It was a show of unprecedented aggression in a surfers' paradise: ten shark attacks in the past two years, three of them fatal. Now the surfers are biting back, calling for a posse to hunt and kill the offending animals. Bucky McMahon paddles straight into the insanely unsafe waters of Réunion island, a little slice of France off the coast of Africa, and reports on a raging turf war between man and beast

It seemed somehow significant, or maybe particularly unfair, but anyhow a cold, dumb fact: Mathieu Schiller had just paddled out. He hadn't had a chance to catch a single wave. In a case of bad timing within worse, the 32-year-old bodyboarder, a former French champion and the owner of a local surf school, had launched from the beach as one of the biggest sets of the day humped on the horizon. There'd been a month of solid swell (which may have been significant as well), and though the wave heights were finally beginning to decline, it was still a big day at a surf break renowned for its powerful waves, and negotiating the set would take Schiller a little farther out to sea than the normal lineup. He duck-dived under the last wave, feeling the upward surge of power as the lip of the breaking wave threw out over him. He came up, streaming water, scanning the horizon with his characteristic enthusiasm, his ever present stoke.

Then he burst up out of the sea. The shark stood him up, his legs in its mouth. And while he beat at its snout with the blunt end of his boogie board, another shark leapt from the water and bit into his torso. For one impossible, hopeful instant, while the second shark hung in the air, jaws snapping, the whole thing must've seemed like some kind of terrible hoax, or a collective hallucination. Then the momentum of the leaping shark carried man and beasts back down into the water, into a spreading pool of blood.

This primal scene of large wild animals hunting us could've been witnessed by any number of locals and tourists sunbathing on the beach or sipping drinks at the cafés along the promenade, for it was three o'clock on a sunny afternoon, September 19, 2011, the tail end of the surf season at Boucan Canot beach and a busy time at this festive resort town on the west coast of Réunion, a French island about 400 miles east of Madagascar. The lifeguards, surfers themselves and friends of the victim, saw it going down right in front of them. Vincent Rzepecki, a powerfully built 31-year-old, was the first guard to hit the water. He couldn't believe what was happening. He'd grown up with Schiller, had dinner with him the night before last. Now he paddled like mad, hoping for the best.

Of the half dozen surfers in the water, Yves Delaplin had been closest to the accident. He remembers the fear and the shock, and the inner conflict of fight or flight. From about twenty feet away, he saw the slick of blood and heard Schiller call out from the middle of it, "Shit! Yves!" Time seemed to smear into one long panicky moment of hesitation—the sharks visible as fast-moving blurs, everyone yelling "Get out of the water!"—and then Delaplin, on a bodyboard himself, kicked toward the accident. He was holding Schiller in his arms when Rzepecki arrived on the paddleboard.

"Get out of here!" he ordered Delaplin. "Let me do my job!" And with that he took custody of the victim, shifting the stricken surfer up onto the deck of the paddleboard. Rzepecki saw at once that the situation was hopeless. Schiller's chest was torn open; water washed into the cavity. Still, he was determined to deliver his friend to shore. Then the next set arrived, a series of twelve-foot-tall walls of water. Rzepecki heard the roar of white water behind him, and then he and Schiller were ripped from the paddleboard, driven down, and slammed hard on the bottom. Amid a blizzard of turbulence, still clutching his friend to his chest, Rzepecki was somehow aware of the sharks in the white water with him, gray shapes at the edge of his vision.