Shark Drunk Page 2
A short time later, both rams were slaughtered. The Aasjord family had lost all sympathy for the two creatures. Now, their pelts hang over a rod in the small shed.
—
It was on a night like this one, two years ago, when Hugo first mentioned Greenland sharks. Hugo’s father had gone on whale hunts from the age of eight, and he’d seen how the Greenland shark would emerge from the deep and steal huge pieces of blubber from the whales as the crew drove and flensed them alongside the boat.
Once, the crew harpooned a persistent Greenland shark and used the derrick to haul it up by the tail. Even in its half-dead condition, as it hung upside down with a whale harpoon stuck through its back, the shark gorged itself on the fresh whale meat within reach. That Greenland shark took forever to die. It lay there for hours, eyeing the crew as they moved about on deck and spooking even the toughest and most seasoned fisherman.
Another hot summer day while drifting in Vestfjorden aboard the fishing boat Hurtig, one of the fishermen decided to cool off by going for a swim and dove into the sea. When a Greenland shark suddenly surfaced just a few yards away, the fisherman scurried back into the boat in a flash—much to the amusement of the rest of the crew.
Stories like this fueled Hugo’s imagination, brewing inside of him for forty years. That night, when he talked about the Greenland shark, a gleam appeared in his eyes and his voice took on a special tone. The tales he’d heard as a child had never lost their hold. He had seen most of the fish and animals that live in the ocean, he said, but he’d never seen a Greenland shark. I hadn’t either. Hugo didn’t have to work very hard to convince me it was time. I took the bait, so to speak. Hook, line, and sinker.
I also grew up near the sea and had gone fishing ever since I was a little boy. Getting a nibble always gave me the feeling that just about anything might come up from the deep. A whole world existed down there, containing countless creatures that I knew nothing about. In books I’d seen pictures of the known species, and that was more than enough. Life in the ocean appeared richer and more exciting than life on land. Strange beings swam around, practically right under our noses, but we couldn’t see them and didn’t know them. We could only guess at what went on down there.
Ever since, the sea has retained its attraction for me. Much of what we find mysterious or exciting when we’re children loses its aura by adolescence. But for me the ocean simply grew bigger, deeper, and more amazing. Maybe an atavism came into play; something had skipped over several generations in my family before I inherited it from my great-great-grandfather, who had ended up at the bottom of the sea so long ago.
And there was something else, something I wasn’t fully aware of at the time and may not see clearly even now, except on the periphery of my vision—like when the rotating beam of a lighthouse rips apart the darkness with a swift flash of light.
There were actually a lot of other things I should have been doing when, without hesitation, I replied, “Sure, let’s go to sea and catch a Greenland shark.”
3
We have mapped the world, and we no longer fill in the blank spaces with strange monsters and fantastical animals conjured from our imagination. But maybe we should, because all life on the planet has not yet been discovered—far from it. Scientists have catalogued just under two million species of animals to date, but biologists estimate that altogether there are about ten million multicelled organisms on our planet.2 Undoubtedly the greatest discoveries await us in the ocean, where new life-forms are constantly being discovered. In fact, we still know very little even about large creatures that swim near the coast. There could be as many sharks in the ocean as people on earth.3 And who knows anything about the Greenland sharks swimming in the deep troughs and channels of Vestfjorden, sharks that can grow to twenty-four feet in length and weigh twenty-five hundred pounds? Other than Hugo, of course.
—
The Greenland shark is prehistoric. Reportedly, it swims at the bottom of deep Norwegian fjords and all the way up to the North Pole. Yet deep-water sharks are usually much smaller than those that live at shallower depths. The Greenland is the major exception. It can grow bigger than a great white and is thus the world’s largest flesh-eating shark. (The basking shark and whale shark are bigger, but they eat only plankton.) Marine biologists have recently discovered that the Greenland shark can reach an age of four, maybe even five hundred years. That makes it by far the oldest vertebrate on the planet. The shark we’re going to catch could have been swimming slowly around in some dark oceanic abyss well before the Mayflower set sail for the new colony of North Virginia, or even a hundred years earlier, when Nicolaus Copernicus concluded that the earth is orbiting the sun. It could be half the age of Methuselah. According to tradition, Methuselah perished in the year of the Flood, and maybe the swelling water was what finally got him. The Greenland shark would have found the altered circumstances on earth very agreeable, considering the unparalleled abundance of food that must have been available.
