Read Online Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley - Free Book Online Page B

black blood no longer billowed around me but trailed behind. The pain in my leg had waned, and my foot seemed to be working, which meant that no major tendon had been cut.
    I passed a hundred feet, then ninety, eighty … things were lighter now, visibility had returned, and I could see the rays of the sun angling down from the shimmering surface. Everything would be okay, after all. There was noth—
    The shark came straight for me, emerging quickly from the blue haze, its fins forming a triangle of lopsided symmetry because of the slight downward curve of the extraordinary pectorals.
    Ten, maybe fifteen feet from me it veered away, banked downward, and passed through the trail of blood leaking from my ankle. Convinced now of the source of the savory scent it had picked up from far away, it rose again, leveled off before me, and began the final, almost ritual, stage of the hunt.
    Because seawater acts as a refractive lens, sizes are difficult to ascertain under water. The generally accepted rule is that animals appear to be roughly a third again as large as they actually are. This shark looked ten or twelve feet long, which meant that, in fact, it was probably seven to nine feet long. But “in fact” didn’t matter to me; all I cared about was that the closer this shark came, the bigger it looked, and near to me or far, it was very big.
    It circled me twice, perhaps twenty feet away, establishing for itself a pattern and perimeter of comfort, and then began gradually to close the distance between us. With each circle, it shrank the perimeter by six inches, then by twelve, then fifteen.
    I raised my broomstick and held it out like a sword, waving its blunt tip back and forth to impress upon the shark that I was a living being armed with the weapons and determination to defend myself.
    Longimanus
was not impressed. It circled closer, staying just beyond the reach of the broomstick. I could count the tiny black dots on its snout, the celebrated ampullae of Lorenzini, which carry untold megabytes of information, chemical and electromagnetic, to the shark’s control center.
    The mouth hung open about an inch, enough to give me a glimpse of the teeth in the lower jaw.
    As I turned with the shark, trying to maintain some upward movement, I watched the eye—always the eye—for movement of the nictitating membrane, the signal that the threat display was ending and the attack itself beginning.
    It quickened its pace, circling me faster than I could turn, so I began to kick backward as well as upward, to increase the distance between us.
    I jabbed randomly with the broomstick, never touching flesh, never causing
longimanus
even to flinch.
    I glanced upward and saw the bottom of the boat, a squat, gray black shape perhaps fifty feet away, forty-five, forty …
    The shark appeared from behind me, a pectoral fin nearly touching my shoulder. The mouth opened, the membrane flickered upward, covering most of the eye, the upper jaw dropped down and forward, and the head turned toward me.
    I remember seeing the tail sweep once, propelling
longimanus
forward.
    I remember bending backward to avoid the gaping mouth.
    I remember the ghostly, yellowish white eyeball, and I remember stabbing at it with the broomstick.
    I
don’t
remember hitting, instead, the roof of the shark’s mouth, but that’s what must have happened, for the next thing I knew, the shark bit down on the broomstick, shook its head back and forth to tear it loose, and, when that failed, lunged with its powerful tail, intent on fleeing with its prize.
    The broomstick, of course, was attached to my wrist, and I was suddenly dragged through the water like a rag doll, flopping helplessly behind the (by now) frightened shark, which had taken a test bite from a strange, bleeding prey and now found itself dragging a great rubber
thing
through the water.
    Breathing became difficult; I was running out of air.
    I tried to peel the rawhide thong