The first time was maybe two years ago. Two and a half, I remember because we'd just brought back the first living specimen of a giant squid and thought we were pretty hot stuff.

They'd found a dozen dead sharks, big deal, what's a dozen more or less, way over off the Philippines. But the marine bio journals had a feeding frenzy, dropped our story to jet over to interview the Pacific Research Institute Monterey (PRIM) guys. By the time they came back around, our squid was just so much dead meat--calamari time. Maybe it got the bends, living in a shallow tank. Maybe it just got bored and gave up--some days, this job makes me feel the same way.

About a year later they find another bunch up in the Bering Sea and all hell breaks loose, even though these aren't even the same kind of shark. Salmon sharks, this time; last time was tigers. The journals say there's no reason they should be dead; they're all healthy adults, males and females. No evidence of disease, oxygen levels average, no other fish kills in the area. For a while they tried to blame overfishing for messing up the food chain, but the population tallies were average, some even above average. Weird.

Then six months ago they lose another set, tigers again, this time in the Fiji Islands. The PRIM losers finally decide they're out of their depth and send for the "A" team. "Wonder Boy" Wysocki and a couple of his favorites get to go check it out. Polynesian girls, Australian beer, tough job.

They came back with sunburns but no answers. There wasn't any unusual virus or bacteria in the tissues; again, no other fish kills. The tigers were healthy except for being dead. The guys were kind of spooked. Like anytime Ph.D.s get stumped, one guy'd have an idea and the others'd shoot him down, go round and round. I pretty much shrugged it off. Not my problem--I've got other fish to fry, ha ha.

The great whites got to me, though, right here off Bermuda, practically our own doorstep. We were on a cruise to the Sargasso. Soon as he heard, Wysocki had me turn Atlantic Cetacean around, put the bone in her teeth and run us up to Saint George. Even with the shoals and reef protection zones, we averaged eighteen knots--not bad for this old girl.

Nothing satisfied the good doctor, though. He kept coming up to the bridge and frowning down at the plotting table like there were answers there. Biologists in the pilot house make me nervous--I don't go down and breathe all over their test tubes, do I? Not that Dr. Wy's a bad guy. He's taken the helm once, when they were getting footage of him for some nature show, and then it was only for about five minutes out in the middle of Biscayne Bay where he couldn't do any real harm.

The scientists and wannabees trooped off to check out the mysterious dead sharks of Saint George. I was kind of curious myself, but by the time I'd tended to fueling and victualing they were back with two corpses on dry ice. Wysocki had aged ten years; still looked ten years younger than me. We headed north-northwest and rigged out two long lines and a dozen jiggers at sundown, the great white's busiest time. We needed a live one.

One of the graduate assistants that summer, tall thin tan blonde girl, about like most of them, kept me company on the bridge on the first night watch.

"Isn't this exciting?" she said, watching the long lines streaming out, skipping green-white trails in the low black swells astern.

"Exciting?" I grunted. "Just fishin, darlin'."

"You sound like my grandpa."

That hurt. There comes an age where you play a role in a woman's fantasies far different from the one you'd like. "Oh yeah?" I asked. "Your grandma as good-looking as you? What'd you say her name was? Say, when was your daddy born? Where was she living back in--"

"Dirty old man," she said, and flounced down the ladder to help check the jiggers.

I was enjoying the promotion from grandpa to dirty old man and wishing I hadn't quit smoking three years ago when I heard the call.

"Yellowtail, grouper, bonita, empty, grouper, shark--Hey, SHARK!"

Old man or no, I can still vault the bridge rail. But I clear it by less than I once did, and my hand on the rail has to support more weight than it used to. When the grad students got the shark in I stooped to look, steadying myself with a freshly-painted yellow cleat.

His body and tail twisted lazily back and forth to scull through the water as the grappling hook in his mouth kept him off our beam. I counted the white scars on his blue-gray skin and watched the remora on his back slip off in the ship's wake and latch on again near the tail. The nearside pectoral was chewed up, probably by another great white--nothing else would've had the nerve. I watched the eye tracking back and forth, only pausing on me long enough to give me a chill before he continued his search for food.

I heard Wysocki's lecture once on how sharks evolved between 350 and 160 million years ago. A pretty big window, but now I knew he was just splitting hairs. One look at the great white's easy motion, his scars, and his pale, uncaring eye, and I knew that he was old as God.

The students gingerly hoisted it aboard and seated it in a wet sling. While we were waiting for the lift to lower it belowdecks a late arrival said, "Hot shit! It's freakin' Jaws!"

When I was still wasting money on movies in pursuit of the sweet mysteries of tender breast and smooth thigh, "jaws" were what took up the space between your neck and nose. Kids these days.

I followed the shark down into Scientist Country. The compartments from amidships forward are soundproofed against the vibration of the engines. A girl explained why once, but I don't buy all the "sensitive measuring equipment" crap--I think it's to muffle the sounds coming from the scientists' cabins. I've heard enough hatches open and close on the mid watch to be skeptical. Not that I grudge anyone anything--hey, enjoy life.

