by Tim Cahill
Great whites are possessed of a nictitating membrane, a leathery eyelid that comes up from below and protects the shark’s eyes from the thrashing death throes of its prey. The membrane is pure white, so the shark rose like a particularly vivid nightmare, with gleaming rows of teeth and spectral white demon’s eyes completely devoid of pupils.
Because of the membrane covering its eyes, the shark was effectively blind at the moment of the munch. Low tugged the rope and gently pulled the bait toward the boat as the great white moved blindly forward, mouth open in a behavior Frederick called “gaping.”
“I’ll bring him right up to the cage,” Low said. “Get in.”
“You get knocked out of the cage,” Frederick said, “swim down.”
“Down?”
“They hit things struggling on the surface.”
And so, cradling Louise’s second camera, and biting down hard on my regulator, I dropped into the cage, where everything turned gray-green and I was looking at the world through a mesh of chicken wire, while Louise stood at the slitted window in the cage, her camera at the ready. Say I lost the regulator: How long could I stay below the surface of the sea, with a great white shark circling above? Two minutes? How long is a great white shark’s attention span?
And then I saw the shark, perhaps forty feet in the distance, a dim abstraction, like a notion of grace half formed in the mind, something brilliant but hazily apprehended. There was a curious feeling of dread without vulnerability, as in a dream.
Louise and I stayed underwater for perhaps half an hour, and the shark circled back a few times, always gliding off at meditative distances. Occasionally, chilled and shivering uncontrollably, the two of us rose to the surface, and sat, somewhat awkwardly, on the floats set about the interior of the cage, so that we were still surrounded by the wire that rose above the surface of the sea.
“How big was that guy?” I asked Frederick. I figured twenty feet.
“About eleven feet,” he said. “Weighed maybe fifteen hundred pounds.”
“I thought it was bigger.”
“Adrenaline magnification,” Frederick explained.
“Biggest one caught around in these waters,” Low added, “was just over twenty feet. Biggest one I’ve seen here in Shark Alley was about seventeen feet. Weighed probably four thousand pounds.”
We saw six sharks that day. There were two other shark operators, with boats full of paying customers, anchored no more than a stone’s throw from us. While that felt a little crowded, the next day was a circus.
Here we are, four out of six operators, all of us anchored side by side in Shark Alley, in the one area just off the shipwreck where the water is relatively flat. There is, however, enough surge and surf that the boats are swinging widely on their anchor lines and banging, one against the other, so we are pushing boats off the Dive Cats with long poles, which is not something one really wants to worry about a whole hell of a lot because there are three (count ’em, three) great white sharks in the water, circling the boats, and there are three cages, containing five divers, in the water, not to mention three scuba divers, who are swimming around just under our boat. These divers are not in a cage. One of them, an American scientist named Mark Marks, habitually swims with great whites in this exposed fashion. Other operators think this is dangerous, and feel that when he’s eventually killed, business will suffer.
Marks is working with a French film crew, and at the moment, he is acting as a safety diver for the cameraman, who, when looking through the lens of his camera, cannot see sharks coming at him from odd angles. Marks hovers above the Frenchman, holding a weighted, three-foot-long board carved into the shape of a killer whale. The board is painted with the orca’s distinctive black-and-white markings. Killer whales are one of the few creatures in the sea that might prey on sharks. Even great whites.
Anchored next to the French party was a small, seventeen-foot boat, boasting twin 75-horsepower Yamahas. Counting the captain, there are ten people aboard. The swells had diminished to a mere twelve feet, but this is the Cape of Storms, the Cape of Souls, and the boat, rated for six passengers, was dangerously overloaded. Low told me he had quit work for a rival shark operator because he tolerated such conditions. “I think people will die here,” Frederick said. “Not from the sharks, maybe. But for sure, a boat will go down. An overloaded boat, like that one.”
