The shark was a torpedo with teeth. She swam the seas in search prey. Her preference was dolphin meat, and she often pursued her quarry into the surf zone.
Bottlenose dolphins are wiser creatures than the great fish. They knew about her presence often before she knew of theirs. All she could do is slip around where the dolphins might be hunting and hope that one slipped up.
On this day, she was working them close to the crystal sand beach. Every time, she thought she might get the drop on a dolphin, another dolphin would raise an alarm and they would swim around her, mobbing her, almost taunting her, until she slipped back into the depths.
Hunger was starting to take its toll, and now she began to work the surf once again. Her black eyes noted something whitish pink and smooth suspended in the rushing water.
Her shark brain asked “Could that be something to eat?”
And she swam over and tested the pink thing in her mouth. When she bit down, the blood gushed everywhere. But the meat had no fatty taste to it, so she let go when she felt the quarry slap her.
She then swam back into the depths, scenting the water again for that delicious odor of dolphin.
What she had not known on this first sultry day of May on this desolate beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks is that she had bitten a person, the son of a wealthy corporate lawyer.
The young man screamed in terror. He had been wading alone in the surf, hoping to make communion with the local pod of dolphins. He felt that thing brush up against him and then the hard pressure of the bite. Then the flowing of red blood.
His right butt cheek down to his right thigh was hanging open and bleeding, and how he managed to swim with that much blood gushing from his body no one really could fathom.
He made it to the foamy line where the white water splashes on the crystal sand. He landed hard on the compacted earth and groaned in agony.
His girlfriend found him five minutes later as she came down to walk their obese golden retriever on their private beach. He was sent to the hospital. Hundreds of stitches and blood transfusion were his treatment.
In week, he knew that he’d met the sea monster and had lived.
The biting had happened. The great torpedo fish claimed a victim without knowing anything other than she’d bitten into something quite disgusting.
And she was two hundred miles away when the young man’s family finally got together and took stock of the situation.
The father believed he should sell the beach house and buy a nice cabin on a quiet mountain lake, were the largemouth bass rose in the April sun and the ducks sat fat upon the shore.
The mother believed they should keep the house at the beach, but under the condition that no one ever go into the water deeper than the waist.
The young man had no thoughts on the matter. He had not expected to be bitten. It felt like something so random, so strange, that he didn’t know what to think of it all.
Yes, the bite had harmed his hide. But he was going to live, and although he felt physical trauma, he was oddly at peace with the whole thing.
The shark had bitten in error, not in malice. He had seen enough nature documentaries to know this fact, and the odds of it happening again where somewhere in the winning the lottery category.
But the victim can try to reason with those who see the aftermath and still not be able to assuage their concerns.
The father had called up the department of fisheries in hopes that he a posse could be assembled to wipe out such large sharks from the waters. When he found that the great whites were protected in these waters, he was filled with bellicose anger.
He paid for that spit of sand, and now, the government was telling him he could not protect his property and family from sharks?
He called everyone he knew in the world of government. They listened as intently to him as they would anyone with potential to flip out some campaign money, but nothing was done.
The laws were the laws, and what’s more, every single expert told him that the shark was long gone.
Man has this odd tendency to take personally the banal violence of nature. The young man had come to the realization that this was not a personal attack at all, but just an accident of predation. The father never could accept this reality.
He put the beach house up for sale, but the sell did not go through until the July of the next year.
The young man didn’t tell his father what he was going to do, but on the last weekend hte house remained in his family’s hands, the young man went to the beach. He slipped on his rash guard and wandered into the surf.
He hoped to make final contact with the dolphins. Yes, that was certainly a goal.
But he also wanted to make peace with the sea monsters, the ones that still stubbornly hold onto their domains despite ourselves.
The dolphins came at high tide to cavort among the surf and hunt baitfish. He felt their echolocation against his skin once again. He felt at peace in the saltwater.
And he felt the true humility of a human in the sea. The ocean suffers the onslaught of our civilization in such horrific ways, but it still exists undominated, uncontrolled.
And that briny wilderness is an affront to those who worship in our domination, but it beguiles those who see it as the last redoubt of unblemished life.
And the young man felt that sublime beguilement and felt the warm water rushing around him.
And he then left the sea to the ancient struggle of dolphins and sharks, which he hoped would go on long past his mortal existence as a man on this earth.
