Shark Bait

by Justin D'Ath

  Unlike Michi, I had to stay awake. It was important to stay awake, I told myself. Very important. But I was so tired that I could no longer remember why. Don’t go to sleep, I kept telling myself, fighting to keep my droopy eyelids open. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t… go… to…

  I must have dozed off finally, otherwise I would have heard the boat before it got so close. Suddenly it was right there. Its white bow wave came churning out of the darkness like an avalanche.

  Holy guacamole! It was going to plough straight into us!

  8

  INDESTRUCTIBLE

  You don’t think in a situation like that; there isn’t time. You simply act. I brought my knees up between Michi and me, placed both feet squarely against his stomach, then pushed with all my might.

  Although it was dark, there was just enough moonlight to see Michi’s eyes snap open in shock as he came awake, and the black O of his mouth as he screamed, then the boat’s enormous bow came slicing directly between us.

  I dragged my legs out of the way, but not quickly enough. The boat struck me a massive blow on the thigh. It spun me around, rolling me helplessly along the hull beneath the water line. My eyes were open, but it was too dark to see anything but a pale mist of bubbles swirling around me. The hull made a dull thump every time I hit it. I heard the surge of water and the rumble of engines. There was another sound, too, a heavy thwop, thwop, thwop that grew steadily louder.

  The propellers! I had to avoid them or I’d be chopped to ribbons!

  The hull whacked me again, on the shoulder this time. I felt it roll across my back. I counted the seconds – one, two, three – then I pushed with every ounce of energy I could summon from my tired arms and legs. My timing was perfect. Both hands and both feet made contact with the hull at the same time. All four pushed together. I spun out into the black water. The churning wash from one of the propellers parted my hair – that’s how close I came to having my skull split open – but the deadly blades missed me. I was okay.

  I bobbed to the surface seven or eight metres behind the boat. It was a big, ocean-going launch. There were no lights anywhere on board, but I saw a man’s silhouette on the flying bridge. The lower deck was stacked with what looked like crayfish pots. Three burbling outboard motors glinted in the moonlight as the powerful launch sped away from me.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled, waving my arms frantically. ‘Stop! Help us!’

  The lone figure at the helm turned and looked back in my direction, but the boat continued on its course. Its engine-note didn’t change. He can’t have seen me, I realised, still shaking from the shock of nearly being run down. He must have mistaken my yelling for the cries of a seabird. I stopped waving and shouting, and turned my attention to the dark water around me.

  ‘Michi?’

  ‘Kochira desu!’

  A dark shape came splashing in my direction. I heaved a big sigh of relief. I had tried to push Michi out of the boat’s way but hadn’t been sure if I’d succeeded. I swam to meet him.

  It was only when we reached each other that I noticed something had changed. Michi was hanging lower in the water. Only one of his water wings supported him. The other one, though still attached to his shoulder, was shredded. It must have been chopped by the boat’s propellers.

  ‘Michi, are you okay?’ I gasped, terrified that the propellers had chopped him as well.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, then held up his arm to show me he wasn’t injured.

  I gave him a high-five. Michi and I had experienced some pretty rough moments over the past ten or twelve hours, but we had handled everything the Reef could dish out, and survived.

  ‘We’re indestructible!’ I yelled up at the wide starry sky.

  It took about ten seconds for the reality of our situation to bring me back down to earth. Or down to water, I should say – and that was the problem: we were still lost and adrift in the middle of the Coral Sea, with no chance of being rescued until daylight.

  Why hadn’t that launch stopped? The man on the flying bridge had turned around and looked back. He seemed to look right at me. Okay, maybe he mistook my shouts for a seabird, but surely he would have seen me waving. I had seen him, after all. The starlight was quite bright. And why wasn’t his launch showing any lights? I didn’t know much about boats, but I was ninety percent sure that it was illegal to go out to sea at night without running lights on your boat.

  I was one hundred percent sure that it was illegal to see someone in the water, waving and calling for help, then go cruising away, leaving them to drown.

