Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [76]
Keen to avoid a seal’s thrashing teeth and flailing claws, a great white will often strike, bite, and then back off, circling a short safe distance away while it waits for its prey to expire from shock and loss of blood. This behavior is what allows many surfers who have been hit to survive—provided the shark’s initial attack takes a bigger bite out of their fiberglass board than their torso or limbs. No such option is available to the seal. A deep wound to the body almost invariably leads to death, though if the first bite is shallow or glancing, or primarily takes a piece of tail or flipper, the seal sometimes survives.
Later that morning, we encountered the victim of one such slipshod assault. Right flipper dangling, trailing blood through the water, it was fighting to make it back to the island. All of us on board followed its progress with a mixture of fascination and trepidation. All that blood—there seemed no way the seal, painfully working its way along the surface with only one functional flipper, could escape the notice of the patrolling sharks.
No matter how jaded one is to the indifference of Nature in the wild, no matter how many kills one has witnessed or come across, as humans, it is impossible to look upon such a scene without becoming at least somewhat emotionally involved. We found ourselves rooting for the seal until it was safely back in the shallows that surround the island.
I looked at Chris. “Do you think it’ll live?”
He pondered. “It lost a lot of blood, and I don’t see how that flipper can heal. But believe it or not, we’ve seen seals on the island with worse injuries and they seem healthy enough.” He smiled slightly. “So yes, it’s possible.”
Then he turned away, moved to the stern, and began to put out the surprise.
Cut from a piece of black neoprene, the decoy was life-size. No professional sculptor would have admitted authorship of the crude lure, but Monique assured me it had proven quite effective. The rubbery seal silhouette was tossed off the back of the boat and the line attached to its nose carefully played out. Soon it was bobbing along behind us, easily cresting the small waves stirred up by our wake. At a distance of ten yards or so, it didn’t look very realistic to me. I wondered what it must look like from below.
Chris headed the boat away from the island. Turning to Monique, I’m sure the reservations I was having must have crept into my voice.
“This works?”
“Not every time,” she admitted. “The sharks have to be in the mood, active, and hungry enough to bite.” She nodded sternward. “Just watch the decoy—and cross your fingers.”
I considered. “How often do you have to replace the decoy?”
“A few times each season.” She shrugged. “It can get pretty torn up.”
Her instructions were simple enough. Except that while they explained how we were to look for a striking shark, they failed to explain how we were supposed to photograph it. At least, I had a video camera. Even assuming the decoy did its job, to get a decent still picture of such abrupt, fast-moving, quickly-over-and-done-with action demanded the best efforts of the world’s most skilled wildlife photographers—such as David Doubilet and Amos Nachoum, both of whom owe their classic shots of leaping great whites to the shark-finding skills of Chris and Monique Fallows.
I’m no David Doubilet or Amos Nachoum. All I could do was point the camera in the direction of the decoy, let it run, and cross my fingers—no, couldn’t do that, because I had to hold and position the camera. Off to one side, Ron clutched his still camera and joined me in watching and waiting. So did the professional film team, who despite their thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment could do no better than sit and stare and wait together with the rest of us.
Time