Hennessey - A Shark Novella

#HennesseyTheShark

Part 1: Migrant

She idled northward eating the miles with slow beats of her crescent tail. Water flowed through her open mouth and out her throat, past gills that sampled its equatorial warmth, through nostrils that tasted its stories. Everything that moved in the sea around her left thin traces, and all of them were amply known to her. Her eyes stared black and still, while her nose, tongue and throat saw a broader array of colors. Flat triangles of pectoral fins and a meaty gray dorsal fading stylishly to black cut a shape with thirty million years of credibility. Gunmetal gray on top, pristine underbelly. “White Shark” was the word-paring anyone would use to describe her, but what she represented was far older than language.

She was utterly sure of her supremacy. Her kind had seen the tides of mass extinction swell and recede, watched the world live and die and live again. Yet her kind survived, swimming beside death as witness and partner. In an ocean of tumult sharks endured.

Where she swam today the shallow ocean was green with life, charged with the earthy discharge of Georgia marshes and the phosphorus tang of rivers emptying from Carolina farmlands. For hours she enjoyed the Sun, cruising near the surface with occasional feeding dives. In the dim deep she could sometimes find prey with sufficient fatty bulk to fuel her growth: schools of saucer-like jacks in reflective silver, long-nosed billfish surprised in the dark, and tuna on the best days when her speed could match their silvery frenzy.

She’d followed the continent’s edge northward each summer, cued by rapidly warming water, since reaching 10 feet in length. Bulk had brought its own confidence, along with the physical fortitude needed for sorties farther from shore. And in the north she learned to take small harbor seals, then bigger gray seals and even bigger prey to feed her needs.

When she found them, she struck her prey like all ancient hunters, without worry. She was good at feeding, nothing in the planet’s history ever did it better. The ocean was her limitless hunting ground, a never-ending cycle of life with her and her kin at the top. She wandered the global waters carrying her skill and hunger like a hammer and an anvil. So she accepted her food with no malice and no regret and no tally except the need to feed and grow.

Now, each changing moon brought her closer to the next chapter in her life, and bigger needs. New life grew within her. Midway through her fourth decade, her first brood of pups. Her first heavy weight of life’s responsibility.

But this year’s waters were even barer than last. Prey of all kinds drifted further north each year, fleeing the super-heated summers of the south. Day after day her search in those warmer waters was empty. But day by day, her need for food spiked as her pups grew.

She sliced through the coastal waters, skirting beaches and ships and bays, swallowing little but the miles of her journey, casual with her inborn strength. And with the utter determination of a new mother.

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.

Part 3: Seal Rocks

Hennessey patrolled ahead, instinctively following the ocean road in her memory. Her electric sense knew the rocky paths and the smooth sand below. It knew the volcanic cracks and hidden valleys where the base of the ocean bunched up to form rocky outcrops. She knew the mouth of the bay because of its taste, and could hear the tumult of the crowded, boisterous, vacation beach at the bay’s northern point. Her memory said if she followed this path, she was close to a wellspring of food.

She moved quickly past the bay and the beach towards the sights and smells of rocks and seaweed that lay just to the north. Just offshore, in water only three or four body lengths deep, a stone semicircle brooded over a tiny pocket of glorious prey. The air was full of raucous barks, the smell of fur and pups, the smell of seals. They were small, but their presence and promise peppered the water.

As the morning brightened, sunlight slitted her eyes, and allowed her to see the churn of possible prey. She circled the rocks, close enough to observe the seals with all her senses, but far enough away not to spark panic. Satisfied with the possibilities, she approached slowly, watching. A flash to her right pulled her attention, a combination of sight and sound and electric current that shouted ‘mammal’. A seal scampered in the lee of the rocks, oblivious of the looming danger.

With instinctive speed, Hennessey twisted herself into pursuit. Reacting instantly, the seal leapt away at high velocity, frightened, churning toward the nearby rocks. Correcting sharply to her right, Hennessey wheeled, accelerating with her full power. An apex hunter’s total mastery of her trade.

