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the Academy who had come along to assist us, said he'd stay and keep
trying for sharks. We wished him lots of luck and we went o¤ diving.
After our dive we arrived back and were greeted by a surprisingly re-
laxed Les Gunther. Figuring he must have given up and retired with a
cool drink to the verandah, we asked him how he'd done at shark chas-
ing. Smugly he said there were eight more sharks in the pool. We sus-
pected he was pulling our leg, but when we checked, sure enough, there
they were cruising around.
We knew he was hiding something, and after much pressure Les ad-
mitted he'd asked Seone Tau, known on the island as “Tonga John,”
to help him catch some sharks. Loading the truck with the collecting
equipment, Les and Tonga John, together with John's dog Blackie, drove
out to the shallows where the blacktips were known to cruise. Les set
the net out in the water, but then, looking back, he happened to see
Blackie at the edge of the water, his foot on a shark pinned to the bot-
tom. At that point Tonga John told Les that the one thing Blackie most
loved was to catch sharks.
As if to demonstrate, Blackie raced o¤ after another one. In a mat-
ter of moments the dog had it beached. Picking it up gently in his
mouth, he dropped the shark at Les's feet.
Knowing Gunther's fondness for teasing, we found his story a bit
hard to swallow, so the next day we decided to go shark collecting with
Tonga John and Blackie. We were exhausted by our method of catch-
ing sharks and willingly enlisted Blackie's eager and skillful help.
Indeed, Blackie turned out to be truly amazing. We would scan the
lagoon surface for tiny shark fins; as soon as one was spotted, Tonga
John gave Blackie the word and o¤ he'd dash, heading for the seaward
side of the shark. The shark, meanwhile, seeing him coming, would
frantically dash back and forth trying to make it past him to the safety
of deep water. Like an expert sheepdog, Blackie skillfully herded the
shark into shallower and shallower water. Rarely did a shark get past
him. Instead they eventually ended up running aground in the inches-
deep shallows, where Blackie would either pin them down with his foot
or pick them up gently in his mouth.
A couple of sharks had slight teeth marks on them, but they weren't
serious. One time a shark sought revenge and bit back, getting Blackie's
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