MAKO/GIANT SQUID BATTLE TO THE DEATH

[Captain Fred Archer]

A taste from the novel, Grim Ripper, Book Three, "To the Ends of the Earth and Back", Chapter Two, "The Coming of the Kraken"

(Spacing does not come thru correctly)

Chapter Two

The Coming of the Kraken

“Far, far beneath the abysmal sea, the Kraken sleepeth
There hath he lain for ages and will be
Battening on huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the day.
The once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring fire he shall rise and on the surface die.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Kraken is a monstrous sea creature that is the subject of an old, Scandinavian myth. Many scientists and historians believe that the supposed monsters that attacked ships in the past were actually giant squid.
Because they spend most of their lives in hugely deep waters the giant squid, Architeuthis (Ruler squid) is one of the most mysterious animals on the planet. A living one has never been captured for scientists to study, but others have seen them, almost exclusively when they attacked ships.

Ancient historians tell of attacks on wooden sailing ships by giant squid that were mistaken for sea monsters, but these attacks weren’t limited to ancient history. Modern day attacks have also occurred.

In the 1930’s the fifteen thousand ton Norwegian auxiliary tanker Brunswick was attacked at least three times by a giant squid. Each time the crew reported that the attack was deliberate. The squid would pull up alongside the ship, pace it for a while, then suddenly turn and run into it, wrapping its tentacles around it. On the third attack it slid off the boat and was chopped up and killed by the props.

It is speculated that giant squid grow to one hundred feet long. The tubular body, or mantle alone on a squid that size would be bigger than a bus! The biggest one ever found dead and washed up on a beach was fifty-five feet long. Its tentacles were thirty-five feet long and the tentacles and legs were covered with four-inch suction cups lined with tooth-like cutters. The huge eyes were eighteen inches in diameter!

It is a known fact that carnivorous sperm whales feed on giant squid in the depths. And they don’t always win the battles they engage in to subdue the great Architeuthis. In 1965 a Soviet whaler watched a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale on the surface. They reported that it was an epic battle with each beast thrashing, wrestling and biting the other. The awesome sperm whale, the biggest carnivorous animal to have ever lived, usually won their wars with the giants. In this case, neither won. After the battle the crew found the whale floating dead with the squid’s tentacles wrapped around its throat. The squid’s head was found in the whale’s stomach.

Virtually all sperm whales bear large sucker scars from wounds received while battling giant squid. Some are the size of dinner plates and these hint at the remarkable size of the animals that made them.

A giant squid’s beak is huge and it is strong and sharp enough to bite through heavy steel cable. It is a very dangerous weapon.

It was yet another full moon night when Ripper met the fearsome Kraken.
As always, the shining moon lured mysterious creatures from the depths that shunned the upper layers of water during any other time. Sometimes solitary giant squid rise near the surface under the full moon to stalk and feed on the animals that have risen there. Including their own young.

This night a small group of juvenile giant squids was hunting fifty feet below the surface. They were searching for fin fishes or even smaller members of the squid clan. They were six footers that weighed about a hundred pounds. They were mere infants compared to the adults.

A hundred feet below, an exact physical duplicate of the juvenile squids, except for its huge size, stalked them. It was of the Architeuthis tribe of ancient, dramatic hunters. This one was a moderate sized young adult stretching more than forty-five feet from the tip of its mantle to the end of its tentacles. Its huge eyes were bigger than basketballs.

The powerful suction cups that covered its arms and tentacles were studded with sharp teeth of their own that ripped and held prey. The suction cups were the size of small grapefruits. Its black beak was big enough to rip forty pounds of meat from its prey in one awful snap.

The fins on the sides of the big squid’s mantle barely moved as it slid slowly upward, propelled by gentle bursts of water from the jet engine-like orifices below the large eyes. Both eyes were focused intently on the smaller giants above it. They were easy to see and follow because their bodies were constantly surrounded by a beautiful, pale green luminescence.

The brilliant green glow was caused by millions of tiny creatures being excited by the swimming motions of the squids as they swam. The response was billions of minute starbursts of phosphorescence that combined to create the glowing shrouds of light that surrounded the squid and left trails of luminescence in their wakes.

The giant killer squid followed the glowing beacons, gradually closing the distance between them. It was close to the point where Architeuthis could streak in among the young ones and grab one, or even two, in its long tentacles that lash out to seize prey in their suction embrace. The powerful tentacles drag the victim to the likewise strong legs, which then pull it to the snapping beak that rips it apart.

As the squid prepared to attack, another hunter was also stalking the smaller ones. It was Ripper!

She had sensed them from half a mile away, first through the clicking signals that they made to communicate with each other and later through their scent when she crossed their trail and began her killing run.

Unlike the other hunter, she didn’t stalk them. She simply charged headlong at them and would attack them with speed and surprise. Her target would be the large eye.

She sensed what seemed to be another pod of squid below the others, but had focused on those nearer the surface. The sight of the soft, phosphorescent glow that surrounded them as they came into her vision caused her to completely ignore what her senses told her was the other pod below them. Even the smaller giants could injure her and might even rip out one of her precious black eyes, so her ancient teachers had made her concentrate on one target pod, not two.

As she closed on her prey she failed to notice that the lower pod had begun to rise rapidly from beneath the others. In seconds she would hurtle among her targets! Her upper mandible sprang out in preparation for delivering a crippling bite.

