Dad had always said if I was in real trouble to call and he’d jump in and help me even though the water was “powerful wet,” like he said. Now I was in real trouble, so I yelled for him. I was being grabbed by something that was going to kill me or at least bite me so deep the blood would spurt out everywhere, and I’d die of the loss of blood like the man did in the story Mom read about the Great White Sharks of the Australian Barrier Reef in our book The Wonderful Secrets of the Deep.

I could see people on the beach running toward me. There was Dad jumping off the end of the dock in his shorts and T-shirt. And there was Mom screaming, “Ralph! Ralph! He’s drowning!” And there was Janet screaming, “Please, Lord, save him!” and Rachael running up the beach to get the Banini to do something.

Now the thing was all over me. Really all over me! I looked at my arm and I saw a tentacle and suckers sticking to it. Then I realized all at once what it was and I understood the whole thing, but now I was even more scared than before because I had heard a story about what giant squid were capable of and now I knew it was a giant squid that was attacking me because I saw the tentacles and the suckers. I waited to feel the bite of its beak rend my flesh as it pulled me beneath the waves, a victim of the dreadful and mysterious deep where no man has gone.

So I screamed even louder and that was when Dad swam up and saw what was happening and said, “Why is that octopus on you?” and “Why are you screaming? I thought you were drowning!”

We swam in to shore together. Everyone on the beach was gathered in a big crowd just as the Banini ran out with a life ring, which if I had been drowning, would have done no good because I had been too far out. But like Mom says, the Italians aren’t very practical.

I walked up the gentle slope of sandy beach with the giant octopus crawling all over me that I had shot at and missed. Only I hadn’t missed because one of the prongs of my spear had stuck into the middle of one of its tentacles and caught it. Because it was underwater, it didn’t weigh anything so I hadn’t known I had it. It had wound itself around the nylon cord that held the spear and had slithered its way up to me and wound around me and hung on.