He surfaced in the blinding sunshine, coughing the water from his throat, sobbing as he gulped the air into his lungs, splashing feebly in the hope that he could scare away the shark. But all the while he knew that no amount of splashing would drive away a shark with the blood scent sending that clear message to its brain.
He screamed as he felt a rasping touch on the side of his foot. The fin appeared beside him and circled back, turning almost on itself. Pierson screamed again, the cords in his throat standing out, his staring eyes looking up at the cloudless sky. The boat was an impossible hundred feet away.
There was a vast boiling beside him, a smashing thud, and a solid sheet of water slapped against his face and open, screaming mouth. Dark, shining backs surfaced around him and he heard the harsh, whistling exhalations. He swam for the boat as he had never swum before, trying, with each stroke, to claw himself up and out of the water. He scratched and grunted his way up over the flat stern and tumbled into the bottom of the boat...
When he sat up to watch, it was almost all over. They hit the shark from all sides, coming up from underneath so that the heavy blows from the muscled snouts knocked the big shark completely out of the water. The shark writhed feebly as the mammal teeth chomped and tore at the tough hide, biting out great chunks.
And then there was nothing left. Nothing but the great, deep stain on the blue-green water of the bay.
The porpoises lost their brute speed and began to roll happily. They were the implacable and unforgiving enemy of the shark, hunting him down, slamming into him with pile-driver force, dazing him, eating him alive.
Pierson knelt in the bottom of the small boat, and the blood dripped from his torn knuckles. One porpoise surfaced so close to the boat that it nudged it gently. It exhaled heavily through the blow-hole atop its head, and its eyes had the wise mammal look of a good horse or a good dog. It arched back down into the depths. When it reappeared with the rest, Pierson saw there were about fifteen of them, heading back out of the bay.
Pierson was not an emotional man. But he knelt there for a long time, and cursed in a soft husky voice, and the corners of his eyes stung. He pulled the gun up from the bottom. The barb line came up without tension. The harpoon was gone, the line slashed as though a knife had cut it.
He rowed to shore, reloaded the boat, packed the grouper in damp burlap in the back end and drove slowly out to the main road.
He knew that he would be back next year, back in the green and frightening depths. Because, to him, all other forms of hunting and fishing had become as tasteless as games for polite children.