She strained and sped up and closed in. But the agile seal could turn and twist as fast as the shark could follow. It was harder now, harder for Hennessey to pivot and accelerate, with the large girth of her pups and their pulsing, wriggling weight. She usually massed a full ton of muscle and blood and brain and teeth. But her pups added another quarter ton – held tensely in her uterus full to bursting. The pups got in her way when she needed agility.

The pair shot through the cold green gloom, from undersea canyon to waving forests of kelp. The chase lengthened as the seal porpoised out of the water for frantic speed. Each massive stroke of the shark’s scimitar tail and her massive envelope of muscle tensed and twisted and pushed in coordinated power to send her closer to the fleeing seal. She strained and pushed herself and closed in, eyes rolled up, mouth beginning to open, teeth pivoting out as if to jump the last few inches towards her prey.

Then from the shallows came hurtling two new grey torpedoes, two smaller sharks of her kind, carelessly barreling in between her and the prey. The juvenile amateurs flailed and spun and snapped at the seal, ruining Hennessey’s attack. All the mother shark could do was to twist uselessly to lunge at her prey as it miraculously shot into the safety of the shallows.

As fast as she had accelerated, she slowed and threw herself at the small sharks, which scattered into the murky water. Spinning away, Hennessey turned violently downward, and lunged toward deeper depths. She had competition for these seals, from a dense collection of immature and inexperienced sharks. Interference!

And for what? These seals were too small for all this trouble. Each was barely a morsel for her hunger, barely the size of two of her pups. Barely enough to make up for the effort in catching them. They were the natural prey of smaller sharks.

The inexperience and interference of her small brethren changed the decisions in her predator’s brain. The youngsters could have them. She needed more.

So, hungrier than ever, she left the rocks, spiraling out and around them in an uncertain search for the next target. Her memory had been right - there were seals here. But her new bulk and the undisciplined gangs of juveniles just learning to hunt, made Seal Rocks an impossible target.

Back on the hunt, what immediately intruded on her senses were novel sounds and smells. The nearby beach. It had none of the comfortable signals of her well-known seal prey. But it also just wasn’t the same empty ocean she’d moved through during the weeks of her northward trek. The nearby beach held different signals of possible food. She turned toward it. The distance was tiny as the ocean was measured - and the payoff might be worth it.

Part 4: Test Bite

Hennessey, crept in towards shallow water. It was all sandy here – no more rocks and no more seals. Instead there was a gentle swell coming from the south, a swell that eventually hunched up into waves that curled and crashed up the gradual slope of the beach. She was assailed with different smells, sweet chemical oils that were neither seal nor fish, but with an underlayer that was clearly mammal. And could see what were obviously animals near the shore, rolling, splashing and standing in the waves. She kept her distance from these. Prey or not-prey? Her memory held little answer because she had always avoided these shallow, sandy, crashing shores.

Turning, she paralleled the beach for a short distance, then reversed and idled back. It was all the same – with some creatures that might be prey and that looked very clumsy, but were standing too shallow for her great girth. Attracted by the mammal scent. Repelled by the shallows. Hennessey continued her patient patrol along the beach and back again.

Then something caught her vision. It floated nearby. Almost oval like a sea turtle. At the surface. She couldn't tell if it had legs like a turtle and was paddling, or fins like a sunfish. It seemed to move of its own power.

She shadowed the object with ancient caution and a fencer’s grace. Lifting her right fin, she swung minutely to her left, passing it, sensing it. A very dilute mammalian scent lit up her hunter’s brain. She pirouetted to the right, spinning back around for another questing pass. The patience of motherhood tempered her approach—looking for certainty before committing to action.

Another pass. With every lap the great fish tightened her loop, spiraling in at last, close enough to touch it, to brush it and power away. She went back to looping again, evaluating, but still not certain. She had learned nothing, and so she spiraled back in. She made another pass.

None of her senses helped her classify this object. Her brain organized everything into two fundamental categories: prey and not-prey. Attack or ignore. The oddity she circled challenged that simplicity. Neither fish, nor seal, nor whale, nor turtle. And when scent and electricity and touch failed her, she needed the most important sense of all: taste.