  But Michi and I were not going to drown. We were indestructible. Deep down, I knew this wasn’t true, but I couldn’t give up hope now. I looked at my watch and saw there were still three hours to go till dawn.

  Those were the longest three hours of my life. Michi dozed off from time to time, but I stayed awake. I had to. Now that we had only one water wing, we weren’t as buoyant as before. I tried floating on my back, but even then I had to kick my feet slowly to keep myself on the surface. It was very tiring. After a while I got into a rhythm and shut my mind to my aching calf muscles. I guess it was like running a marathon. You put your body on autopilot and occupy your brain with something else. I played counting games to distract myself.

  I invented a game where I’d count slowly to a thousand, then do a countdown all the way back to one. When I got to one, I had to guess the time. Then I’d look at my watch to see how close I was. It probably sounds dumb, but it kept me occupied and awake. I became so absorbed, in fact, that I didn’t even realise dawn was breaking until Michi interrupted me.

  ‘Bruce.’

  ‘Ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six…’

  ‘Bruce,’ Michi repeated.

  I was in a kind of trance and didn’t really catch on to what he was saying. But he’d distracted me from my counting. Was I up to ninety-five, or nine hundred and five? I frowned at him, annoyed, and that was when I realised dawn was breaking. It wasn’t fully light yet, but it was light enough to see two tiny islands on the horizon. We hadn’t been swept away as far as I’d thought.

  Then I noticed Michi’s expression. He looked terrified. And sounded it, too.

  ‘BRUCE!’ he yelled.

  It finally sank in. I snapped out of my trance and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of Michi’s boggle-eyed gaze. And nearly had a full cardiac arrest.

  Weaving towards us across the blue-green sea was a dorsal fin roughly the size of a yacht’s keel.

  9

  HITCHHIKERS

  The shark was so big it seemed wrong. Its head, a massive wedge-shaped shadow in the green water, seemed as wide as a car. Its pectoral fins looked like the wings of a F18 jet fighter. And it was sweeping towards us with the momentum of an express train. There was no time to get out of the way.

  ‘Pull your feet up!’ I screamed at Michi.

  It made no difference that Michi didn’t understand English. You can’t watch a fifteen-metre shark approaching you at full speed without taking evasive action. We both pulled our feet up. I was scared half out of my mind, there’s no denying it, but in the other half an idea was forming:

  We were facing the oncoming shark and Utopia Island was directly behind us. That meant…

  As the enormous, white-spotted head passed beneath us like the prow of a nuclear submarine, I wrapped one arm around Michi’s skinny body.

  Here goes nothing! I thought.

  With my other hand, I grabbed the huge dorsal fin as it churned past.

  Michi must have thought I was crazy. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as the monster shark began towing us through the waves. I fought to hold on. The fin felt like sandpaper and I had a good grip, but the drag of our two bodies through the water nearly pulled my arm out of its socket. Changing my hold on Michi, I shouted at him to open his eyes, then swung him around the other side of the shark’s tall triangular fin.

  ‘Grab hold!’ I gasped.

  Michi looked dazed, like someone having
a bad dream, but he gingerly took hold.

  ‘B-B-Bruce?’ he stammered, peering at me wide-eyed across the bulge of foam churned up by the massive shark’s fin.

  I shook my head. ‘Not Bruce,’ I said. ‘Whale shark.’

  I had seen them on TV. Whale sharks are the world’s largest fish. They grow to nearly twenty metres in length and can weigh as much as fifteen tonnes. But they’re harmless. They feed on small fish and plankton. Because of their massive size, they aren’t scared of humans. Sometimes they even let divers ride on their backs.

  Michi and I weren’t divers. We didn’t ride the whale shark, we simply let it drag us along the surface. As long as its fin stayed above water, I reckoned we’d be okay. But if it dived, we’d have to let go in a hurry.

