not to be undervalued when one is to be packed into a too-small, inadequate boat with a bunch of strangers for an un-air-conditioned tropical journey of a month’s duration.
The rest of the production team was a decidedly mixed bunch. There was a professional underwater photographer, much of whose previous work had been in, amusingly, Antarctica. Joining Rodney was his remarkable wife, Kay. The crew consisted of the boat’s owner and captain plus his irrepressible mate and all-around deckhand. Brent Mills was joined by a good friend of his, Robbie Lauren Kyle Mantooth, scion of another notable Chattanooga family. One of the kindest and most beautiful young women I have ever met, she was also the expedition’s official still photographer. Not long after the expedition, she moved to Hollywood and willingly surrounded herself with carnivores of a species whose predatory habits and lifestyle it is not within the scope of this particular book to describe. Looking back over the years, I have a feeling that deep down she was more at home with the fish.
As for Brent, through no fault of his own, he was a representative of a subgroup of humanity that I often find it difficult to deal with: people who inherit money. However, in his case, a more amiable and almost self-consciously self-effacing