A bank of powerful taste sensors lined her mouth, constantly sampling every chemical in the ocean around her. A small bite, or a small rip, or a small gash in the body of a potential prey was enough to fill the water with an encyclopedia of tastes that Hennessey could read in an instant.

Right now, she did not know what this floating object was. It was still here. She was still hungry. To know it, she had to taste it.

Deciding, she tightened the circle she was swimming and returned to the object, raising up toward the surface from below. She turned her head daintily in order to bite carefully, nimbly, and to finally classify this object. Prey or not prey?

She extended her jaws so that the teeth flexed out toward the mystery. Not to bite with full commitment, not even hard: she saw no need for anything but a test bite. Her jaws could macerate turtle shells and splinter the bones of the largest whales but for this she needed the tiniest puncture.

As she tensed for the bite, her teeth flexed out toward the floating object. She steadied her huge head with an exactly timed pulse of her tail, and bit so carefully that only a few front teeth engaged the object.

It shattered in a fracture of tasteless styrofoam and brittle plastic. It broke apart instantly. There was nothing edible, nothing that was even alive. Just a floating empty board, blown off the beach, it’s owner nowhere near.

Hennessey wheeled away, carelessly leaving the broken board in a tumble of ripped plastic, creating a deep thumping fountain of water as she dove quickly. The test bite had done its job – the prey was worthless.

Part 5: Pups

Hennessey fled the broken boogie board, scattering parts of it across the waters near the beach - and left a riot of worry and chaos behind. She’d been spotted by nearly a dozen people: lifeguards, swimmers and beach goers. Her casual circuits around the doomed board captured the attention of everyone. Parents hauled their children in from the water, piercing whistles from every life guard tower alerted everybody else. If Hennessey had had a rear view mirror, it would have shown panic.

One contradiction floated nearby, though Hennessey did not notice. A small boat had been motoring calmly as Hennessey’s attack on the board progressed. The young woman who piloted the boat watched intently as Hennessey disappeared offshore.

The tumult fell behind. Hennessey looped around Seal Rocks, passing to the north, and fell into her normal migratory pace. She had one last destination in her memory – one last place that would have the food she needed. Far to the north was a giant hook of sand and rock. It was where the warm Gulf Stream veered off to the east, crossing the ocean in its weakening current of loops and gyres. The base of that hook was her target now – a place she’d seen bigger seals congregate in previous years.

She swam, and the sea bed disappeared beneath her - so that the floor of the world gradually darkened to the ocean green of deepest water. Hennessey was one of the largest creatures in the sea, but here she was reduced to a tiny speck by miles of waves in every direction. She stayed within a body length of the surface most of the time. There, the angling sunshine rippled through the waves, casting a patchwork of light and shadow through the water. And it showed her no other large creatures – none appeared within the broad reach of any of her senses. She walked the ocean in solitary dominance, and travelled the rhythms of a solitary migrant alone.

But not entirely alone. She had seven companions. She had her pups. One of the rarest gifts of any fish in the sea, she had her pups.

In the long evolutionary history of her kin, across hundreds of millions of years, the advent of pupping rang a loud bell of evolutionary innovation. Unlike the bony fish, almost all sharks nurtured their eggs inside of their bodies even after they hatched, helping the young grow and become stronger. There were very few pups per brood – not the millions of eggs a big codfish would carelessly spawn into the uncaring ocean – so the pups entered the world strong and ready. But they had to be fed.

The mothers of her species – in fact Hennessey’s whole clan of warm-blooded sharks - made eggs in two types. The first dozen or so eggs could be fertilized and would grow. But afterward, she produced a second type - a nurse egg - meant only as food for her young. She made them steadily in her uterus, powering their production with her own body stores of fat and muscle. And each hatchling ate them and grew, and ate more. Her pups now were over four feet long, after 11 months of feeding them. They ate a lot of nurse eggs, and her body now cried out for fuel.

So she trudged towards the promise of food to the north. A place that now called out: Here was the food that could give your pups their final push.

