The Shadows Attack 23 



for abalone about 50 yards off La Jolla with another skin-diver, Tom 

 Lehrer. Suddenly, Pamperin rose high out of the water. His skin-diver 

 face-plate had been torn off. He screamed once. 



"I was swimming about fifteen feet from Bob," Lehrer said later. 

 "I heard him calling, 'Help me! Help me!' 



"I swam over to him. He was thrashing in the water, and I could 

 tell he was fighting something underneath . . ." 



In the next instant, Pamperin went under. Lehrer peered underwater 

 through his face-place. The water, though bloodied, was remarkably 

 clear, and he saw his friend's body in the jaws of a shark. 



"It had a white belly and I could see its jaws and jagged teeth," 

 Lehrer said. "I wasn't able to do anything more. So I swam to shore to 

 warn the other swimmers." 



Before 1959 ended, there were three more attacks in California— a 

 spear-fisherman whose left leg was slashed by a Hammerhead shark 300 

 yards from where Pamperin had been devoured; a swimmer whose left 

 arm was raked from wrist to elbow by a shark off Malibu; and a skin- 

 diver who lived to tell how (what he presumed to be) a Great White 

 shark bit down on one of his rubber swim fins, "shook me like a dog 

 shakes a bone," and then released him, unharmed. 



Public officials in California talked of somehow finding a way to 

 stop the sharks. Swimmers and skin-divers sought an explanation for the 

 attacks and the presence of Great Whites in California waters. Ocean- 

 ographers said that there had been a rise in water temperatures off the 

 coast of California in recent years. But no one really knew why the 

 sharks had come, why bathers had been attacked— or even how many 

 had been attacked. For, when a man goes for a long ocean swim and 

 never returns, or when men go out fishing in a small boat and only the 

 boat is found . . . what was their fate? Captain Charles Hardy, chief 

 of San Diego lifeguards, remarked after Pamperin's death that three 

 persons had disappeared in the area during the previous three months, 

 and that their bodies had never been found. Were they, too, victims of 

 sharks? 



Eight days after Pamperin was killed, a 12%-foot shark was caught 

 off Catalina Island, about 60 miles north of La Jolla. In its belly was 

 found a man's watch, too badly deteriorated to be identified. It could 

 not have been Pamperin's, for he wore no jewelry when he went on 

 his last abalone hunt. But whose watch was it? Had a man lost it at 

 sea and, as it fell to the bottom, had its <jl"-ni lured a curious shark? Or 

 had a man been wearing it? 



Wlien the southern summer began in Australia in November of 1961, 

 the warm weather ushered in another tragic "Year of the Shark." Fisher- 

 men and bathers began reporting the sighting of more offshore sharks 