One more thing: in Norway, people sometimes assume the Greenland shark is related to the porbeagle. But we’re talking about two different species. The porbeagle is smaller and has tasty flesh that could potentially be served in a restaurant—if it were not on the endangered list, of course. The Greenland shark is wild and not on any list, but few people would ever want to eat the flesh of its massive body. Its meat is laced with a toxin that, when ingested, produces a feeling of extreme intoxication and can be fatal.
Still, cost what it might, we were going to catch a voracious monster with many hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind it, with potentially fatal poisons in its bloodstream and teeth like that of an oversized steel trap, only a lot more of them.
—
It was two years ago that Hugo and I first made our decision, and now the summer night sky takes on the orange tinge of caviar. We’re sitting here exchanging Greenland shark news, because we’ve both found out a thing or two since we last met. Most sources in print describe it as slow and sluggish. Unbelievably, the swiftest kinds of shark can reach a top speed of almost forty-five miles per hour. Hugo doesn’t agree that the Greenland shark is so much slower.
“Then how do they explain that the remains of polar bears and the fastest fish in the sea, including halibut and mature salmon, have been found in the stomachs of Greenland sharks? How slow could it be?” asks Hugo.
“Most Greenland sharks carry a parasite that attacks the cornea and makes them partially blind. Some are depicted with what looks like finger-long worms hanging from their eyeballs. One theory is that the prey is hypnotized by the shark’s eyes, which are a luminous green in the dark,” I say, pleased that I can tell Hugo something about the sea that he might not already know.
My joy is short-lived. Hugo is not impressed.
“If that’s true, then how is the shark able to bring down reindeer in Alaska? And how does it catch seabirds? Are you saying it hypnotizes them too?”
Hugo launches into a brief lecture on the sensory organs of the Greenland shark. If the shark is blind or partially blind, this would be less of a handicap than you would imagine, because it’s so dark down there in the deep anyway. But the Greenland shark has a secret electromagnetic weapon. Like many other sharks, Greenland sharks are equipped with so-called ampullae of Lorenzini. Through these jelly-filled, half-inch-long ampullae, it can sense changes in electric fields down to a few billionths of a volt. That’s probably how it detects prey buried in the sand and how it manages to sneak up on seals lying or sleeping on the ocean floor before attacking.
I look at him, trying not to show that this is new to me.
“Didn’t you know that seals sleep on the ocean floor?” he says, a bit gleefully, before continuing his lecture.
“Maybe the Greenland shark uses these properties to catch animals that are much faster, or maybe it finds fish that are injured or weak or buried in the sandy bottom. Maybe it usually moves slowly and soundlessly, perfectly camouflaged, snapping up its p
rey…”
I can tell that he’s about to get to the point.
“But I’m pretty sure it’s capable of increasing speed in sudden lunges. That’s the only logical explanation,” he concludes.
We haven’t yet discussed certain details. For instance, what do we do if we actually bring a Greenland shark up to the surface? I suggest that maybe we can try to tie a rope around the base of its tail and haul the shark up backward so that it passes out. Sharks have to keep swimming in order to take in oxygen. The same is true of mackerel.
Hugo shakes his head. He thinks we would risk the shark sinking. Maybe instead we should try to steer it toward land, the way the Inuit do. The weak link in this plan is that we’d have to persuade the shark to swim in the direction we want to go. The Inuit use two small kayaks on either side, steering the Greenland shark between them, while we have only one boat. By the way, the Inuit traditionally regard the Greenland shark as one of the animals that help shamans.
