Island of the Sequined Love Nun

screwed.
    The women, children, and old men were all lined up on the beach. Tuck had never seen most of the women and children. There must have been three hundred people there. The only familiar face was Favo, the old man from the drinking circle, who showed no recognition when he looked at Tuck. The younger men were out in the water, standing knee deep on the reef in the light low-tide surf. Each of the men held a five-foot-long stick with a rope tied at one end. They wore long knives tucked into cords tied around their waists.
    "Fishing?" Tuck asked.
    "Just watch," Beth said. "This is how the Shark People got their name."
    Tuck spotted Malink coming out of the jungle with four other men. Each carried a large plastic bucket.
    "They make the buckets out of net floats from the huge factory ships," Beth Curtis said. "The plastic is tougher than anything they can make."
    "What's in them?" Tuck watched as each man swam out to the reef holding a bucket on his head.
    "Pig and chicken blood."
    Two men helped Malink onto the reef and took his bucket from him. Malink looked out to sea and said something in his native language, then looked to the people on the beach as if to say, "Ready."
    The chief shouted a command to the men in the water and they dumped the buckets of blood. Soon they were all knee deep in crimson surf and the bloodstain swept out into the ocean in a great cloud.
    "Isn't that dangerous?" Tuck asked.
    "Of course. It's insane."
    Interesting choice of words. Tuck was surprised that no one seemed to notice or make a big deal of Beth's presence. "Why aren't they drumming and kowtowing to you?"
    "They aren't allowed to when I'm dressed like this. It's a rule. I need my privacy at times."
    "Of course," Tuck said.
    A fin appeared in the water about twenty yards out from the reef. Someone shouted and Tuck recognized Abo from his warrior's topknot. Malink nodded and Abo dove into the water and swam toward the shark. Before he was ten yards out, the fin turned toward him.
    More fins appeared and as Malink nodded, more young men dove into the water with their sticks.
    "Shit, this is suicide," Tuck said. He watched as the first shark made a pass at Abo, who moved out of its way like a bullfighter.
    "You've got to stop this." Tuck couldn't remember ever feeling such panic for another human being.
    Beth Curtis squeezed his arm. "They know what they're doing."
    The shark circled and made a second pass at Abo, but this time the young warrior didn't move out of the way. He shoved his stick into the shark's jaws as if it was a bit, then flipped himself on the shark's back and wrapped the cord just behind the pectoral fins, then back to the other end of the stick so it wouldn't come out. The water boiled around Abo as the shark thrashed, but Abo stayed on and, holding the stick like handlebars, he pulled back to keep the shark from diving and steered him into the shallow water of the reef, where the other men waited with their knives drawn.
    A roar went up from the crowd on the beach as Abo turned the shark over to the slaughterers and held up his arms in triumph. The men on the reef slit the shark's belly and cut off a huge hunk of the liver, which they handed to Abo. He bit into it, tearing out a ragged chunk and swallowing as blood ran down his chest.
    Soon others were steering sharks onto the reef and the water beyond was alive with fins. The red cloud expanded as the sharks died and bled and more came to take their place. The gutted sharks were brought onto the beach, where the women continued the butchering, handing pieces of the raw flesh to the children as treats or prying out serrated teeth and giving them to little boys as trophies.
    One of the men actually stood up on the back of a huge hammerhead that he was steering to the reef and nearly castrated himself on the dorsal fin as he fell. But the shark was held fast and died on the reef with the others.
    In half an hour the shark hunt was over. The sea was red with blood for a thousand yards in all directions and the beach was littered with the corpses of a hundred sharks: black tips, white tips, hammerheads, blue, and mako. Some of the deadliest creatures had been taken like they were guppies in a net, and not one of the Shark People was hurt, although Tuck noticed that many were bleeding from abrasions on the inside of their thighs where they had rubbed against the sharks' skin during their ride. The Shark People were ecstatic, and every one of them was drenched in