She leveled the gun at the ocean and squeezed the trigger. It kicked so hard that she almost dropped it. Her hand hurt from the jolt. In the pain of it she found pleasure. Slowly, deliberately, she fired it five more times. She drew back her hand to throw it into the sea.

No. It had been theirs, and she had so little of them left.

Gun in hand, knees trembling from the cold, she turned slowly and began to wade back toward the strand.

***

All the long night the great white had patrolled the beaches south of Cape North Light. At dawn, when the gray summer cottages of Napeague, Amagansett, East Hampton, and Sagaponack took shape in the drizzle, he was a hundred yards off Amity Beach.

The ampullae on his forehead detected a change in the electromagnetic fields of force through which he swam. Something metallic lay on the bottom.

For aeons his kind had investigated such electrical phenomena: skates and stingrays and even squid emitted auras of minute electrical disturbances and were his natural prey.

This time the object was man-made: a three-foot lobster pot jammed between two boulders at the twenty-fathom line. Eight big lobsters crouched inside. Their feelers waved in alarm when they sensed his presence.

In murky green darkness a hundred feet below the surface, the great white banked, stabbed at the pot, and clamped it in his jaws. He began to shake his head, worrying it from where it was wedged. He shook it loose, breaking off outcroppings of stone in a cloud of sand and murk.

The pot was a homemade latticework of heavy wire fencing. It ripped open as he shook it, and he swallowed a section of wire. As the lobsters scooted off, he lunged after them, snatching the three slowest before they could take refuge in holes in the reef.

They were not enough. He was an eating machine with enormous fuel requirements. The caloric value of the three crustaceans came nowhere near replacing the energy he had wasted in getting them.

Ravenously hungry now, he glided slowly upward.

Although his ears were so tiny as to be almost invisible, his hearing was exquisite, for he heard with his body, too, through the tiny lateral canals that laced his flanks.

Drifting slowly now, with all his senses sharpened, he heard a distant, sharp report. He quivered; anything that made noise interested him. The shot was followed by another and another, six in all. By the sixth he was swimming at full speed toward the beach.

He felt vibrations in the water. Something was sloshing ashore.

***

Ellen Brody slogged from the water, shivering with cold. She was wet up to her waist. She turned to look back at the sea.

The great gray breakers were building, charging in lines like white-plumed knights, hanging for a moment, then plunging into battle in the churning foam below.