“Maybe we could pull it up onto an islet—if we can get the islet between us and the shark,” I say.
Hugo blithely ignores my suggestion, presumably because it’s so stupid.
“What if we drag the shark ashore? If we have time to wrap the rope around a tree, we can then move off in the opposite direction and pull the shark all the way up onto land,” I propose.
“A little better, but I’ve been thinking about this, and I know what we need to do. When the Greenland shark comes up to the surface, we stick another shark hook into it and tie it to a float with a short line. Then we can figure out the rest.”
—
If we manage to get the shark, either backward or forward, to one of the docks or beaches around Skrova, Hugo is interested in the liver. He can extract a barrel of oil from the shark’s liver and use it to make paint. Then we’ll paint Aasjord Station as part of its renovation. Hugo is pondering various art projects for which he could use the shark.
After going on like this for a couple of hours, we’ve run out of juice. This is not the time of the midnight sun, but it’s still bright daylight. I sit outside on the porch to stare at nature. It’s truly a pliant night, with almost no breeze. From the waters of the sound comes a faint hint of salt and rotting seaweed. All our gear is ready and waiting on Skrova, at Aasjord Station. We have chains and thirteen hundred feet of the best quality nylon line. We have shark hooks eight inches long and made of stainless steel, and weights to make the line sink. We have two big floats to absorb the pull if the shark bites, so it will wear itself out and, if necessary, we can keep it a safe distance away.
The only thing we’re missing is bait. The time has come for me to gather up the remains of the Scottish Highland bull lying somewhere out in a field. Hugo doesn’t have the stomach for it. After a botched operation, he often feels the urge to retch, even though it’s now physically impossible for him to vomit.
Luckily that’s something I can still do.
4
Life cannot exist without death, and the cycle of life is what keeps the planet in harmony. At least that’s my philosophical solace while, early the next afternoon, I trudge alone through the woods, following vague directions about where to find the sure-to-be-rotting carcass of a Scottish bull.
Scottish Highland cattle are a primitive and hardy race that spend the whole winter outdoors and look something like musk oxen with long bangs. They are herd animals with a strict hierarchy. It’s best not to get too close when they are calving because these animals have retained all their natural instincts. With their long, sharp horns and enormous strength, these ancient creatures can do much more damage than an aggressive ram. Highland cattle often scare the living daylights out of berry pickers.
A farmer had been raising these animals for a couple of years. Or rather, he’d left them to graze in the forest while he worked on an oil platform in the North Sea. The first time he slaughtered one of them, he used a humane killer, which drives a bolt into the animal’s forehead and kills ordinary large cattle instantly. But the forehead of the Scottish bull is two and a half inches thick, and it turned out that the bolt merely knocked the beast unconscious. It looked dead, but as soon as the farmer had severed the main artery, the bull got up and began running around, panic-stricken, blood gushing out over the farmer and his kids, who barely managed to escape to safety.
The bull that was now our bait had to be shot several times with a .308 rifle, which can kill a moose at a distance of half a mile. Only after the third shot did the bull finally keel over.
But where is the carcass?
I follow the directions and reach a field. According to what I’ve been told, the remains of the bull are lying among the trees on the far side of the field. It’s a summer day, one of those warm and sunny days that you rarely get this far north. Songbirds are chittering as if they’ve drunk champagne for lunch; bumblebees are lazily buzzing around the flowers. I see red clover, oxeye daisies, geraniums, and multitudes of that puffy yellow flower that has so many names: bird’s-foot trefoil, bacon and eggs, Dutchman’s clogs, lady’s slipper, granny’s toenails, and devil’s fingers. This flower has a particular fragrance that has locally prompted nicknames of a highly profane nature: shit-stink flower, Satan’s diarrhea, and perhaps the least appealing name ever ascribed to a flower: ass-wiper gut grass.
At any rate, it would have been a perfect day for a picnic on Engeløya, except for the whole carcass thing.
