ate these stones, maybe for ballast, maybe for digestion. No one knew why. Up to ten pounds of rocks in the gut. Grinning, I turned it over in my palms.
I slipped it into the pocket of my coat. There was something reassuring about its weight, its heft. Its perfect sphericality. Its wildness. It had been carried in the belly of a seal until it was rendered flawless.
There was a noise behind me. I whirled around and saw Andrew. Crimson hat. Hands in pockets. Smirking face. He was a little too close. I hadn’t heard him until he was almost on top of me. I stood up quickly, dusting off my hands.
“You want to be careful,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
His eyes were so blue. They looked like windows, as though I were seeing through him to the sky behind.
“You don’t want to get hurt again,” he said. “A little thing like you.”
I was gripping my camera like a shield. Andrew smiled and sloped off, shoulders hunched, heading for the cabin. I watched him go with relief.
Then a hint of motion caught my eye. There was someone else outside—a shape on Lighthouse Hill. I thought it was Lucy. But the figure was gone so fast that I could have been mistaken. It could have been a trick of the light.
WE ARE DEEP into Shark Season. I came to the islands in late summer, and my arrival coincided with a vast influx of white sharks. (The great, I have learned, is only used by ignorant nonbiologists.) On my travels, I have encountered dreadful creatures before—leeches with a penchant for armpits, crocodiles masquerading as logs, irate lions. For nearly five months, I once lived in the rainforest; I slept in a hut and bathed with a bucket. The rules of my visits were strict: no littering, no hiking except on the designated trails, and, whatever the provocation, no destruction of any living thing. This included venomous tarantulas and foot-long centipedes. I loved that place as a photographic object, but by the end I was dying for a cup of real coffee, a change of clothes, and the feel of a stiff breeze on my skin. I found that, of all things, I missed the look of straight lines. There were none in that eruption of greenery.
But the white sharks have a lethal charm all their own.
Galen and Forest are our shark specialists. In the past month, I have learned a bit more about these two, but my initial impression of them has not changed all that much. Galen is white-haired, venerable, and never in a particularly good mood. He still strikes me as being an elderly god of the sea—possibly omnipotent, probably omniscient. He knows everything that happens here. He watches the tides. He organizes repairs on the cabin, the boats. He can recite the history of the Farallon Islands with the scholarly air of a college professor. He has a thousand animal facts at his fingertips. Though his raison d’être is the sharks, I have seen him sitting on the porch beside Lucy, helping her to dissect the wing of a dead cormorant like a trained veterinarian. He can read the coming weather at a glance.
Forest, on the other hand, is an enigma. A dark-haired, cold-blooded naiad. Galen’s right hand. Forest eats, sleeps, and breathes work. I have yet to hold a conversation with him that has not centered on something to do with biology: the anatomy of harbor seals, the local varieties of comb jellies, or the weather patterns as related to bird migrations. The one time I dared to ask him where he’d grown up, he shot me a withering look, like a Victorian butler reprimanding an impertinent housemaid. Like the others here, he seems to have no past, or a distinct unwillingness to discuss it. Once, long ago, I read that all nuns who joined a convent were forbidden from speaking about their lives before. The Farallon Islands seem to be a religious order in their own right, with a similar vow of silence.
Galen and Forest catalog and track the population of white sharks. Throughout the autumn, the two men rise at four-thirty in the morning to start the watch. During every hour of daylight, one of them is in position in the lighthouse, keeping an eye out for blood on the water. Against every basic human instinct, they hurry toward a feeding frenzy. They board one of the boats and head out to sea, armed with video cameras, tagging equipment, and the “dummy,” a surfboard painted like a seal to lure the sharks in closer. The two of them live to make contact with these creatures. Galen and Forest are lunatics, to put it frankly. Galen has mentioned that he dreams about the white sharks every single night. Forest sketches a shark’s silhouette—lean, rough, and spiked with fins—on any nearby surface. He does this unconsciously, doodling on the table, on a book I once left open on the couch.
At this time of year, there can be two or three kills a day. The sharks eat the seals and sea lions. There is enough prey here to sustain a massive host of predators. The birds will mark the spot like an X on a map. Watching from the lighthouse, Forest or Galen will spy a collection of gulls diving over a patch of sea. The cry will go up. Boots are thrown on—coats flung over shirts—a thunder of feet on the stairs. Forest uses a child’s scooter with streamers on the handlebars to make his downhill run from the lighthouse that much faster. One of these days he will break his neck.
There is no pier on the Farallon Islands. The tides have seen to that. Any attempts at building a dock have invariably been washed away. There is a powerful undertow. There are riptides that come and go without warning or rhythm. There are reefs and shoals. The islands are home to two small boats, both of which must be lowered into the sea by crane. They are too large to ride in the Billy Pugh, of course. Instead, they must be hooked directly to the steel cable itself.
The first is a rowboat (called the Lunchbox, I am sad to say, since its crew tends to feel like a tasty snack when moored next to a white shark). Then there is the Janus, a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. This is a sturdier thing, with benches and a deckhouse, as well as a railing that, to my untrained eye, appears to be for decorative purposes only. The Janus is equipped with a motor, which makes this boat the preferred method of transport. Both boats spend their free time resting on a mattress of rubber tires at East Landing, a thirty-foot cliff. I have seen them being lowered into the water, swinging merrily on the end of the chain, plummeting into black waves larger than themselves.
I have not yet been brave enough to venture out on Shark Watch. I have stayed safely on land. It is unnerving to think that those monsters are always out there, patrolling the dark surf. Waiting. For the most part, the white sharks remain hidden, tucked inside a wave, buried in the deep currents. Once or twice, however, I have glimpsed a dorsal fin cresting the water, as menacing as the periscope of an enemy submarine.
MY LOVE AFFAIR with the islands has continued. At times I feel drugged, wandering the shoreline with a stupid grin on my face, camera aloft. Each snapshot seems like a benediction. We may never know what another person is thinking—never truly get into anyone else’s head—but photography brings us as close as anything can. When the members of an audience at an art gallery look at a picture, they can step for a moment inside the mind of the artist. Like telepathy. Like time travel. At some future date, when people gaze at my photographs of the islands, they will see what I saw. They will stand where I stood, on this granite, surrounded by this ocean. Perhaps they will even feel some of the elation I have experienced here.
Earlier today, I found myself at North Landing, where a dozen California sea lions were lolling in the light. They maneuvered around like canine mermaids. Their bodies seemed split in two; the upper half was alert and upright—pert little ears, sharp eyes, and a snout bristling with whiskers—whereas the back half was weighted down with fat and fins, slithering across the flagstones. They toasted themselves like marshmallows, plunging into the frothy shallows to cool off.
Soon I realized that one of the creatures was injured. It did not romp and play with the others, diving and hunting fish. Instead it lay on the shore, one flipper cradled against