Occasionally, she dove, angling down, using her weight to coast deeper into the green ink. The temperature collapsed as she sank, gaining the chill of the ancient water of the deeper depths. The light failed, but her other senses kept watch, and she could skim the seabed 500 meters deep with a flash of fins and sharp-dagger tail, raising a cheer from the worms that lived such dull lives, kicking up a stream of sediment that had not been disturbed for a thousand years.

She stayed in the deep only a little while. The bone cold challenged her ability to keep her pups warm with only the energy of her working muscles. So, she returned quickly to the warmth and light, returning to the world she could see and scan for opportunity. She’d look for a faint glimpse of distant prey to chase. She’d look for a challenge, or an easy meal.

She’d look for any opportunity that came to her.

Part 6. Whale Encounter

Late in the day after leaving the beach, past the shallows of Long Island but before she would get to Cape Cod, she felt something new. The long lateral line of her hearing detected the beginnings of a pounding through the water behind her. Not the churning foam that cold metallic propellers made, but a deeply rhythmic push. Familiar and comforting, but also tantalizing, it appeared in her hearing like a long-lost drumming.

She slowed and listened. Reversed course and waited. Slowly undulating in the constant green glow to keep her exact place in the current.

They came, lumbering near the surface, pushing a wave along with their great heads. They slid through the ocean, uncaring in the powerful up and down motion of their ocean-crossing tails - two slow giants and a tiny newborn calf. Breaking the surface every few minutes, slowly and methodically they approached.

Cautious! They paused a second when they saw her, veering slightly seaward. She fell in behind to evaluate and learn.

Not prey, not usually. When a great iron hull broke the back of one of them on the surface, or if a little one wandered off in a moment of inattention, then they could be prey. But usually they were too big and too fast and too ferocious.

But the baby was very tempting. An easy kill, confused and soft and weak. Hennessey’s brain flitted through the possibilities, evaluating, calculating. As if sensing her measuring gaze, the large whales pulled in closer alongside the yearling, sandwiching it between enough tonnage of muscle, bone and fluke to warn off attack.

The whales slightly quickened their pace through the olive green sea even as the shark dipped under them, drawing close enough to distinguish the soft little calf from its mighty parents, to see sunlight creeping through the narrow gaps between them. Her pups moved within her, as if to remind her of their needs. She flipped into hunting mode and prepared an approach to strike.

But a shadow disrupted her focus. Her vision went suddenly dim and by reflex she dove. She just barely avoided the mother whale as the behemoth descended on top of her.

It was as if the mother whale could read the shark’s intent. A thrash of the whale’s tail drove a blast of water along with it, kicking the shark into a leftward spin. The shark was momentarily helpless, and it took a moment before she righted herself, just in time to avoid the whale driving headfirst up like an immense living spear.

Hennessey twisted up and to the right, trying to parry this second charge, to slip through and administer a single good and fatal bite to the calf. The mother whale also twisted and as a last gambit pressed the top of her head under the calf’s belly, lifting its weight along with hers until they broke the plane of the surface entirely. There was an explosion of foam. Blinded, the shark felt the whale’s flank scrape hard against hers and with a lurch she was thrown aside.

Her hunting instinct now knew there was little chance of success. Or perhaps the mother shark recognized a kindred spirit protecting her young, mother whale to mother shark. Either way, the mother whale’s protection was too formidable– these whales, even the small one, were too well defended.

Pulling away, the thwarted shark dropped behind and below the whales. A chastened queen re- entering an uncaring sea. Still hungry in a blank and endless, empty blue. Swimming. Searching. Waiting.

Part 7. Seals Again

The clock of her hunger ticked as she loped northward, feeling colder the farther she moved. But there was a plan in Hennessey’s actions. This was the northern-most point of her journey – the apogee of her annual trip. Here, a different type of seal - larger, slower, in colder water - hauled out near a broad, large lump of rocky land, a place she could hope to feed. Maybe the last chance before the pups inside her were damaged by hunger.

She approached this other rookery slowly, using all her senses to observe the sea bed shallowing, smell the oily foam of the seals, and hear their calls. This habitat was far larger than Seal Rocks – and hosted prey that were also far larger.