Not far from where I’m searching for the carcass, there is an old sacrificial altar called a horg. Through Hugo I’ve developed a certain interest in the hollowed stone, since he has put it in one of his paintings. Povl Simonsen at the University of Tromsø is one of the few people who has written anything about the horg. He maintains that there are only two sacrificial stones of this type in northern Norway. One is on the island of Sørøya in Vest Finnmark; the other is at Sandvågan on Engeløya. Simonsen dates the stone to somewhere between 1000 BC and AD 1000.
It’s astonishing how imprecise this is. Simonsen says the stone could be either from the late Bronze Age or the late Iron Age. The explanatory text on the sign recently posted next to the stone by the Directorate for Cultural Heritage is not doing any better. It says that the stone is from the period between 1500 BC to AD 1000. In other words, the stone might be 3,500 years old, or maybe only 1,000 years old, which means that no one has any idea who used it or when or how. It’s rather like reading in the newspaper that the new world record in the hundred meters was under one hour, and that it was set by a man or a woman between the age of one and a hundred.
Because of the hollows in the stone, it was likely used for sacrifices. The hollows might have been meant to collect the blood or fat from humans or animals. The stone faces west, which prompts speculation that it might have had something to do with sun worship. Maybe the people sacrificed virgins, or merely domestic animals, or maybe just milk, butter, and grain. Maybe they held sacrificial celebrations once a year. That was one way to bind people to a specific group. Everyone participated, and there was guaranteed to be music, dancing, food, and intoxicating drink. In my mind a certain thirst for blood was also involved. A way of remembering or reenacting the violence that had brought their forefathers together in groups.4
—
So I’m wandering around speculating about animals and sacrifices when a little gust of wind sweeps across the ground in my direction. Judging by the smell, I’m on the right track. The stench makes me gag, which in turn brings tears to my eyes, and I stumble over a big tussock and land in cow shit. After a night of bingeing on red wine with Hugo, I’m not really prepared for this. Halfway across the field I can hear the flies. Hugo has sent along with me what I thought was a gas mask, but it turns out to be a dust mask, which is totally worthless in fending off the stink of death. In our part of the world most people have forgotten what death smells like. The stench begins spreading almost instantly after the body dies, but it only gets really bad after three days, when the bacteria inside the stomach st
art feeding upward to consume their dead host. During the process, waste gases and extremely toxic fluids are created. Our sensory organs explicitly warn us to stay as far away as possible from such poisonous substances. Not to seek them out as I’m now doing.
A renowned evolutionary biologist once described us humans, no matter how high standing and cultivated we may be, as a thirty-two-foot-long canal through which food passes. Everything else we have acquired through evolution—the brain, glands, organs, muscles, skeleton, and so on—is extra equipment built around this canal.
There’s not much use in reducing the human being to such a basic function. But the earth’s most widespread life-form, with the exception of microorganisms, is a canal surrounded by a muscle: worms and maggots. Hardly any other creatures have colonized the earth more efficiently, and nowhere are there more of them than on the floor of the ocean. A dead whale carcass becomes the home for millions of worms.
Tens of thousands of whales die every year. They are not buried in mythical whale cemeteries to the sound of mournful whale songs accompanied by some sonorous hydraulic sea organ of the deep. Some drift ashore, but most sink to the bottom. The smell attracts carrion scavengers from far and near, and they establish what is called a whale fall community. A slow explosion of life occurs when colonies of various types of parasites establish themselves. They can keep going for decades before the whale skeleton is stripped clean. And even the bones become food. A special type of worm that looks like a tiny red palm tree will attack the skeleton. And even that is not the last meal these carcasses provide. Soon the bacteria take over. They turn toxic sulfides into nutrient-rich sulfates. This process alone will provide nourishment for four hundred different species, including bivalves. And after everything has been consumed, all of these species drift onward, surviving on standby mode as they search for the next oasis. This is something we know a lot about, since scientists have lowered dead, stranded whales down into the deep to study exactly what happens.5