This is a lonnnggg one, so please, if you don't like long posts, don't bother with it. It is from the novel "Grim Ripper" about the life of a female mako shark. This part happens in Book Three of the 360 page adventure. Ripper is a ten footer by this time and, well, here's what happens. Hope you enjoy.
Chapter Twelve
The Harem Bull
Months had passed since Ripper escaped the longline.
She had spent her days after that aimlessly traveling the broad Pacific, having left the migrating schools of albacore for a long, southwestern foray into unknown waters.
During her days and nights of travel she had very few encounters with man, other than those on the monstrous beasts we call freighters and oil tankers, plus the occasional cruise ship. She had fled the ships, the vile scents of the oil, garbage and human waste that sloshed in their wakes offended her delicate sensors. Man’s pollution repulsed her.
Besides the ships, she had also encountered large numbers of ancient creatures that were familiar to her inner teachers. They were the great whales that had inhabited the oceans for many millions of years. Her genes carried many messages about them.
She recognized their eerie underwater songs and had no difficulty telling them from the shriller, higher pitched squeaks of the many different species of dolphins that traveled the same waters.
Most whales represented neither prey nor danger to her. So she ignored them.
These were the baleen whales, mostly humpbacks and the huge blue whales. The latter are the biggest animals to ever live on earth, the largest weighing one hundred seventy tons, or over three hundred and fifty thousand pounds!
They are called baleen whales because of the large, bony plates of a horny substance called baleen in their huge mouths. Baleen is similar to the material our fingernails are made of. The baleen plates are used to filter plankton and many other forms of tiny life from the seawater. It is ironic, is it not, that the biggest beasts on earth are hunters of the smallest prey?
There was one species of whale that did represent one of the few natural threats to her that still existed. It was the sperm whale, the largest predatory animal ever to roam the earth. Far bigger than the biggest of the extinct predatory dinosaurs, this one still lives and hunts for living prey.
Sperm whales reach up to sixty-five feet in length and the biggest bulls weigh over sixty tons, or about one hundred twenty thousand pounds. Their huge heads comprise one third of their body length. The lower jaw of its large mouth is studded with the biggest teeth of any animal ever. Their eight inch long, two and a half pound tusks fit into grooves in their upper jaws, which are toothless.
Like the mako, the sperm whales have almost no natural enemies, the only ones of consequence being the Orcas and the giant squid. Even here, a single killer whale would have no chance whatsoever of taking on an adult sperm whale. Only a pack of them could do so, and only after a long and dangerous battle.
Bull sperm whales often win these few battles by killing one or more of the pack of killers, so the black and white wolf packs rarely make the mistake of tangling with them.
Groups of the smaller females and the young ones are led by a huge harem bull that is both cantankerous and extremely dangerous to anything that dares to provoke it or its herd. These are the wild beasts whose forefathers took their toll of the early whalers by ramming and sinking their wooden whaling ships, taking all hands with them.
They were the same bulls that attacked the dories that carried the harpooners who had the misfortune of lancing one of their cows, or worse yet, a calf. Some of the whalers harpooned babies intentionally, using them as bait to lure the frantic mothers back into killing range.
The problem here was that it was sometimes a huge bull that came back instead to wreak bloody vengeance on them and their skiffs. Some of the crewmembers were actually eaten!
Unlike the whalers, Ripper would not have to provoke a sperm whale to cause one to attack her. In spite of her great size, she represented easy prey for one of the huge, toothed mammals.
The adult bull sperm whale consumes over four thousand pounds of food on a twenty-four hour basis. The four thousand pounds can consist of a myriad of prey, from massive numbers of small fishes like sardines, to whole swordfish, marlin, sea lions, or giant squid. Sperm whales are truly cosmopolitan eaters that don’t discriminate between sources of protein. A ten-foot mako is just as sure to be eaten as anything else if there is a hungry sperm whale around!
But Ripper was lucky. Her ancient memories included knowledge and consequent fear of the sperm whales, so she avoided them when she heard their distinctive, “Clicking” talk traveling through the water from far away. The ancient voices that guided her told her to leave when she heard them entering an area she was hunting in.
Only once, months earlier, had she blundered and found herself among a herd of sperm whales. This time the usual roles were reversed, as it was man that had saved her from one of the great bulls.
But the price that would be paid by the nation of whales would be a high one!
Chapter Thirteen
The Whalers
Somehow the voices that guided Ripper failed to identify the clicking sounds of the sperm whales that traveled through the water toward her.
She was in the mid reaches of the Pacific when she heard the language of a new whale. A whale, her senses told her. Neither threat, nor prey. Thus, to be ignored.
