White Shark (11 page)

"But suppose you'd been wrong.
 
Is a shark's life worth as much as
yours?"

"That's not the point; the point is
,
I knew what I had to do.
 
The Bible may say man has dominion over animals, but that doesn't mean
we've got the right to wipe them off the face of the earth."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Max was standing at the end of the pulpit,
Chase behind him on the foredeck, as they passed through a stretch of deep
water between the islands.

Suddenly Max shouted, "Dad!" and
pointed down into the water.

A dolphin had appeared from nowhere and
was riding the bow wave of the boat, coasting effortlessly on the bulb of water
created by the boat's forward motion.
 
They could see its shiny gray back, its pointed snout, the puckered
blowhole in the top if its head.
 
They
could hear sounds — faint clicks and trills — coming from somewhere within the
animal.

"He's talking!
"
Max said excitedly.
 
"That's how
they talk!
 
I wonder what he's
saying?
"

"Probably just
jabbering... maybe calling his buddies over, maybe saying something like
"Whee!"

For several moments, the dolphin's body
barely moved; it let the momentum of the boat carry it along.
 
Then, for some reason, it accelerated,
thrusting its horizontal tail up and down, and pulled ahead of the boat.
 
It slowed, waited for the boat to catch up
and resumed its ride.

"Look at that tail," Chase said.

Max leaned over the pulpit.
 
"What about it?"

"The left fluke.
 
Look at the
scars."

Max looked, and saw five deep white
slashes, an inch or two apart, in the flesh of the tail fluke.
 
"What did that?" he asked.

"This dolphin was attacked by
something," Chase said.
 
"I'd
say he was lucky to get away."

"A shark?"

"No, not a shark, no shark did
that.
 
A shark bite would be
semicircular."

"A killer
whale?"

"No, you'd see punctures or drag
marks from the conical teeth, not sharp slashes like those."
 
Chase frowned.
 
"They look like claw marks, like a
tiger's or a bear's."

"What lives in the ocean and has five
claws?"

"Nothing," Chase said.
 
"Nothing I've ever heard of."

11

The dock had been built in a cove on the
northwest corner of the island, and as the boat puttered up to it, Chase nudged
Max and pointed overhead and smiled:
 
a pair of ospreys were
flying high over the water, searching
for food for their young, which were sheltered safely on nesting poles that
Chase had built.

"Once ospreys were almost wiped
out," he told Max.
 
"For some
reason, their eggs had become so weak they were cracking before the chicks
could hatch.
 
A scientist got to wondering
what was doing it, and he found out:
 
DDT.
 
The pesticide was leaching
into the water and poisoning the food chain, and the fish the ospreys were
eating were destroying their eggs.
 
That
discovery was the beginning of the Environmental Defense Fund.
 
Once they got DDT banned, the ospreys started
coming back.
 
They're in pretty good
shape now."

A one-winged blue heron stood sentinel
over his tidal pool by the dock.

"Hey, Chief," Tall Man called to
the bird,
then
he looked at Chase and said, "The
Chief is pissed.
 
His lunch is
late."

"That's Chief Joseph," Chase
explained to Max.
 
"Some kids found
him over at the borough beach.
 
He had a
broken wing; the vet they took him to said the wing was too badly smashed to
fix, he wanted to put him to sleep, but I said no, just amputate the wing and
let us have him.
 
He's become a real
prima donna.
 
Twice a day he walks around
in the shallows, the rest of the time he stands there and complains that we
don't feed him enough."

"Why'd you name him Chief Joseph?
"
Max asked.

"Tall named him that, after the Nez
Percé chief...
 
you
know,
the battle of
Bear
Paw
Mountains
.
 
He said that with only one wing the heron
reminded him of what Chief Joseph said after the battle:
 
‘I will fight no more forever.’"

"Is the Chief friendly?"

"If you've got food he is.
 
If you don't, he's a perfect pain in the
ass."

Max grinned.
 
"Maybe
I'll
find some special animal, something I can take care of and
name."

"Sure," Chase said.
 
"Maybe you will."

Tall Man guided the boat into its slip between
two smaller craft — a Whaler and a Mako — and Chase hopped onto the dock and
retrieved the lines.
 
He hopped onto the
dock and retrieved the lines.
 
He tossed
the stern and spring lines to Tall Man and returned aboard to show Max how to
cleat the bow line.

Then, while Tall Man went to find food for
the heron, Chase and Max went on up the hill.

*
         
*
         
*
         
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*

Osprey
Island
had been a private family compound for nearly a
hundred years, but over four generations of the family had outgrown the five
houses that local zoning permitted.
 
Periodically, family members had tried to buy one another out, but they
had found themselves caught in a paradox.

Technically, because it consisted of
thirty-five acres of waterfront property, the island was worth a fortune, and
the state and township had taxed it accordingly.
 
