"Quick! Drop the nets! Drop several more layers of fishing nets and tangle it up!..."
"Ah! Slack the ropes, slack the ropes! This giant whale is too strong—we have to snare it while giving it room to pull!..."
"Quick, quick! Throw more grass ropes weighted with heavy stones! Hook it!..."
The strait shimmered like a jade belt, the opposing cliffs like waist and thighs. The kingdom's Whale Port lay faintly in sight, at the far end of the horizon. And in this narrow bay, twelve of the kingdom's Longships circled the greatest beast in the world, laying a net they had prepared for a long time.
"Main God! It's coming this way! Back! Back! Row, row!..."
"Huh! It's surfaced! It's actually this big—bigger than a Longship!..."
"Main God as witness! This thing must weigh hundreds of thousands of jin, right?!... If we catch it, it'll feed several thousand people for a month!..."
"Good chance! Stab it with the long forks!... Bleed it! Bleed it more!..."
Its fins and bristles blotted out the blue sky; the long whale towered like a crag. This enormous blue whale was a full twenty or thirty meters long, even a stretch longer than a Longship. Its vast, heaving body could easily raise surging waves, making even the Longships rock violently.
The twelve Longships kept casting nets and throwing ropes, winding them around the enormous blue whale in an effort to limit the giant beast's movement. Along the sides of the ships, many Kingdom Warriors also hurled sharp Stone Spears, shooting them into the beast's flank. More than twenty nimble Canoes carried dozens of tribal warriors.
These tall hunters who had cast life and death aside crouched on the violently rocking little boats. They gripped fish spears several meters long in both hands and stabbed hard