Blueback

VIII

Abel and his mother went ashore to wait for trouble. But trouble never came. Once or twice they saw the mirror flash of binoculars upon them, but fairly soon the compressor started up again and Costello and his offsider went back to stripping the reef bare, as though nothing could keep them from business. Plenty of abalone came to the surface but no speared fish, and, to Abel’s great relief, no huge blue groper. Old Blueback stayed holed up, nursing his sore head, safe from spears.

Then, quite abruptly, at four o’clock, a Fisheries patrol boat swung in around the headland and skated across Longboat Bay. It ran alongside Costello’s boat and three officers boarded her. Half an hour later the abalone boat left Robbers Head at the end of a tow rope with a cloud of gulls off her stern. As it steamed out onto the open sea, the patrol boat let off a blast of its horn that echoed all the way into the forest.

For the rest of that summer, Blueback kept clear of Abel’s mother. Costello’s fines cost him his licence and put him out of business. Abel was a little disappointed that he had never met the man. It would have been thrilling to come face to face with a real life villain.

But a couple of weeks after the Costello business, Abel got to know enough about the man to know he never wanted to meet him after all.

A huge tiger shark swam into the bay. Abel took his boat out to see the thing swimming sluggishly up and down the beach. His mother stayed ashore; she said she never wanted to see a tiger shark again as long as she lived. Abel couldn’t blame her but his curiosity got the better of him.

The shark looked wrinkled and flabby when it should have been thick and powerful as a tree. It wasn’t hard to see why. Everywhere it went it towed a big red buoy on a length of chain. It had a stainless steel meat hook in its jaws and it swam like a ghost of itself. The shark couldn’t dive without being defeated by the buoy and dragged painfully back to the surface. The day it was hooked it would have dragged it underwater for hours but now its strength was gone and every turn of its head, every kick of the tail was agony. The buoy dragged behind like a ball on a chain. The tiger shark was starving to death and dying of exhaustion. It was a pitiful sight and it sickened Abel. If he’d had a gun he would have pulled alongside and shot it through the head to end its suffering. There was no way he could save the shark now, even if he could cut it free.

So Abel watched the shark all afternoon. In the end he came ashore and watched it from the jetty. It swam feebly up and down, restless with its terrible agony. That night he sat on the verandah and saw moonlight flash on the dragging buoy which made a miserable sparkling wake on the still water.

In the morning the tiger shark was dead. The tide left it stiff and leathery on the beach and Abel turned the red buoy over in his hands to see the name stencilled on the side. COSTELLO.

He towed the shark out to sea, replaced the buoy with some lead weights and cut it free. It sailed down into the black deep like a torpedoed ship.

Abel went back to school in the new year feeling older, different. That summer he learnt that there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.