I glanced over at the wreckage on Geyser Rock, and thought about trying to swim the fifty yards, boat to shore. The boat closest to Geyser Rock has deployed a cage whose floats are positioned on the top rim so that when the divers, two American men in the thirties, surfaced to the warmth of the sun, they sat on the floats, with their butts hanging out in the shark-infested water. Occasionally Frederick or Low would yell over helpful advice, like, “For Christ’s sake, get in the cage, there’re sharks coming your way.”
Having seen any number of sharks rise two or three feet out of the water to take seal bait, I found this cage just a little scary. A white shark could easily rise up and put his great conical head in the cage, where the animal would be trapped, swimming around like some doofus at a party with a lampshade on his head. Except, of course, there would be divers crouching at the bottom of the cage. This scenario is not at all fanciful. It has happened. The photographer cowering at the bottom of the cage got a lot of good pictures and was not injured. But what an advertisement for the topless shark cages: Sharks can get in, but they can’t get out.
Louise was down in our cage, with Frederick watching the circling great whites, and Low ready at the line that held the cage. In a bad scenario, a shark could get wrapped in the rope and toss Louise out of the cage. Low stood ready to uncleat in an instant. Meanwhile, boats were bashing up against one another, mostly because the other operators had come out alone, with no dive master or assistants, so that they felt an obligation to watch the sharks and their clients, and couldn’t spare the attention necessary to reanchor or even prevent the constant and irritating collisions.
As I pushed the French vessel off the Dive Cat with a long pole, the biggest of the great whites made a dummy run at our bait, rose blind and gaping, then engulfed the entire seal’s head in its mouth. Low pulled the shark to the transom of the boat—it was a fifteen-footer—and Richard, the leptin collector, leaned over the transom and tried to plunge his syringe into the powerful, thrashing beast, which was more than a little tricky. He missed twice. The French boat thudded into the Dive Cat as the shark at our transom boomed against the boat, threw up a great waterspout of spray, then caromed off the nearby cage, bouncing Louise back and forth against the chicken wire before it turned and dove slowly toward the French cameraman, whose video housing was snowy white, and very prominent against the blue-gray sea.
Then something remarkable happened. Marks, the safety diver, pulled the black-and-white painted board from under his chest and flashed it at the shark, rather in the way horror film actors hold up crosses to vampires. Did the shark apprehend the board as a killer whale in the far distance? Did it calculate its chances against a mammal that can weigh in excess of five tons, and that hunts in packs? I don’t know, but the great white shark did not just turn away from the three-foot-long board. It veered off in several sharp thrusts, the fastest I’d seen a great white shark move in over twenty hours of observation.
Louise crawled out of the cage, blue-lipped and shivering, shaking uncontrollably as she tried to get a topside shot of another shark taking our bait, which it shook about for a time. Little bits and pieces of what used to be a seal floated to the surface. I pushed boats off the Dive Cat while Dyer Island seagulls swooped to the surface of the sea and picked at the floating leftovers. This seemed less than gallant, a way of profiting from death and tragedy. I told Louise that I thought of these particular seagulls as “lawyer birds.”
She was thoughtful for a moment.
“We do that too,” Louise said.
“What?”
“Journalists. We write about death and tragedy.
For money.”
And I guess we do. Right now, I thought, I am one of the journalist birds circling over Shark Alley, and we are all shrieking in our shrill and self-righteous manner about choosing the proper operator, about inexperienced sharkers and overloaded boats, about operators with no radios, no links to rescue helicopters, and no trauma training. Soon enough, we’ll be swooping down to pick at the various remains of the inevitable disaster, the one no one wants and everyone expects.
With that unlovely thought in mind, and with a certain amount of confidence in my own operator, I dropped back down into the chicken wire, and played another one-sided game of bumper tag with a couple of thousand pounds of white death.
Atlatl Bob’s Splendid Lack of Simple Sanity
Atlatl Bob Perkins called me from the Rabbit Stick encampment, along the banks of the Henry’s Fork River, just outside of Rexburg, Idaho. Rabbit Stick is an annual weeklong gathering of people allied with the Society of Primitive Technology.
