“Think of it as initiation. A warm Hawaiian welcome,” he said with a smile.
He had two heavy coolers, a duffel bag, a ukulele, and boxes of food, which Minnow helped him unpack. There was enough beer for an army.
When he moved out of the kitchen and into the main section of the house, he opened his arms, inhaled and said, “Ah, home sweet home.”
The place had been growing on her. The roughness and remoteness, and how in the wee morning hours it was so silent, she swore she could hear the stars singing—something her father used to say and, as a young girl, Minnow believed to be true. Even now she listened for the sounds when she woke in the night.The biggest stars have the deepest voices, and the small ones chirp like songbirds.
“And don’t you worry, I’ll be sleeping on my cot out by the water. I snore, so Anna—my wife—banished me years ago and it stuck,” Woody said.
“Will she be coming down?” Minnow asked.
He frowned, shaking his head. “She’s at Volcano for the weekend with her friends. An artisthuishe’s part of. You ask me, it’s a good excuse to drink wine and get a little crazy without any men around.”
Minnow laughed. “I like her already.”
A line on the horizon burned orange beneath the clouds, and Woody grabbed them both a cold beer and led her outside onto the seawall. Walking behind him, she noticed a tattoo of triangles around his ankle.
“Cheers,” he said. “To our blessedmano. The sharks.”
She tapped her bottle against his as he scanned the ocean with an expression that strangely reminded her of a contented dog.
“So tell me, what have you learned since you’ve been here?”
Minnow went through the days with him, leaving out Angela’s identity, and how based on what she’d seen so far, the two incidents were likely the same shark.
“I seen the news today before I came down. Sounds like Lum might move up the shark hunt to next week. Sawyer and Warren, head of DLWA, was on there making their cases. Spring break and the roughwater swim,” he told her.
All the air blew out of her. “What?”
“Nevah mind we the people are the trespassers.”
“But he told me two weeks,” she said.
“Politicians can be slippery. And anyway, what you hoping to prove that’s gonna stop them?” he said, then emptied the last of his beer down his throat. Minnow had only managed one sip.
“Well, I was hoping it wouldn’t be the same shark, or the same species of shark, and maybe we’d find that whale carcass or fishermen chumming or... something, I don’t know.”
“You found any of that yet?”
“No, but these large sharks usually cover a lot of ground, so to go out and indiscriminately fish is just slaughter. It’s pointless.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, girl. And what if you found out this guy that disappeared was nailed by the same shark, then what?” he asked.
She had thought about that herself. “We may never know. And hypothetically, if it was the same shark, I would be certain something weird was happening. It’s simply not in their nature to hang around and bite people.”
Woody watched the water closely, his eyes catching fire in the last light. “The first thing you need to know is that the area to the south of us is known as Kalaemano, literally ‘Shark Point,’ but it refers to waters all along this stretch of coast because of the many tiger sharks here. Places were named with great care and for good reason. Now, suddenly you get this fancy development, a resort and an open-waterswim right in the middle of our tiger shark pupping grounds, and boom, recipe for trouble.”
“But these attacks were not tigers. At least the two we have evidence from.”
He crouched down and sat on the wall, feet hanging down to just above the pebble beach. Minnow joined him.
“My grandfather built this place, which used to just be a small fishing shack. This whole area was important forpa‘akai—salt—and he collected and traded it, along with his fish. But he named the house Hale Niuhi, not for the salt or fish, but for theniuhithat swam these waters. The giant man-eating shark. Most people just call it Shark House.”
Minnow had never been a fan of that term—it was misleading on so many levels, but she remained quiet out of respect. Had it been anyone else, she would have corrected him, but she knew Woody was on her side.
He continued. “My gramps knew the old ways and the new. Where to find the best salt, how they fed and trained the?opeluto stay in the area, and how to recognize and care for our family’s ?aumakua—the shark.”
“And so your ancestors called the tiger sharksniuhi?”