  Luckily, the whale shark stayed near the surface. Maybe that’s where the plankton were at that time of day, or perhaps the water was warmer there than down in the jungle-green depths below us. The oversized fish didn’t seem to mind having two hitchhikers hanging onto its metre-high dorsal fin. After a few minutes, Michi grinned at me and I grinned back. For the first time since we’d been swept off the reef, our luck seemed to be changing. If the whale shark remained on its present course, it would take us right past the larger of the two islands on the horizon.

  10

  SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS

  The shark didn’t deviate. It was going to pass within a few hundred metres of Utopia Island. As we drew nearer, the long, low mound of trees and coconut palms seemed to rise out of the sea ahead of us. I longed for a glimpse of the resort, but it was on the other side. It didn’t matter. Even if nobody spotted us when we let go of the shark, I reckoned we could to make it ashore on our own. I no longer had the heavy plaster cast to hamper me, and I didn’t think the current would be so strong at this end of the island.

  ‘Asoko wo miro!’ Michi cried suddenly.

  I looked where he was pointing. The tiny figure of a man stood on a sandy point halfway along the island. Although we were several hundred metres away – too far for our voices to carry – Michi and I both began shouting and waving our free arms above our heads.

  We shouldn’t have done it. Our carrying-on disturbed the whale shark. With a sudden swirl of water, and an unexpected downward tug of its dorsal fin, the huge fish was gone. Michi and I were left floundering in the waves.

  We took a few moments to recover. Both of us had swallowed large mouthfuls of sea water when the shark dived. Spitting and coughing, I splashed over to Michi. Without the shark’s fin to hold on to, we were floating lower in the water and we could only see the man when we were lifted up by waves. He was turned side-on to us and held something up to his face. Binoculars. He seemed to be looking at the sky.

  Michi started waving and shouting again, but I motioned him to be silent. I touched my ear, indicating that I wanted to listen. The sound was faint but unmistakable. A big grin spread slowly across Michi’s face when he recognised it. I smiled back. It was the buzz of an aeroplane.

  A dot appeared above the horizon. The buzz increased to a dull roar. As the aircraft sped towards us, I saw that it wasn’t the little red-and-white seaplane that brought tourists to the island. This was much larger, with four engines. It was a big Navy Orion. There could be only one reason why an Orion would be flying out to Utopia Island so early in the morning. They were searching for Michi and me. We were saved!

  Instead of coming in our direction, the Orion roared low across the pale dawn sky to our right. It seemed to be heading for Cowrie Island. Michi and I waved our arms madly, but it continued unerringly on its course.

  C’mon guys, you’ve got the wrong island! I wanted to yell at them.

  Michi touched my arm and pointed. In the excitement of seeing the search plane, I had forgotten about the man on the beach. He was no longer there. From the top of the next wave, I noticed something else. There was a small narrow bay just beyond the sandy point where the man had been standing. Deep in the bay, partially hidden beneath some overhanging trees, was a big blue-and-grey launch.

  ‘Soko ni booto ga arimasu!’ Michi said excitedly.

  I nodded to show that I had seen it, too. But the boat was too far away, and anyway the man hadn’t seen us. We would have to make it to shore on our own. I mimed a paddling motion in the direction of the beach.

  ‘Swim,’ I said.

  Michi nodded. ‘Oyogimashou!’

  We didn’t get far. Less than halfway to shore, something wrapped around my ankle. It was cold and leathery. Seaweed, I thought. I stopped swimming and tried to kick it away, but the seaweed clung to me. Worse, another cold tendril curled around my other leg. Now I had seaweed around both legs. This was getting serious. I tried pulling my feet up, but the seaweed came with them. Because I wasn’t paying attention to the sea, a wave took me by surprise. It washed over my head and for two seconds I was in a blurry underwater world filled with wriggling green seaweed. I bobbed back to the surface.

  Wriggling? I thought.

  ‘Hebi da,’ Michi whispered.