“How are you, Bob,” I said, then winced. When you say how are you to Atlatl Bob Perkins, he invariably says, “I’m at the top of the food chain.”
“I’m at the top of the food chain,” Bob said.
“The Society of Primitive technology”—I didn’t know how to phrase this—“has, uh, telephones at Rabbit Stick?” I asked.
“I’m on a cellular,” he explained.
The irony, apparently, was lost on Bob, who, in fact, has his own web site (atlatl.com).
“So,” Bob said, “you coming down or what?”
The Rabbit Stick encampment is about a four-hour drive from my house.
“I’ll be there.”
“We still going to do Australia?”
Bob and I have been talking about going to Australia together for the past decade. Aboriginal hunters, in certain areas, still use the weapons Aztecs called atlatls. Bob Perkins is perhaps America’s best-known atlatl maker and theoretician. This is not to suggest in any way that he is universally respected. Bob lacks scientific credentials in the field of archaeology, for one thing, and, for another, it is generally felt, not without reason, that my friend is nuts as a bunny.
But, hey, since when has simple sanity been the measure of a scientist or an artist? Bob does what he does because he can do no less.
Here’s what happened to the poor guy. He was an engineering student at Montana State University, an institution that forced him to take some humanities courses in order to obtain a degree. Bob decided on archaeology, which he figured for a gut course. It was there he discovered the spear-throwing system called the atlatl.
The device comes in two parts: a thick stick, about two feet long, with a point generally made with the prong of a deer horn, at one end. The second part, the dart, can be six feet or longer. It is generally fletched with feathers, like an arrow. The feathered end of the dart fits into the notch of the stick, which is the atlatl proper. Holding the throwing stick in one hand, an ice-age hunter would notch the dart onto the point and, holding the dart with a thumb and forefinger, hurl the stick overhand, in the manner of a man serving a tennis ball.
The dart can easily be thrown one hundred yards, and is heavy enough to pierce armor, as the Spanish conquistadors discovered in their first encounters with the Aztecs. Ice-age hunters brought down North American imperial mammoths with atlatls. The weapon has been used almost worldwide for over fourteen thousand years. Some Australian aboriginals still hunt with the device, which they call a woomera.
So Bob Perkins, the incipient engineer, wrote a paper on the physical mechanics of the atlatl. It was, he discovered, a system of fiendish ingenuity and not, as might be supposed, a simple spear-throwing harpoon. Quite the contrary. The atlatl was a device that stored energy and released it in carefully timed phases. The throwing stick was flexible, bending backward as the hunter served the dart. Toward the top of the throwing arc, the dart itself humped up, like a hissing cat—storing energy—then bent down as the throwing stick released its own energy. Or something like that.
Bob was awed by such stone-age genius, and was certain that the Paleolithic atlatl maker understood the principles of wave mechanics and propulsive physics. Perkins graduated in engineering and immediately got into the business of atlatl manufacture and sales, an idea whose time had come, and gone, and has now come again. The business is currently thriving.
I purchased my first atlatl from Bob fifteen years ago—it’s a collector’s item called the Mammoth Hunter—and found that I could throw a heavy dart the length of a football field with the kind of accuracy that would generally allow me to hit the side of a barn. Just the action of throwing the gadget forced me to imagine how Paleolithic man must have hunted. It would be like this:
The various animals, in their multitudes, would probably be found at the edge of the retreating glaciers, where there would be running water and strong katabatic winds to drive off clouds of biting, stinging insects. The streams would be populated by beavers the size of cows, but you’d probably want that giant mammoth, feeding over there in a field of alpine wildflowers. More meat on a mammoth standing fourteen feet at the shoulder.
There might be as many as twenty hunters in your clan group. If I were one, I’d position a line of atlatl tossers one hundred yards or more from the great beast and loft darts at it until one or more hit. Then I’d send in the young hotshots looking to make reputations and have them finish off the wounded and enraged animal.
This process of both building and using stone-age tools is called “experiential archaeology.” It forces one to contemplate prehistory in a fairly visceral manner and it is precisely what Rabbit Stick is all about.