Yet within the signals she was receiving from the Ancient Ones there was once again a slight note of confusion and alarm in the background. It was a small, angry whisper that seemed to be demanding her attention. But it wasn’t strong enough for some reason. Soon, the whisper would break out into a screaming warning to her.
But it would be too late!
The sixty-year old bull sperm whale is returning to the surface from a hunting dive two thousand feet down. It was one of those rare occasions when his efforts had been for naught. He had pursued a giant squid that had escaped him somehow.
Now the tingling sensation that was coursing through his body told him that he had to return to the surface to replenish his oxygen supply before diving again and trying to locate the squid or other prey. A mature sperm whale can hold its breath for up to two hours, but it had been at least that long since he dove down into the abyss in his search for a meal of giant squid.
As he rises up, the sonar device in his great head begins to receive echoes from a large fish that is swimming just below the surface. He does not identify it as a mako shark. He doesn’t have to. It is a living animal of edible size, so he will take it.
First, he has to breathe and take in more oxygen. This is an old bull and he has experienced this exact situation many times over the years. It is as if the sea gods occasionally reward him with a surprise meal in the daylight at the surface after a fruitless dive into the darkness.
He was going to have to surface near the target because he couldn’t hold his breath long enough to move far enough from it not to alert the shark to his presence. So he would accomplish two things at once. He would speed up and try to ram the target with his huge, blunt head just before he broached. This would either break its back or otherwise severely injure it, so that he would have time to pump in a few short breaths.
Next he would seize his meal and hold it in his mouth while he breathed for the half an hour that his body required to replenish his oxygen supply. Then he would turn his attention to the twitching meal he held in his great jaws, rip it apart, and eat it.
He is rising rapidly on his ramming course when she senses him beneath her. Now the insistent, ancient warning buzz of earlier broke through and was screaming at her to turn and flee, there is a sperm whale attacking her!
The voice is too late! She only has time to flinch, moving to the side enough to avoid the full impact of the huge, black headed battering ram being propelled by over one hundred thousand pounds of force.
As its huge head passes her, the bull attempts to snap her up in his jaws, missing by mere inches.
She is caught up in the great current caused by his huge bulk passing so fast and close to her and is struck first by a stunning blow from the bull’s side, then slapped by the flat, upper edge of one of his great tail flukes.
She is knocked senseless by the force of the blows, yet is lucky that the leading edge of the tail hasn’t struck her. If that had happened it would surely have broken her thick, cartilaginous spine and smashed her internal organs.
In spite of the tremendous blow she instinctively beats her tail wildly in a vain attempt to escape the great vortex created by the whale’s leap. She is trapped in the spinning whirlpool as he towers in the air above her! He is literally standing on his tail flukes, his head nearly sixty-five feet above the water, slowly beginning to turn to one side. Gravity has overcome his leap and he falls back toward her to deliver a bone-crushing blow that would be even more powerful than the first!
Her only hope – fate - intervenes as he begins his fall back toward the water with gravity hurling his fifty-some tons down for a cataclysmic, thundering blow on the water and whatever else is beneath him.
She is not there when the colossal blow is struck.
She has managed to dart from under the great shadow that covered her and is feebly swimming and attempting to recover her senses when he crashes into the water beside her.
His heavy body mass blasts a monstrous hole in the water that immediately slams shut, creating a thunderous implosion that once again knocks her into underwater cartwheels and overloads and blocks out her senses!
She spins out of control for several long seconds before her senses start to gradually return. As they do, she levels off and begins to swim in somewhat of a normal manner.
Ripper is still terribly disoriented and doesn’t realize that she is swimming directly toward the bull, which has swum off a short distance after crashing back into the water. The big whale is huffing and puffing great gouts of air into and out of his oxygen-starved lungs as he comes back to claim her.
Unlike her, he still has all of his faculties about him. The thunderous crash back into the water had no effect whatsoever on his internal systems. He is designed to resist the far greater pressures exerted on him by the great depths he hunts in. And he is built so he can easily withstand the unimaginable shock of head-on collisions with other bulls at mating time.
(During that period the great bulls fight over the cows by swimming a mile or more from one another. Then they turn and charge at each other at their top speed, meeting in a monstrous head-to-head collision! These animals are so tough that the mating clashes don’t cause permanent damage unless their blunt foreheads aren’t in line with one another when they collide. If that happens, one or both bulls are likely to have their lower jaws broken, or even ripped from their heads.)
He has her! She is swimming so slowly that he doesn’t even rush her, but swims at a leisurely pace toward the stunned shark. He opens his twenty-foot mouth to engulf and swallow her.
She could not hear what happened next through her dulled senses, but he did.
What saved her was a dull, “Crump” that slammed through the water. The sound was followed by the panicked clicks of the big bull’s family shooting through the purple water from several miles downwind. Mingling among the fear calls was one of pain from a cow that was one of his daughters from thirty years earlier.
