Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [4]
Sometimes, in the dark of night, when I lie in bed at home with the television off and my wife calm and asleep beside me, I close my eyes just a little, and I can experience once again that moment of predator-and-prey eye contact as precise and clear as when it occurred in the baking forest of Kanha. So beautiful. So unique. And not a little soul-shivering.
I can kill you if I want.
II
THINGS YOU NEVER FORGET
South Australia, January 1991
THERE ARE SOME THINGS IN life that never escape your memory no matter how much your other reminiscences fade. Your first date. Your first love. If you are an artist or musician or writer, your first sale. Your first home of your own.
Your first great white shark.
Tellers of tall tales have been inventing inimical creatures since before Frankenstein. Rocs and griffins. Dragons and centaurs. In the course of forty years of writing, I’ve concocted one or two myself. While researching the impossible for your fiction, you inevitably come across the most extreme examples of what our own planet has actually produced. In today’s increasingly civilized, urbanized, Internet-connected world, there are not many creatures that we fear might actually eat us—the fear of being eaten alive being among humankind’s oldest terrors. Among these more ominous representatives of the animal kingdom, Carcharodon carcharias occupies a place very close to the ultimate.
Carcharodon is not the largest predator in the sea. That honor belongs to the sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus. Next in size comes the orca, or killer whale. But save for rutting bulls, sperm whales are easygoing leviathans whose principal interest lies in consuming large, soft squid rather than tiny, bony humans. Meanwhile, show business has Shamu-ed the orca into a cuddly giant squeaky toy not dissimilar from an oversize black-and-white seagoing puppy.
Furthermore, there are no confirmed records of a sperm whale or an orca deliberately attacking and killing a human being in order to eat it, whereas Carcharodon has been known, however mistakenly, to make a meal out of the occasional human swimmer, surfer, or spearfisher. The great white generates an atavistic fear in humans no dozen whales come close to matching. The fact that it is also a stealth hunter only adds to the terror it engenders. It is the oceanic equivalent of the clutching hand in a horror movie reaching out from the dark to grab the unsuspecting victim from behind.
As a writer hoping to invent terrifying aliens and ravening otherworldly monsters, I reasoned, it would behoove me to take stock of the nearest actual equivalent the earth has to offer. While it’s easy enough to go to the zoo and observe land-based carnivores, the distancing that results, the presence of moats and heavy bars separating observer from the observed, strongly mitigates against the intensity of the experience. Not to mention the fact that most of the time the imprisoned lions and tigers and bears—oh my—seem utterly disinterested in their eager human visitors. In contrast, I had read that the great white shark tends not to be disinterested in those humans who dare to immerse themselves in its element. Quite the contrary. In January 1991, I set off for the wild coast of South Australia to find out.
At the hotel in Sydney, my fellow expedition members had already begun to arrive. I looked forward to meeting them with more than casual interest, since it was not inconceivable that at some point in the immediate future my continued well-being and/or my life might depend on their respective underwater skills and good judgment.
The first to appear was Brent Mills, youthful scion of a famous family-run portrait photography company based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Brent was open, cheerful, and friendly, like an overgrown Boy Scout who had been blessed with an outsized allowance. His home back in Chattanooga looked like a bombed-out Kodak warehouse, overflowing with more photographic bells, whistles, and gewgaws than I imagine could exist in the feverish dreams of any would-be Ansel Adams.
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