  I was nose-to-nose with him. He had stopped swimming, too. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were swivelled right down, watching a green rope of seaweed that was draped diagonally across his shoulder. It seemed to be moving, threading itself slowly through the narrow gap between the water wing and his neck. As the seaweed moved, Michi slowly tipped his head to one side, away from it. I heard him take in a long shuddering breath, like someone trying to control their emotions. Then I felt a cold feather-light touch on the back of my own neck, just above the water line. It sent a chill through my whole body. This wasn’t seaweed, I realised, not daring to move as a small evil-looking head poked out of the water right beneath my nose. It flickered its Y-shaped tongue at me.

  Sea snakes. They were all around us. All over us. One came sliding up onto my shoulder, had a close look at my mouth (clamped tightly shut), then made a sagging bridge across the gap between Michi and me. It passed another one coming the other way. Now there was a snake looped around my neck. And one slithering across my head! I could feel them under water, nosing at my limbs, tangling in my clothes, tickling past my feet. For ten metres in every direction, the sea writhed and churned like a saucepan full of boiling spaghetti, with Michi and me in the middle of it.

  ‘Stay absolutely still,’ I whispered to Michi.

  He couldn’t understand what I was saying. In fact, I don’t think he even heard me. He seemed to be in shock. His face had turned a sickly bluish grey and just the whites of his eyes showed between half-closed eyelids. Every so often, a big tear would roll down one of his cheeks.

  ‘Michi, it’s going to be okay.’

  He gave his head a tiny shake. ‘Hebi,’ he whimpered, between chattering teeth.

  There was nothing I could do to calm him. It was hard enough staying calm myself.

  According to a program I saw on the Nature Channel, sea-snake venom is much deadlier than land-snake venom, but luckily sea snakes aren’t aggressive towards humans. They’re just curious. They might swim right up to you to check you out, but they won’t bite if you remain calm and don’t do anything to alarm them. Good advice. In theory. But I wonder if the experts on the Nature Channel have ever been the human meatball in the snake spaghetti?

  Here’s another thing I heard on that program: over the years there have been a number of unconfirmed reports of sea snakes congregating in large, floating spaghetti-islands like the one Michi and I got caught up in, but no scientist has ever seen it. If I were a scientist, I could be famous. But right now I was more concerned with survival than scientific discovery. I just wanted to stay alive.

  I don’t know how long it lasted. When you’re tied up in a floating tangle of several thousand deadly sea snakes, time passes slowly. All I could do was cling to Michi and try to keep him from freaking out totally.

  I sang to him. I sang several of the songs we’d sung last night, but I kept forgetting the words. Finally, Michi’s lips began moving. Almost silently at f
irst, then louder, Michi joined in and sang with me. It seemed to help. He stopped shaking, his eyes opened, and some of the colour slowly returned to his face.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours – but was probably no more than fifteen minutes – we found ourselves at the edge of the writhing mass of snakes. They were lighter than us, and the surface current was carrying them slowly away. I waited until the last one had unwrapped itself from around my leg, then I carefully nudged Michi out into clear water.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whispered.

  Michi let out a large breath. ‘Wakarimashita!’ he replied, and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards in the ghost of a smile.

  11

  WORSE THAN VERY BAD

  After more than twelve hours at sea, it was wonderful to feel the first touch of solid land beneath my feet. Except it wasn’t solid land, it was coral reef. And this time my feet were bare. It would be the very worst bad luck, I thought, to tread on a deadly stonefish now, only forty metres from the beach, after we’d been through so much and survived so many dangers. I quickly lifted my feet off the coral and continued swimming.

  ‘Don’t put your feet down!’ I called over my shoulder to Michi, a few strokes behind me. I kept forgetting he didn’t understand English. Turning towards him, careful to keep my feet well clear of the sharp coral a metre below, I pointed down into the cloudy green water and shook my head. ‘Coral reef,’ I said. ‘Very bad.’

  Michi pointed down, too, and said something in Japanese. I noticed he wasn’t moving. His body was upright, his chest and shoulders clear of the waves. He was standing on the coral.