Arriving, she followed ancient protocol carved into her behavior, and circled to find whatever other sharks might be there. Swimming on the surface, she boldly announced her presence in the social space of this hunting ground. She had never been so brazen before. But she’d never been this big, or this hungry.

Immediately there was a second shark behind her. Even bigger than she, it followed her every movement, each turn and diversion, as she swam towards the seals. It was a body length behind, then a half-length. When it nearly overtook her, it yawned its gaping mouth, and she bolted.

She resumed circling, and a second huge animal headed directly toward her. As they came closer to one another the other shark sped up, on a collision course. It was powering toward her with a churning noise of thrashing water, not veering. At the very last instant, Hennessey dove: avoiding a crash of gristle and fins, avoiding a tangle of teeth.

All morning she swam the complex dance of dominance. She gave ground more often than not, but not always. Once, while she was near the bottom, a male dropped down towards her from the surface and sinuously swam just above her for ten long tail beats. She had seen this dance before, when she had sought the male she needed to fertilize her eggs. Now she was exhausted by hunger and motherhood and dismissed him with a curt flick of a fin.

Gaining confidence, she circled smoothly, trying not to let her hunger take control, trying not to let it overrule her predator’s caution. Off in the murky water around her, she saw more than one successful prey capture, the seal blood and the distant splashes lighting her senses on fire with the iron smell of mammal. This gave her confidence and purpose.

Suddenly, her chance came. A large seal careened foolishly towards her. It was no easy target, and it rocketed off in a new direction, streaking for the rocks. Rocks that were too far away, Hennessey knew! She flipped her great tail to hotly pursue it, dropped her depth and sped up to track it from below. There were no other competitors nearby. Her predator’s brain could calculate her best attack, and she slipped, with certainty, into perfect position.

The seal kept its pace, looked in all directions, speeding faster than an eyeblink for the rocks. This was an error. Because Hennessey could track it, cutting off a deep escape. The mother shark closed in from below, instinctively projecting the course of the seal. Doing the math faster in her primitive lobes than most humans could consciously calculate, she propelled herself to where the seal would be. She rose to meet it, jaws agape, rocketing up smoothly and confidently and perfectly to intersect the line of the fleeing mammal. This was her element, her time. Every muscle and sinew coordinated in this glorious upward surge. Her leap was the culmination of her straining willpower, projecting a mass of muscle and an armor of skin and a honed set of sharpened teeth on a flashing rise towards the surface.

In slow motion every movement came together, perfectly timed, perfectly positioned.

The seal was in mid-air, leaping toward safety as the shark rose from beneath. Lifting out of the water, Hennessey surged upward toward the top of the seal’s leap the same second the seal reached it. It was a magnificent, terrifying sight. She yawned her jaws and captured the seal perfectly across its girth. Despite its weight, her vast momentum carried her upward, wedging the seal tightly in her grasp. A perfect capture.

The signals of a worthy kill flooded her senses. She bit down with all her strength, fell back with a geyser of water, and dove. Two other sharks followed, sliding in to snap up anything they could. She bit again and quickly swallowed, twisting at the last moment to regain possession of the rest of the body. Down near the bottom, she bit and swallowed once more, and fit this meal somehow into her body bulging with young.

She slowed and stopped, sphered in a bubble of ocean water still tinted red with dissipating blood. She felt full, weighed down, successful, vindicated.

This was enough. This would feed her pups. It would give her time to find the birthing place they needed. Amid the swirl of other sharks coming to inspect her kill, shooting through the scent of blood in the water, Hennessey breathed, serene and sated.

Part 8. A Circle of Death

Hennessey’s pups were not only big, they were also warm. Her muscles generated tremendous body heat with every tail stroke. Intricate loops in her blood vessels jealously kept this heat inside her, flouting the sucking cold of the water. So, her pups were constantly bathed in the warmth of her exertions.

