Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,29

enough to wear shaggy hair tied in a ponytail. Just a hint of accent, enough of a scar showing on his forehead to suggest hockey or boxing, and weight room muscles but without the bulk—a weekend athlete who stayed in shape.

“Not now,” I told him. With my digital camera, I gestured to the shallow water below. The stingray was a meter wide, a diamond-shaped slab of brown muscle, with a reptilian tail and undulating wings for lateral fins. It was behaving erratically, spouting water from spiracle vents aside its big shark eyes, gliding in short bursts from one end of the netting to the other as if pacing.

“Is it sick?” My visitor sounded concerned.

“I’m busy,” I replied. His accent was Boston, I decided, but unusual in that it seemed forced. Grew up there but moved, I guessed . . . or wealthy enough to have attended private school in the area for a few years.

“I’ve seen thousands of those things,” he told me. “At night, their eyes glow if you hit them with a light.”

A phenomenon caused by tapetum lucidum in an animal’s eyes, but all I said was, “Feeding time is when they come in shallow. They’re common here.”

“So . . . how’s this stingray different?” A moment later, though, the man was saying “Good boy, it’s okay,” then asked, “What kind of dog’s that?”

I looked up. The retriever was at the top of the steps, staring, eyes like two yellow lasers focused on this stranger. If a message was being communicated, the content was neutral, but my visitor read it as a threat.

“Does he bite?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“He’s a stray,” I said and signaled the dog with a hand, palm out, that commanded Stop there!

A stray that obeys hand signals? If that’s what the man was wondering, the answer was Yes.

It was another fun discovery I’d made about the mysterious retriever. Instead of anchoring him with a sit or stay command when he followed me, there was a more tolerant way. Hold up a hand like a traffic cop and a boundary line was created. Since I’d noticed the stingray’s erratic behavior, the upper deck was now the dog’s to roam, but the steps were off-limits. Because of this new arrival, though, the dog was tempted, so I signaled him again, then returned to what I was doing.

“A runaway, huh? That’s why he’s so skinny. I’ve seen lots of chocolate labs, but their coats are different. So he’s probably a mixed breed, you think?”

I was concentrating on the ray: something was happening. So I dropped onto my belly, eye to the camera, and said, “I think it’s starting. Don’t talk while I’m filming.”

The man said, “Oh . . .” but caught himself. Then we both watched the stingray float free of the bottom, an envelope of flesh now protruding from its uterine vent.

“I’ll be damned,” my visitor whispered.

I shushed him and continued to film.

A week earlier, in my trawl boat, this ray had tumbled from the net along with a flopping heap of pinfish, grunts, grasses, hydroids, puffer fish, plus several sea horses that I needed for a recent order. Stingrays are common on the Gulf Coast and considered a dangerous nuisance by some. At the base of the tail is a venom gland and a modified denticle—a long, serrated barb that’s sharp as an Amazon spear and sheathed with a slime of nerve toxin. Seldom fatal, unless the barb pierces the heart, but the sting is excruciating.

Little is known about stingrays because they live in the scientific shadow of their close relative, the shark. So I was interested. The absence of claspers told me this ray was a female. Her size told me she was sexually mature (males are dwarfs by comparison). Her belly appeared engorged, so I’d taken a chance and brought the ray back to the lab, handling her as carefully as the delicate sea horses. Here, beside the dock, where stingrays came to feed nightly, I’d created a temporary pen that was roomy enough to forage and shallow enough for observation.

Now, one day before the full moon, my interest was being rewarded.

The man knelt beside me. “In the car, I’ve got a waterproof Sony. Slip it inside the netting on a desk tripod and use the remote. You’ll get the underwater angle.”

“Quiet,” I told him. “You’ll spook her.”

Not true. The stingray was lost in the birth process, but I didn’t want his voice cluttering the video I was shooting. Inside the ray’s uterine