Hennessey Part 2: Mother

Colliding and moving and growing. Seven small pups had hatched within her, squirming ever tighter in the center of her belly as they grew. They were each three feet long now, yet when four and a half feet long, they would be born into a warm ocean cove, darting away into the dim green water and the lonely monarchy of their kind. Until that day, they thrived and fed on yolk and young unfertilized eggs, crowding themselves into a tight sardine embrace.

They were now the guiding force within their mother. They defined her journey and her needs. She needed food badly. Her pups were in their final growth spurt, nearing the 60 pounds apiece they would be at birth. To feed them she had to feed herself, like all mothers who nourished their growing young. She was ever alert, ever seeking. She was a mother and always hungry.

Her quest drove Hennessey up the North American coast toward Long Island, as the hot summer bloomed. She dipped in and out of the cold and warm currents, her normal search for prey interleaved by an additional search: for a warm cove to birth her young. When hunger rose, she hunted, veering into the cold. When her pups thrashed inside, she diverted towards shore and the calmer, warmer waters.

But mingled with that warm beacon came a tickle of danger. She could also taste the metallic waters of crowded coastal waters. Beckoning with the warmth her pups would soon need, these sandy, shallow bays also repelled with the musty infusion of human industry – oils, metals, sewage, and a thousand human chemicals that no shark ever had memory of, until now.

As she approached the stark marshy coastline flaming with human lights and sounds and smells, all of her senses signaled that there was danger here. Alerted, she stopped and drank in the sensations. Her pupils, orbs that could narrow to thin slits in sunshine, now flared large in the dim moonlight. Her hearing used her whole body, like an ear drum on which the rhythm of the oceans played. Scents in the water wrote a picture of her prey from the chemicals they left behind. In her nose, spongy tissues that only she and her ancestor sharks possessed sensed the electric currents around her and telegraphed the fleeing heart beats of her prey. Floating motionless, she let the ocean speak.

Amid the layered sensations came a thin hint, and a possible payoff. Among the smells of this one particular oily metallic bay she could also detect salts and proteins—the stuff of life - a blubbery tang of cold-ocean prey, a mammalian scent that conjured a vision of fast chases and fat meals. From afar, that whiff of something ahead matched her memory: seals she had encountered before - among a small tumble of rocks near a busy beach, holding her prey in great numbers.

She settled onto a path her navigator’s brain knew would bring her towards food. Her steady loping tailbeat slowly delivering her closer to the vague mammalian scent. She was too close to the crowded human bay for comfort, but the need for food called her, and she crept closer.

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Start at the beginning of Hennessey's journey here.