At that exact moment the giant squid also launched his attack! His huge jets furiously pumped water as he went from a slow, stalking pace to a full-blown sprint that covered the distance between him and the other squids in a matter of seconds.

The two hunters, neither aware of the other, met in the midst of the prey!

At the last second, Ripper noted a swelling of the mass of squid. That simply told of more squid as she tore into them.

Her senses had identified the mass correctly, but not the size. This was not another school of squid that had suddenly appeared. It was the monster! And he was a great danger to her, as she was to him!

Her jaws spread the instant before she snapped them shut around the head of one of the six footers, but the smaller eye was replaced by another, huge one at the exact instant that her reflexes slammed the impossibly sharp, fang studded jaws shut.

The collision was a gigantic blow that sent both hunters reeling. Her bite had ripped the giant squid’s eye from its socket and taken a large chunk out of the glowing purple head of the monster. It turned an angry rod color, spurted ink and writhed in the water trying to seize and stop its slashing attacker.

Although terribly wounded, it was not killed by Ripper’s bite. Her wicked teeth had not slashed the nerve center that controlled it. That is what it would take to slay a Kraken!

The blow delivered to Ripper was absorbed by the huge, soft body of the monster, pushing it in, not unlike a baseball bat that has struck and sunk into a big pillow. Her head was buried in the yielding, but tough flesh of the squid, which bent into a “U” shape from the force of the blow.

Ripper twisted frantically and bit wildly to free herself from the living net the squid had become. Her sharp teeth and powerful body ripped and tore their way through the thick veils of its flesh and chopped their way through several of the strong legs that reached desperately for her.

The beast ejected gallons of acidic black ink that mixed with its blood and obscured the two fierce warriors. The ink and acidic blood of the wounded Kraken burned her eyes while she tore away at her huge tormentor.

Several of the monster’s arms found her and started to grab at her, with several large suction cups gluing themselves to her sides. The arms began drawing her to the squid’s awful black beak, which was snapping involuntarily and blindly at anything that came near it. One bite from the wicked weapon would wound Ripper terribly!

As she tried to bite her way through the writhing monster, its torn head suddenly appeared alongside her and the awful black beak snapped at her. Instead, it bit off the tip of one of its tentacles that had curled back and was reaching for her.

Just before Ripper’s jaws found the central nerve core that controlled the giant it had time for one, last convulsive snap of its beak. It did not achieve a full bite, but five pounds of Ripper’s flesh was torn out of her side before her teeth slashed into the Kraken’s central nerve bundle, instantly killing it.

Even though the monster had died, Ripper had to tear and bite her way out of its mass of arms, tentacles and the tubular mantle. Fortunately for her the suction cups that had attached themselves to her side relaxed their grips when she bit into the monster’s nerve bundle, releasing her from them like an electronic magnet that is suddenly shut off. She burst out of the black, blood and ink-stained water just as Kraken’s body began to sink below it.

The monster’s color turned from an angry, glowing red/purple to a dull brown, like a large neon sign snapping out during a power failure. The forty-five foot remains twitched and the legs and tentacles convulsed, spreading themselves apart and out like a human hand with the fingers spread wide open to catch a ball. Then the legs and tentacles collapsed and folded together, again like human hands, but this time in the prayer position as they followed the sinking mantle and head of the beast toward its ancestral home in the great depths.

Ripper sped off in a panicked run. It was good that she did. Otherwise, she would undoubtedly have become a victim of the young giants as they descended on the dead one like a swarm of giant, glowing, purple bees. They latched onto the carcass from all angles and began tearing and feeding on it.

The hunted had returned to devour the hunter. So it is in the seas of the beautiful world that Ripper ruled, yet had to practice extreme caution in. For the first rule is to hunt and kill, or be hunted and killed. Nature rewards her top hunters with the gift of life and the chance to renew its species. The failures become fodder for the true rulers.

Ripper dove deep, the ancient voices now screaming at her to flee to the frigid depths, where nature’s compress of great water pressure and her bandages of near freezing water would help bind Ripper’s wound and stop the bleeding trail that others might follow and destroy her by.

It wasn’t until she reached the total darkness and immense pressure at nearly fifteen hundred feet that she leveled off and slowed down.

The bleeding would stop before long, as no major vessels or arteries had been severed. As her heart slowed to a gentler, more relaxed beat the internal pressure that had been pounding blood to the wound would also slow and stop the bleeding.

Above her the pod of young giants swarmed over the sinking dead monster and continued to devour it.

Not long after that, a twenty-foot great white shark appeared out of the darkness and scattered the other scavengers. It approached the remains of the giant squid and proceeded to tear huge bites from it. Soon gorged, it ignored the blood trail of a wounded mako that led down into the depths. Instead of following it, the white shark remained, guarding the squid’s body until hunger returned again.

Ripper remained deep, allowing nature to quickly heal her wound. The ragged scar that would replace it would mark her until the day she died.
Her memory of the great Kraken disappeared in minutes. The cataclysmic event was a mere moment in the life of a great huntress.

Far deadlier, drooling enemies waited patiently in her path. They would soon threaten her with death’s embrace. She swam on into the unknown.

END OF CHAPTER. HOPE YOU ENJOYED A SHORT SWIM WITH GRIM RIPPER.

FOR A LONGER SWIM, GRIMRIPPERBOOK@SBCGLOBAL.NET

[flatbottom]

THANK YOU FRED

that was an amazing arrangement of words. I am swimming with her looking for the next encounter she reaches.