The Devil's Teeth

Journalist Casey first saw the great white sharks of the Farallon Islands, some longer than twenty feet, swirling around a small motorboat in a documentary. In a few months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter swells on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island, just 27 miles off the coast of San Francisco--dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth." There she joined two biologists who bunk down during shark season each fall in the island's one habitable building, a 135-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Two days later,…