The Great White Shark by Joseph Monninger

Author:Joseph Monninger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

It was a juvenile, maybe seven feet long.

Probably male.

It swam just below the surface, the waves occasionally lifting it and making it more visible. Barn fought down the impulse to pull out his phone and take a picture. He didn’t want to be a tourist. He wanted to see the shark, his first GWS, in all its sleek beauty.

“It’s a little spooked by the boat,” Pokey called, making a motion with his free hand to throttle down. “Ease up the engine. Maybe it will come by.”

The shark swam in a lazy circle away from the boat. From Pokey’s platform, the shark remained perhaps twenty yards away. Barn calculated that the tagging spear was about ten feet long. That meant they had to close on the shark quietly, trying to keep it interested, letting the shark’s inbred curiosity put it in position for tagging. It was a tricky balance. The shark could spook and be gone in a millisecond.

“Easy, easy, easy,” Pokey said, his voice barely loud enough to hear over the slosh of water against the Gray Jay.

Barn leaned out to see the shark better.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

It fit the standard pattern for whites: gray-green on top, white below. Positioned as it was, facing away from the boat, Barn couldn’t see the shark’s classic grin, but the size and thickness of the first dorsal fin astonished him. It was big. Barn knew it connected to the frame of the shark by cartilaginous rods, called ceratotrichia, which helped support the strength and rigidity of the fin. Without the pair of dorsal fins—the second one, called a caudal fin, located between the first dorsal fin and the tail—the shark would not have the keel—the heavy V-shaped bottom of a sailboat—required to keep it properly positioned in the water. It also wouldn’t be able to turn and hunt with the agility he knew the shark possessed. The design of the body was a perfect thing.

But it was something else that made Barn take special notice.

The shark saw him.

It did. It was conscious of him. Barn would have sworn to it. For an instant, as he leaned out to examine the shark, as the boat edged closer and as Pokey Bob lifted his tagging spear, Barn knew the shark grew aware of them. He already knew sharks were not ravenous beasts who ate everything in the water or came flying out of the sky in tornadoes. That was ridiculous.

But what he hadn’t been prepared for was the intense awareness the shark sent back to him. He knew fishermen gave accounts of white sharks rolling slightly to look at the people on board. Whites did it to see seals on land or birds sitting on the surface. Barn knew the white had rolled slightly to see them. They were not sneaking up on the shark after all.

The shark let them approach. It was confident in its own superiority.

Suddenly, Pokey Bob’s spear flashed forward, and the old pirate let out a loud whoop.

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