Andre Hartman pointed aft to a spot a few yards behind the outboard motors. “Haai op die aas,” he said again, and this time his meaning was clear. “Shark on the bait.”

The glass-calm sea was sliced by a steel gray dorsal fin. Behind it—at least six or seven feet behind—the blade of a crescent tail swept side to side, propelling the torpedo body toward us.

Slowly, smoothly, Andre drew in a rope whose end was knotted around and through the skull and entrails of a small cow shark. The big shark followed. No one asked what kind of shark it was; there was no question. Everything about it, from its size to its color to its shape to the cold ineluctability of its assault, broadcast its identity: Great White Shark.

I could see the body now, gray dappling brown as sunlight flooded the misty blue-green water, and I recalled words I hadn’t thought of since I wrote them more than a quarter of a century ago: “The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. There was little other motion: an occasional correction of the … course by the slight raising or lowering of a pectoral fin—as a bird changes direction by dipping one wing and lifting the other.”

Andre lifted the bait aboard and dropped it in a box. Quickly he knelt on the wood square mounted between the two motors. Bracing himself with his left hand, he plunged his right into the water, just as the pointed snout and great conical head reached the first motor.

“For God’s sake, Andre,” I said, “what.…”

His hand grabbed the snout, moving it away from the shaft of the motor, guiding the head of the shark up as it rose out of the water.

There, in an instant, was the mouth, the most notorious mouth in nature, the upper jaw dropping into view, extending its rank of serrated triangular daggers, the lower jaw falling open, studded with the needle-sharp grabbing teeth that, more than a century ago, gave the animal its scientific moniker: Carcharodon carcharias, “ragged-toothed” one.

Andre’s hand cupped the snout, almost caressing it, and as his arm straightened, the enormous head eased back and rose even farther into the air. And there it stayed, motionless, vertical, suspended—apparently—by some mystical connection with Andre.

No one spoke. No one breathed. The only sound was the motor drive on David Doubilet’s camera as it captured frame after frame of man mesmerizing monster.

The moment seemed endless. In fact, it lasted—what, two seconds? perhaps five?—until Andre pulled his hand back. For one more heartbeat the shark remained suspended, and then—easily, gracefully—it half-slid, half-fell backward, slipped beneath the surface, and, its massive white belly gleaming up at us, appeared to swoon down into the gloom.

Still nobody spoke. We gawked at each other.

At last Andre grinned and said, “The first time it was an accident. I was just trying to shoo a shark away from the motor. Sharks are drawn to motors by their electrical signals and have a habit of biting them to see if they’re edible—that’s how they decide what and what not to eat—and sometimes they’ll knock out a bunch of their teeth.” A former commercial fisherman and champion spear-fisherman, Andre has been living side by side with great white sharks for years. “Anyway, my hand landed on its nose, and it sort of paused, so I kept it there, and when I did let go, the shark snapped and snapped, like it was searching for whatever it was that had hypnotized it.”