All thoughts of the shark disappeared and the bull started to run off in a great panic of his own. He knew what had hurt his daughter! It was the only thing in the world that he and all other sperm whales fear.
It was the whalers!
The man in the crow’s nest above the Japanese “Research vessel”, “Katana” (Sword), shouted, “Kujira! Kujira!” (Whale! Whale!) when he spotted the large cow off in the distance. He directed the captain toward the whale, confident that there would be other ones with her.
After closing quickly on the cow they shot a two hundred pound, exploding harpoon head from a ninety-millimeter cannon into her back as she peacefully swam along the surface with the last calf she would ever have. The little one was confused and terrified as she swam through her mother’s blood, but would not leave her.
The gunner had not seen the baby whale, which had been nursing underneath her mother when he took aim. If he had seen the calf he might not have fired on the cow. Not out of mercy, for the whalers have no mercy on their prey. Instead, most whalers consider it bad luck to shoot a female with a nursing young calf like this one. This superstition is a carryover from the earlier days of whaling, when sometimes a great, raging bull came to the calls of his wounded baby and wreaked havoc on the whalers.
The gunner’s aim had wavered at the last moment and the harpoon had not struck home in the center of her vital organs. Instead, it had entered at an angle and the explosive head had destroyed her liver, stomach and part of her intestines. It was a bad shot that would not kill her quickly.
The cursing harpooner reloaded the cannon and prepared to shoot again while the captain maneuvered the whaling ship to stay within range of the cow. She was badly wounded and in great pain, so it was easy to keep her in range of the awful gun while it was reloaded.
Her cries of fear and pain spread through the water around her, warning the rest of their family to run for their lives!
The Harem Bull had often run from the whalers when wounded members of his pod clicked their warnings through the water, but this time the cries of his daughter had the opposite effect on him. An ancient anger welled up in his huge body as he ran from his screaming daughter and her six month old calf, his grandchild.
Perhaps it was the tone of her screams, or maybe the sounds of the terrified little calf that erased his fear and replaced it with a vile, burning hatred. Whatever the cause, he cast aside his fear and turned back toward his beleaguered family and returned to defend them against impossible odds.
His proud, massive prow of a forehead crashed through the waves like the shield of some kind of huge, majestic, living black sea god bent on revenge and driven by the raw power and anger of the biggest and most powerful carnivore that has ever lived on the planet earth. He was being sent to exact a bloody price for what was being done to his children.
This time they would pay!
He would run from them no more!
The gallant, scarred old warrior was making his last, valiant run. Somehow he knew that it would be his final charge. He made it a proud, glorious one of speed and power unlike any that he had ever known.
It was a charge that a certain writer believes that the ghosts of his father and his father’s fathers looked down upon and burst with pride to behold. And that writer believes that their great spirits joined the Harem Bull’s in this, his final, selfless act. They joined and swam with him to help him strike back at the whale killers.
The Harem Bull seemed to swell in size, power and speed as the spirits of his forefathers melded with his and sought vengeance with this, today’s earthly embodiment of these, the greatest of the sperm whale bulls. The spirits cleansed him of any small vestiges of fear and he was now pure. Nothing could stop him.
All of the great love that he had for his children and their children girded this special bull with immense courage and the will to face the impossible challenge that he was charging directly and unhesitatingly toward. He was no longer a mere whale; he had become a great, fearless, avenging sea god.
He returned as the majestic, greatest predator of all time that he truly was, smashing the huge ocean swells into white explosions of water and mist as he crashed through them during his race back to his loved ones and their tormentors..
Perhaps his genes harkened back to the previous century, when numbers of proud bulls threw themselves against the whaling ships of that era in defense of their families. He may have descended from the loins of one of the brave, vengeful ones that struck and sank Star of the East, Toulinguet, Union, Essex, Ann Alexander, Kathleen, or any one of the other wooden whalers that were attacked by raging bulls before him.
Regardless of whether he was descended from one of the brave bulls of the past, in great credit to his clan he behaved with the awesome grandeur of the bravest of his forebears.
In spite of his great fear of the whaling ship and its terrible gun manned by a small Japanese man masquerading as a researcher, he charged it with the great courage that can only be exhibited by a father defending those that he loves.
And, yes, my friends, whales do love!
The Harem Bull had already lived longer than most men. He had fathered this daughter three decades ago. The whalers had taken her mother three years later. Now it was time for him to strike back for all of the members of his clan that had been slain by the whale killers.
The crew did not see him until the last moment. All were focused on the mortally wounded cow when he came thundering up to the ship from the port side and slightly abeam of her, spouting great gouts of water and air like some kind of huge, natural engine of destruction.