Over the past two decades, taxes had doubled,
and doubled again, until finally the cost of running the enclave had approached
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
 
One by one, family members had discovered that for their allotted two
weeks on the island every summer, they were paying more than the cost of
renting a decent house on Nantucket or
Martha's Vineyard
for two months.

They had tried to sell the island, and
discovered that, in fact, it wasn't worth very much at all because nobody —
including the family members themselves — wanted to pay its assessed value.

And so, in a calculated act of revenge
against the local ‘taxocrats’, the family corporation, an entity that existed
solely to run the island, had taken out as large a mortgage as the local bank
would permit —
half the assessed value — had split the proceeds among the
twelve families within the family... and had then dissolved itself and
abandoned the island, leaving its liens, its taxes and its upkeep in the hands
of the bank.

Simon Chase had been welcomed by the bank and the town as the new
owner.
 
He had deep roots in the local
community, and though as a nonprofit entity the Institute might not pay local
taxes, some of Chase's projects might generate substantial revenue for the
townspeople.
 
For example, he might find
a way to bring the shellfishing industry back.
 
For years, the beds of clams, scallops, mussels around Waterboro had
been so badly polluted that no one was permitted to dig, eat or sell any of the
mollusks.
 
Perhaps Chase could find a way
to clean up the beds.

Local merchants knew, furthermore, that the Institute wouldn't be
competition for any of them.
 
And
finally, Chase's grand plans for the island promised to bless the area with
what it needed most:
 
jobs.

Defense cutbacks had slashed jobs from the largest employer in
southeastern
Connecticut
, Electric Boat in
Groton
, and the ripple
effect from EB and other damaged companies had decimated service
industries.
 
Restaurants and grocery
stores, saloons and gift shops had shut their doors, to be replaced here and
there by antique stores and art galleries.
 
Waterboro was being gentrified and ossified, and it was hoped that the
Institute would be able to restore life to the community.
 
Hundreds of people would be employed to build
it, wire it and plumb it, and when it was completed, dozens more would find
full-time jobs there or in one of the many businesses that serviced it.

For a year, it had seemed that the dream might come true.
 
Chase had taken a course in preparing grant
applications, and he had received a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to buy boats
and basic scientific equipment.
 
He had
also received preliminary approval for grants for projects involving endangered
species, commercial fishing and medical research from the federal government,
the state of
Connecticut
and several private foundations.
 
One of
the grants would have enabled him to study the curious fact that sharks, which
had no bones, were immune to both cancer and arthritis and could exert
phenomenal bite pressure — as much as twenty tons per square inch — with a jaw
made entirely of cartilage.
 
Another
would have let him contribute to studies testing the remote possibility that
powdered shark cartilage contained cancer-killing properties.
 
Doctors working with a control group in
Cuba
had
claimed a 40 percent reduction in tumors among patients who were given high
doses of the cartilage.

And then, in late 1995, the bottom had fallen out of the economy.
 
The national debt had grown to six trillion
dollars; the President and the Congress, obsessed with reelection, had refused
to make the hard decisions necessary to deal with the budget deficit.
 
The Germans and the Japanese and the Arabs,
who had supported the vaunted American way of life for more than a dozen years,
looked across the water and, disgusted at long last, proclaimed the
United States
effectively extinct as a world power and pulled their money out.

Inflation had begun to soar; interest rates were reaching double digits;
the stock market had dropped a thousand points and so far showed no signs that
it had bottomed out; unemployment nationwide was 11 percent; one family in four
now lived below the poverty line.

In the space of a single week, every one of Chase's grants had been
refused.
 
New construction was the last
thing he had money for.
 
He could barely
pay his staff of three, could barely feed himself.
 
Had he not been successful in obtaining
tax-exempt status for the Institute, he would have had to follow his
predecessors and abandon the island.

And he might yet have to pick up and go, if his last roll of the dice
came up craps.

Months ago he had received a call from a Dr. Amanda Macy in
California
.
 
He knew her by reputation, had read a story
about her in some journal or other.
 
She
was doing pioneering research in the use of trained sea lions to videotape gray
whales in the wild.
 
Notoriously
skittish, gray whales resisted being photographed by divers, and even when a
diver succeeded in capturing a few images, there was no way to determine if the
whales' behavior was natural or skewed in some way because of the presence of
the diver.
 
Macy's theory was that since
sea lions often accompany whales in the wild, the whales would tolerate them
without altering their behavior, so she had trained sea lions to carry video
cameras as they swam with the whales.
 
According to the report, she was already rewriting much of science's
knowledge of gray whales.

Now she wanted to try the same technique with another species of whale,
the Atlantic humpback.
 
She had heard
about the new institute and had read some of Chase's papers on sharks.
 
She knew he had boats, guts and experience
with large deep-water animals.
 
She knew
the humpbacks passed just to the east of the island every summer on their way
north.
 
Would he be willing, she
wondered, to have her and her team of sea lions come to the island for three
months, to take them to sea and help her research... for a fee of, say, ten
thousand dollars a month?