The Rabbit Stick gathering was a conglomeration of about 350 people, instructors and students (who paid a $195 fee), all interested in learning various skills now considered useless and time-consuming: tanning buckskin, making watertight jugs from reeds, knapping flint (making stone tools), creating friction fires, turning the remains of dead animals and plants into clothes, finding and preparing edible plants, and, in general, eking out a living in the wilderness. These skills are invaluable to the person who, for whatever reason, finds himself wandering around in the woods completely naked. Rural exhibitionists, for instance.
The encampment was set along the river, which was lined with aspen and cottonwoods just turning gold in the early autumn weather. There were dozens of tepees set up and people wandered about, some of them dressed in buckskin and other homemade duds. The morning I arrived, a school bus from nearby Rexburg disgorged a phalanx of orderly preteens who strolled among the groups of people sitting in the sun weaving blankets and making soap. I followed them about. Steve Watts, president of the Society of Primitive Technology, a calm, bearded man, told the students that human beings, and their predecessors, have been on Earth for over a million years and that for 99 percent of that time, they lived as hunter-gatherers. “I don’t care what race you are, or where you come from,” Watts said, “you are standing here today because your ancient ancestors were successful hunter-gatherers.” Today, he said, there is no reason to tan a hide in order to make a shirt. The urge to do so, he thought, comes from somewhere else, somewhere deeper inside the human soul.
I peeled off from the kids and met some of the instructors. Almost every one of them has a nickname: Dogface George, who runs dogsleds; and Abo Boy, who makes containers and atlatl darts from river cane; and Roadkill, whose specialty eluded me. I asked around for Atlatl Bob.
“You mean the big, Neanderthal-looking guy?” someone asked. “He’s sitting over there.” Bob’s thinning hair was longer than I recalled and hung down over his shoulders. He was wearing a buckskin poncho, along with some kind of strange woven skirt. Since he was barefoot, I couldn’t help but notice that every one of his toenails was painted a different garish color.
Several students were sitting around a washtub working on their atlatls. The tub contained buffalo tendons soaking in water. The buffalo had been donated from a private ranch, and the tendo
ns, taken from above the loin, could be peeled in such a way that they formed thin strings, which were being used to tie what is called a timing stone to the back of each carefully crafted throwing stick. Like rawhide, the tendons would tighten as they dried, holding the stone tight to the stick. The stone delays flex in the throwing stick in order to store more energy in the dart.
“Hey, Bob,” I said. “Where’s Buddy?”
“Ahh, you missed it. We ate him last night.
“Top of the food chain, huh?”
“Sadly,” Bob said, in a rare moment of introspection.
Buddy has come to Rabbit Stick for years with Bob, and he always sleeps in the same tepee, which makes some people think Bob is strange, in that Buddy is a lamb.
Every spring, Bob buys a new lamb, and the lamb is always named Buddy. Bob stakes Buddy out on a rope in his yard in Manhattan, Montana. Buddy mows and fertilizes the lawn in exchange for food and beer. Buddy drinks beer out of a nippled baby bottle. Occasionally, visiting Bob, we’ve all sat in the backyard—me, Bob, and Buddy—swilling beer and talking about atlatls and Australia. Bob’s theory—not surprising, considering his obsession—is that human beings are differentiated from other animals not by language or laughter, but by our ability to accurately throw stuff. “We’re small, we’re weak, we’re slow: What other advantage do we have against, say, a mammoth?”
“So a major-league pitcher is the acme of human civilization,” I suggest.
“Exactly.”
“Bahhh,” argues Buddy, speaking for the nonhuman world.
Bob, a former marine, can’t bring himself to personally slaughter the lamb. It happens this way: one day, when the leaves on the aspen have turned yellow and the grass has stopped growing, Buddy downs as many bottles of beer as he wants. After Buddy passes out, he is taken on a short drive and comes back several days later, wrapped in little white packages of freezer paper.
“You know I became a Mormon,” Bob said.
