The shark at Mollewaard keeps the harbor channel dredged, and the town has never paid it for the work. It comes in on the spring ebb, sixty feet from snout to tail fork, slate blue on top and the yellow of tallow underneath, and it drags that belly along the bottom from the sea buoy to the lock. Silt boils up brown. Gulls gather over the plume, which is the surest way to find an animal that is often invisible and always larger than the water seems to allow. It eats what the mud hides: flatfish, whelks, buried crabs, eels, crushing shell with a sound like a cart on gravel. It leaves scoured trenches behind, and now and then a tooth the size of a spade blade, shed and unnoticed.
Three people explain it to me, and they agree on little. Fenne Aldersma, who mends nets on the Mollewaard quay, says the shark works the channel like a woman beating a rug, and that boats grounded in October float free by November. A salt boiler at Ijzerplaat, who will not give his name, says it does no such favor there. It lies at the sluice mouth in the dark of the moon with its jaws propped open and lets the eels pour in, and he calls it a thief with good manners. The lock-keeper's daughter, who is eleven, says its left eye is milk white and that it is the same shark that took the figurehead off the Hendrika in her great-grandfather's time. The eye I have seen myself, rolled up beside the lock on a calm ebb. The rest I cannot check. No one alive was aboard, and no log of the Hendrika survives.
The channel itself is easier to read. Two seasons ago the lead line found two fathoms at the lock. This spring it found a fathom and a half, and the plume rises off the Ijzerplaat sluice more often than off the Mollewaard bar. Fenne takes this personally. Pilots now run their deeper boats on the flood just after the shark has passed, when the turned silt is soft as porridge and a keel slides through it. In both towns a tooth is never sold, lent, or carried inland. One found in the mud goes up on the sea wall the same day.
The row on the Mollewaard wall runs to some forty teeth, gray with weather, every one planted point down in the clay. The newest stands at the end, still wet, with a gull feather caught at its root.
- Classification
- Colossal bottom-feeding shark
- Habitat
- Tidal channels and harbor bars
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 60 ft, snout to tail fork
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Brackish harbors of the northern coast
- Binomial
- Selachodon limivorus
- Diet
- Flatfish, whelks, buried crabs, eels
- Temperament
- Indifferent, jealous of its channels