More Shadows Attack 33 



veered off me . . . went off about twenty feet and swam back and forth. 

 Then he turned . . . and came from the same angle toward my left . . . 

 When he was almost upon me I thrashed out . . . brought my fist 

 down on his nose . . . again and again. He was thrust down about two 

 feet . . . (he) swam off and waited. I discovered that he had torn off a 

 piece of my left hand. Then . . . again at the same angle to my left . . . 

 I managed to hit him on the eyes, the nose. The flesh was torn from my 

 left arm ... At intervals of ten or fifteen minutes he would ease off 

 from his slow swimming and bear directly toward me, coming in at 

 my left. Only twice did he go beneath me. Helpless against this type of 

 attack, I feared it most, but because I was so nearly flat on top of the 

 water, he seemed unable to get at me from below . . . The big toe on 

 my left foot was dangling. A piece of my right heel was gone. My 

 left elbow, hand and calf were torn. If he did not actually sink his teeth 

 into me, his rough hide would scrape great pieces off my skin. The 

 salt water stanched the flow of blood somewhat and I was not conscious 

 of great pain." 



(Though by now the shark had bitten his thigh, exposing the bone, 

 the officer was more concerned with attracting the attention of a ship 

 that was going by. He waved frantically. The ship spotted him and 

 sped to his rescue scant seconds before he would surely have been 

 devoured. Sailors aboard the ship began firing rifles at the shark to drive 

 it away.) 



"A terrible fear of being shot to death in the water when rescue was 

 so near swept over me," the officer later told his rescuers. "I screamed 

 and pleaded and cried for them to stop. The shark was so close. They 

 would hit me first." 



Llano discovered that every shark encounter produced an apparently 

 unique pattern of behavior, by both the shark and the man who faced it. 

 A pilot swimming toward an island after being downed in the southwest 

 Pacific told of seeing four sharks come within 25 yards of him. He 

 ignored them. "I made up my mind not to get panicky, but to keep 

 plugging along until I got there, or the sharks got me," he said. He made 

 it, unmolested by the sharks. 



Another pilot who parachuted into Philippine waters was shadowed 

 by four sharks. As long as he kicked at them, they did not bother him. 

 When he stopped to rest, one of them would make a pass at him. In 

 one of these lunges, a shark grazed his legs. Even though blood colored 

 the water around him, he was not attacked again. After eight hours in 

 the water, he was picked up by a destroyer. 



"Men have spent hours in the water among sharks without being 

 touched, and in view of the evidence some of the escapes seem little 

 short of miraculous," Llano reported. "The one feature all accounts 



