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hungry," Chase said. "Probably so full of whale meat she won't eat for a week."
    "Or longer," said Chase's son. Max sat on the bench seat facing the monitor and meticulously copied its data onto graph paper. "Some of the carcharhinids can go more than a month without eating." He made the remark with studied casualness, as if such esoterica about marine biology was on the tip of every twelve-year-old's tongue.
    "Well, excuse me, Jacques Cousteau," Tall Man said, chuckling.
    "Don't mind Tall Man, he's just jealous," said Chase, touching Max's shoulder. "You're right." He was proud, and moved, for he knew that Max was reaching out, trying to do his part in building a bridge that, under other circumstances, would have been built years ago.
    Tall Man nodded toward shore and said, "Let's go tell the folks on the beach that the lady ain't hungry. They'd be tickled to hear it."
    Chase looked through the window at the rocky beach of Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Though it was not yet nine in the morning, a few families had begun to arrive with their picnic hampers and Frisbees and inner tubes; a few young surfers in wet suits were bobbing on the minuscule waves, waiting for a ride that might never come—not today, at least, for there was no wind and no forecast of any.
    He smiled at the thought of the scramble, the panic, that would ensue if the people had any idea why this innocent-looking white boat was cruising back and forth out here, less than five hundred yards from the beach. People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks, loved to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in the water anywhere within ten miles— especially a great white shark—and their love changed instantly to fear and loathing.
    If they knew that he and Max and Tall Man were tracking a sixteen-foot white shark that likely weighed a ton or more, their affection would turn to blood lust. They'd holler for it to be killed. Then, of course, as soon as someone did kill it, they'd go right back to mouthing off about how they loved sharks and how all God's creatures ought to be protected.
    "The shark's coming up," Max said, reading digital numbers on the screen.
    Chase bent to the screen again, shading it. "Yeah, she's been cooling off at two hundred feet, but she's already at less than a hundred."
    "Where'd she find two hundred feet between here and Block?" asked Tall Man.
    "Must be a ditch out there. I tell you, Tall, she knows her territory. Anyway, she's coming up the slope." From a hook on the bulkhead Chase took a still camera with an 85-mm-200-mm zoom lens and hung it around his neck. He said to Max, "Let's go see if she'll pose for us." Then, to Tall Man, "Check the monitor now and then just to make sure she doesn't buzz off somewhere."
    He went to the doorway and looked at the shore again. "I hope she doesn't come up between us and the beach. Mass hysteria, we do not need."
    "You mean like Matawan Creek," Max said, "in 1916."
    "Yeah, but they had reason to be hysterical. That shark killed three people."
    "Four," Max said.
    "Four. Sorry." Chase smiled and looked down—he could still look down, but barely; the boy was already five-ten—at the gangly replica of himself, but skinnier and better-looking, for he had his mother's sharp nose and narrow mouth.
    Chase took a pair of binoculars from a shelf and handed them to Max. "Here, go see if you can find her."
    Tall Man called to Chase, "Never argue with a kid about sharks. Kids know sharks. Sharks and dinosaurs."
    It was true, Chase thought: kids were dinosaur freaks, and most kids were shark freaks. But he had never met a child who knew half as much about sharks as Max did, which pleased him and also saddened and pained him, for sharks had always been the main, if not the sole, bond between father and son. They hadn't lived together for the past eight years, had seen each other only occasionally, and (phone-company TV commercials to the