Free Peter Benchley's Creature by Peter Benchley Page A

then put the boat in reverse. "Thanks," he called to the boys.
    Chase passed Max his flippers and climbed up through the door in the transom.
    Max looked angry. "That was really dumb, Dad," he said. "You could've—"
    "It was a calculated risk, Max," Chase said. "That's what dealing with wild animals is. I was pretty sure she wouldn't bite me; I made a judgment that the risk was worth taking, to save the life of that mama shark."
    "But suppose you'd been wrong. Is a shark's life worth as much as yours?"
    "That's not the point; the point is, I knew what I had to do. The Bible may say man has dominion over animals, but that doesn't mean we've got the right to wipe them off the face of the earth."

    *   *   *

    Max was standing at the end of the pulpit, Chase behind him on the foredeck, as they passed through a stretch of deep water between the islands.
    Suddenly Max shouted, "Dad!" and pointed down into the water.
    A dolphin had appeared from nowhere and was riding the bow wave of the boat, coasting effortlessly on the bulb of water created by the boat's forward motion. They could see its shiny gray back, its pointed snout, the puckered blowhole in the top of its head. They could hear sounds—faint clicks and trills—coming from somewhere within the animal.
    "He's talking!" Max said excitedly. "That's how they talk! I wonder what he's saying,"
    "Probably just jabbering . . . maybe calling his buddies over, maybe saying something like 'Whee!'"
    For several moments, the dolphin's body barely moved; it let the momentum of the boat carry it along. Then, for some reason, it accelerated, thrusting its horizontal tail up and down, and pulled ahead of the boat. It slowed, waited for the boat to catch up and resumed its ride.
    "Look at that tail," Chase said.
    Max leaned over the pulpit. "What about it?"
    "The left fluke. Look at the scars."
    Max looked, and saw five deep white slashes, an inch or two apart, in the flesh of the tail fluke. "What did that?" he asked.
    "This dolphin was attacked by something," Chase said. "I'd say he was lucky to get away."
    "A shark?"
    "No, not a shark, no shark did that. A shark bite would be semicircular."
    "A killer whale?"
    "No, you'd see punctures or drag marks from the conical teeth, not sharp slashes like those." Chase frowned. "They look like claw marks, like a tiger's or a bear's."
    "What lives in the ocean and has five claws?"
    "Nothing," Chase said. "Nothing I've ever heard of."

    11

    THE dock had been built in a cove on the northwest corner of the island, and as the boat puttered up to it, Chase nudged Max and pointed overhead and smiled: a pair of ospreys were flying high over the water, searching for food for their young, which were sheltered safely on nesting poles that Chase had built.
    "Once ospreys were almost wiped out," he told Max. "For some reason, their eggs had become so weak they were cracking before the chicks could hatch. A scientist got to wondering what was doing it, and he found out: DDT. The pesticide was leaching into the water and poisoning the food chain, and the fish the ospreys were eating were destroying their eggs. That discovery was the beginning of the Environmental Defense Fund. Once they got DDT banned, the ospreys started coming back. They're in pretty good shape now."
    A one-winged blue heron stood sentinel over his tidal pool by the dock.
    "Hey, Chief," Tall Man called to the bird, then he looked at Chase and said, "The Chief is pissed. His lunch is late."
    "That's Chief Joseph;" Chase explained to Max. "Some kids found him over at the borough beach. He had a broken wing; the vet they took him to said the wing was too badly smashed to fix, he wanted to put him to sleep, but I said no, just amputate the wing and let us have him. He's become a real prima donna. Twice a day he walks around in the shallows, the rest of the time he stands there and complains that we don't feed him enough."
    "Why'd you name him Chief Joseph?" Max asked.
    "Tall named him that,