It was the cook, who was stepping out of the galley for a look at the end of the chase who first saw him and shouted, “Oki Kujira! Oki Kujira! Henna, dis!” (Big whale! Big whale! A crazy one!”) as he beheld the majestic creature crashing through the waves toward the bow of the ship.
When the crew turned and saw him there was no mistaking his intentions. The crazy animal was going to ram the big, steel ship! There was no time to dodge the giant and the cow that was tethered to the boat with the harpoon cable made such a move impossible anyway. Everyone grabbed railing and other fixtures in anticipation of the blow!
But it didn’t come.
Instead, the bull veered off at the last instant and slammed his blunt head into the cable that connected his daughter to the ship, as if to tear the harpoon-outrage from her body. The stranded steel cable stretched for an instant, the metal straining and creaking to absorb the shock of the giant bull that had struck it at over twenty miles per hour. And then it snapped with a great cracking sound!
The stretched cable that was attached to the ship reacted to the great release of stress by whipping back toward the bow so fast that no one had time to duck away from it. It had become a rocketing sword of the sea gods, swung in their names by the combined weight of the bull and his dying daughter.
The cable whipped into the gunner at impossible speed, slicing through his flesh and bones like a great samurai sword while wrapping itself repeatedly around the gun and the two severed, twitching halves of its wielder’s body. It literally wove the body halves to the cannon that had killed thousands of whales. The gunner didn’t even have time to scream before he was sliced into pieces.
The ship ran over the dying cow and her calf, its twin propellers chopping them to death. Then the trailing cable wrapped onto the shafts, which continued to turn at high speed. The stainless cable cut deeply into the shafts and jammed them, causing massive damage to the ship’s drive train. Katana would have to be towed back to Japan.
As the propeller shafts buckled the killer ship slid to a halt in the water. The crew stood stunned. They watched the bull as it ran away with a deep, bleeding cut in his forehead where the cable had sliced into him.
He swam off a mile and now, incredibly, he was returning to the ship!
He charged full bore, blasting bloody spray into the air from his blowhole as he thunderously pounded through the waves, once again launching himself at the hated ship of death.
The Japanese whalers were incredulous! Never before had any of them seen such bravery exhibited by one of the whales that they slaughtered in the name of research, but sold for a great deal of yen.
They stood in awe as the bull slammed his blunt head into the starboard bow with such great force that several of the crew were knocked off of their feet and onto the deck. One suffered a broken arm from his fall.
Bloody, red-misted water from his last great breath sprayed the bow area, painting each crewman with a red coat of shame.
The thick, steel hull shuddered when the giant crushed his great head against it in his final act of rage and retribution! He died instantly when the colossal blow crushed his brain.
(Later, when the ship was hauled for repairs, the work crew found that the massive blow had actually bent one of the heavy bow plates inward! The owner of the fleet had the plate removed and highly polished. It then hung in his office as testimony to the “power and ferocity of the great whales that his brave crews hunted aboard his fleet of “research” ships”. He was unusually proud of his strange trophy.)
The herd bull sank quickly. It was as if the sea gods knew that the whalers might try to drive harpoons into his body and desecrate it by dragging it aboard and reducing it to mere meat. Meat for wealthy Japanese to serve their guests in the gardens where all of the “Research whales” were fated to go.
This brave old warrior was far too splendid for such a thing. The sea drew him down into her deep bosom with haste to ultimately pillow his shattered head on a soft, clean bottom surrounded by a funeral bouquet of flowery, multiple colored deep corals. The sea gods provided a soft, sandy mattress for his body to lie upon, far below the drifting ship full of excited, chattering Japanese whale killers.
While the three sperm whales had perished because of the whalers, the killers would not be rewarded with money from their deaths. Nor would the rich dine on the meat of these three in the gardens of the wealthy, where one of them once laughed and winked at a bearded American “Barbarian” guest and said that these whales were, in fact, killed for research - “Culinary research!”
No, that would not happen here. The great herd bull, his daughter and his grandchild were special ones. Their final resting place would be a secret one in the sea, one where the whalers could never molest them again.
Ripper swam over the secret place where the three whales would sleep for eternity. Her remarkable natural sensors and guidance systems that would be the wonder of our most advanced computer designers and rocket builders were still in radical disorder. It took hours for them to realign themselves and begin to take over once again.
In the meantime, she swam slowly into the cool, dark depths, the womb-like place she always returned to when she was injured. There, she would slowly regain her senses and the silent voices of the ancient fathers would again lead her into the unknown future.
She was unaware of the sacrifice made by the one that had stunned and nearly killed her. Nor did she know of the seeds of future makos that were ripening within her as the Silent Voices directed her back to her place of birth. Ripper swam on in the direction of her final destiny.
End of excerpt.
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