But a basic problem existed for large, warm blooded sharks like Hennessey - the shock that would hit their pups if their small bodies were born into frigid water, spit out into the cold uncaring sea. She herself could haunt such cold waters, her bulk and metabolism could keep her warm for a while. But her pups would be born without her mass or ability to traverse long distances and find warm water. So, she had to find a stable cocoon of warmth for her pups to be born – far from the cold-water seals she was just feeding on. That created a conflict between what her hunting computer decided – “hunt where it is cold” - and what her mother’s brain demanded. Now that her hunting instinct was calmed by food, she could turn back south and find the warm cove her pups required.

She left the hook of rock housing the big seals, and struck out for the original rookery - where the small seals swam. Beyond that rookery, she knew there was a string of shallow sandy coves – almost lagoons - stretching to the south that could be the warm water coves she needed.

It was a short journey for such an ocean sojourner, especially with the metabolic glow of a full stomach. Within a day’s travel she retraced her path along the ocean highway. Arriving unerringly at Seal Rocks, she expected to find the small sharks and small seals that she’d so recently left...and then expected that she would move south to some warm nursery bay. Easy.

But Seal Rocks was not the same. The seals were all hauled up on the beach, frightened by a shallow-water frenzy. The young sharks raced from one side of the rookery to the other. Not hunting, just racing. They had been jolted from their normal behavior by some overwhelming stimulus. They had been jolted from their normal behavior by a smell.

Hennessey stopped. She sensed liver and blood and oil in the water - a heavy olfactory burden that crept up on her, quickly scrambling her senses and overpowering her decisions. There was already a burning need to be cautious. But caution lay crushed under that smell. Slick smells of fish oil and metallic blood in the water trapped her in a sensory prison.

She spun, very much like the younger sharks were doing, swimming a frantic tight circle trying to triangulate the origin of the smell. The direction of the scent was not toward the seals at Seal Rocks. Instead it was toward the south and west – toward the beach.

Hennessey crept in this direction warily, moving away from Seal Rocks. The bloody smell reeked of danger but exerted a pull that she found irresistible, even though the warm water coves she needed for her pups were further to the south, along a different trajectory. With fatal attraction in one direction and pupping lagoons in another, conflicting decisions warred within her. Finally, the increasing scent took complete charge and she moved toward it.

Halfway toward the beach from Seal Rocks, she sensed something else – a sound that increased slowly, a coarse pounding in the water, human machines circling in great number. Little by little she approached a ring of human noises. And soon the noise rose to such a pitch that it became a vicious pounding of floating engines. The sound defined a stinking patch of ocean that had been converted into a death stage.

Other sharks swirled, just as confused, equally trapped, a congregation of terrible risk. Under the deadly circle of boats, frantic sharks churned and twisted and snapped at nothing, their senses burning with the chemical intensity ignited from above. The blood was so thick that it was more than a smell now; it hung in the sea like a shrieking fog, commanding an attack, driving sharks all around to spin in near-frenzy. It was an oily reek dumped in the water for a terrible purpose.

The boats that circled above, dumping blood into the water, were looking for her. They’d gathered after Hennessey’s boogie board attack, having seen her from the beach, ignited by a raging, wrong idea that they had to protect their beach from a violent monster. Driven by the subsequent social media storm that drove a spiral of violence, the boats coaxed sharks to the surface with a lie of liquid chum, and then shot them dead.

Hennessey circled, trying to resist. She circled again, pulled toward the southern shores and safety - away from this melee. She circled again, now pulled toward the center, finding even higher concentrations of chum. The circle of death flared every reflex Hennessey had, and all at once she arrowed towards the overpowering scent. She bulled between the other crazed sharks, thrashing the sea into froth. Frantic to attack the source of this chemical insult, she charged towards the boats and the guns. Heedless of the danger.

Then, an overwhelming new smell ignited her agitation. It rang the alarm bell of her highest alert, throwing over her frenzy in an instant of screaming danger. Overlain on the melee and the chum were the sounds of explosions, and the smell of fresh shark blood. Something was killing her kind.

Part 9. Escape

On the surface, Hennessey rocketed toward the deadly ring of chum and guns, made oblivious to the danger to her and her pups by the brain-numbing smell. The sea steamed with offal. The surface reeked with the death of her kind.