The way they'd set up their spaces made you forget you're aboard a ship: laboratory-white, antiseptic, cold. They got the great white bedded down in a holding tank. Once they got the water flow regulated he just started sculling again, most natural unhurried action in the world. The cold gray eye tracked and the five gill slits flexed open and closed like they'd done it forever and would go on doing it another forever.

I'd told that girl that it was just fishing, but, man, what a fish. I went down to the tank every watch as we beat back towards Miami. Each time he was the same: swimming and watching, always watching.

On the forenoon watch the third day I went below and the tank was empty. One of the kids, less scruffy than the others but I don't remember his name, told me the shark had died. Wysocki and company were doing an autopsy.

Maybe it was because I'd seen it alive instead of just hearing about another deader. It makes you think about things. I went back up to the pilothouse and watched a white stormcloud of gulls and terns playing over our wake, looking for scraps, and it hit me. No wonder these scientists were so worried. What if the sharks are just the first ones to go? If they can't figure out why, they've got no jobs. And if they got no jobs, I got no job. I mean, a guy like me can always get a job, but starting over on a purse seiner didn't sound good after thirty-three years of easy living, grad assistants cleaning the brass, pretty girls sunning themselves on the foredeck, me thinking, "wonder what the poor people're doing today?"

Master of my fate, captain of my soul: Henley, I only know it because my wife did a needlepoint sampler for the messroom. A kid asked me once if that was the same Henley as the one with the Eagles. Sheesh.

I wanted to talk to Wysocki's right-hand man, Dr. Thomas. He's a professor too, but about fifteen years older than Wonder Boy, and we'd both spent ten years of our youth playing "chicken" with Soviet subs in the North Atlantic. We'd never talked much about it, except in passing, but I gather Dr. Tom hadn't enjoyed the experience any more than I did. We get along.

I know better than to bother someone while he's working, so I sweated out most of the dog watch, keeping a weather eye out in case he came on deck.

Thomas showed up about eight, doing his evening turn along the rail. I hailed him up for a cup of coffee. We poked around it a while, talking about the weather and if Dr. Wy was going to invite the PRIM guys over to look at our specimens. Finally, I asked him if he was worried.

He was worried, but not about his job or the PRIM losers figuring things out before us. He was worried because he couldn't figure why it was happening.

"It's a sign things are out of balance somewhere," he said. "You ever see that cartoon of a scrap of plankton followed by a shrimp followed by a tiny fish followed by a larger fish, and so on? They're all swimming in a spiral, each one waiting for the one in front to make a mistake, drop its guard, then gulp! Sharks have been at the tail end of that chase for a while. If they're dying off, we're missing a link in the chain."

He rubbed his eyes, and for a minute I thought he was going to cry, but he just yawned and stretched. "There's got to be a sequence of natural events to explain this. If we lose the sharks then there's no alpha predator to weed out the sick and lame, no natural selection, no evolutionary pressure."

I hadn't thought of it that way. "No divine plan," I said.

Thomas stopped rubbing his eyes and gave me a little smile. "Right."

I should have known better than to say that. Dr. Tom is one of the best, but anytime you talk about God they act like someone's told a dirty joke--funny, but inappropriate. He yawned again. "Looks like you're losing sleep over this," I said.

"Nah," he said, grinning. "That new U. of F. grad is putting me through my paces." Chuckling, he said goodnight and slipped belowdecks.

After watch change I went to my cabin too, alone. Water gurgled at the waterline on the other side of the bulkhead. The ship rocked to port, shifted gently back to starboard; getting rough, the further south we got. I resisted the urge to go back up to the pilot house. Showing your mate you trust him is more important than keeping your thumb on every little shipboard detail.

Details. Dr. Tom and Wonder Boy and those PRIM guys all thought they could get the clue if they just studied the details long enough. But they can't stop the sparrows falling, or count the hairs of my own balding head. They really think we evolved from fish, picking up opposable thumbs, four-chambered hearts, frontal lobes, tool-making, language, and tenure along the way by random chance.

I heard the propeller change pitch, the engine hum. One deck above in the galley a cook dropped a pot and someone laughed--the kitchen's a carefree place after the last watch is fed. The normal shipboard sounds settled down into a quiet murmur as I rocked to sleep, listening to the gentle whisper of sea on steel.

§ § §

Kevin Durden was born in Savannah, Georgia and grew up at the edge of the Everglades west of Fort Lauderdale in Davie, Florida. He served as an Air Force Intelligence Officer in Texas, Alaska, and far-flung stations in exotic locations overseas.

His life got really interesting after he had children. He can throw the slowest fastball in sports history through a six-year-old's strike zone with phenomenal accuracy. Not that he wants to actually strike anyone out, mind you, but sometimes it's hard to hit those bats when they're waving around. Ask for coaching tips at wkdurden@att.net.

This piece was first published in INK POT #1 - 2003, a literary journal.

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