As Hennessey hurtled forward, other sharks gave way. No other shark could stand in the way of her bulk and intensity. She was almost to the center of the deadly ring. Then different type of human engine sound came from seaward, high pitched and insistent. First the sound moved quickly toward her, and then sluiced around to be directly in front. The new sound growled loudly to signal the roil of an engine reversing and a hard-turning rudder, as the same small boat Hennessey had seen at the beach days before came hurtling in front of her and stopped.

The boat blocked her path. Hennessey turned away. The boat followed, keeping itself between Hennessey and the melee, serving to break the chain of frenzy that had consumed Hennessey’s actions. Of course, Hennessey could dive under this boat and resume her attack. She was a split second from doing this when she felt her pups move.

She stopped, and the red-tinted water around her cleared for a minute. The currents had shifted, and a clean and teeming sea reached up to embrace her with its long cool fingers. Her frenzy evaporated.

Hennessey turned towards the warm shoreline bays without the slightest hesitation. She forgot the frenzy, now behind her, and remembered her pups. They were ready – they were large enough and grown enough to leave her warm protection. Hennessey abandoned her attack and headed south.

The small boat shadowed her. It puttered slowly behind, and then pulled alongside when Hennessey’s destination became clear. Hennessey and the boat headed for a tiny bay on the south shore surrounded by marshes that promised a warm embrace. They made the crossing together, Hennessey quietly accepting the slow churn of the low throttled engine as a new part of her regular world.

Near the mouth of the bay, Hennessey paused, circling a few times, tasting the bay waters for new dangers. The small boat pulled ahead, and Hennessey heard a splash.

In front of her suddenly appeared a thin figure, long limbed like a seal, but without a seal’s scent. And unlike seals that panicked and ran the second they saw her, this creature floated still and curious, looking at her intently, calmly. Hennessey calmly looked back.

One thing was a universal among all hunters in the sea – the ability to focus attention on something, usually prey. This creature could focus as intently as Hennessey could, could focus on her the way she focused on it. Floating, watching, curious. Observing cautiously. Waiting. Absorbing the moment.

A second universal among ocean hunters were eyes – the guideposts of attention. This creature had odd eyes – one large crystalline eye with what looked to her like two small eyes underneath. Those strange eyes were compelling, fixed as they were directly on Hennessey, still as they were in their regal regard. Hennessey’s eyes looked back.

Both figures floated motionless. Shark and human watching, learning. The moment held, stretched.

Then Hennessey flicked a fin, turned, and powered into a deep glide towards her bay. Leaving the apparition alone in a green ocean.

Part 10. Kings and Queens

Every tail stroke drove Hennessey towards the cove she had selected for the birth of her insistent pups. As the water shallowed, ocean waves calmed, and the water grew greener and warmer. There was a smell of marsh sulfur in the water, alongside the musty taste of useless minnows. The sun above was hot, heating the water in a thick upper layer. Yet the sea bed was sandy and clean, and the depth was enough for Hennessey’s bulk.

She patrolled the small bay, marching along the shoreline back and forth, feeling the pups’ increasing movements. Hennessey twisted in sharp turns as she swam, always keeping in the shallows, always keeping warm.

After one twist, a new tail appeared, back near her rear pelvic fins. The new tail seemed tiny in comparison to her own bulk, but was already bigger than the tails of most of the fish in the sea. Hennessey did not stop. Within a few seconds, the new tail beat back and forth on its own, twisted, and within a few seconds literally pulled the pup out of Hennessey’s uterus. Released into the ocean at last, the new shark rolled and straightened and settled onto the bottom as if to catch its breath and figure out where it was.

Six more times a new tail appeared and dragged a pup into the warm and waiting sea. All seven newborns rolled into the waiting embrace of the cove. Then one-by-one, all seven small white sharks, pups no more, headed out into the green water, leaving their mother and her labors behind.

Hennessey remained on patrol even after the pups were gone, stalking back and forth along the shore, until she could feel no more of the frantic squirmings inside her. Once they subsided, she turned and sought out the mouth of the cove, following her pups out toward the open sea, toward the ocean they would inherit, future kings and queens of their world.