Free 05 Whale Adventure by Willard Price Page B

smell of blood and Hal splashed vigorously to keep them off.
    He yelled a warning to one of his companions as he saw a shark about to seize his foot. The man, numbed by fear and cold, did not act in time. The razor teeth closed on his leg and he was drawn down.
    Hal at once dived down in the hope of rescuing him. He explored the blue depths in vain. There were plenty of sharks about, but no sign of the man and the shark that had taken him.
    He battled his way back through the gleaming silver bodies to the surface and came up by the rolling flank of the big whale.

Chapter 13
Wild ride
    His hand struck something hard and cold. It was the harpoon in the whale’s neck. Instinctively he grasped it and felt himself lifted out of the water and carried away at high speed.
    The bull, having destroyed the boat, had now changed his tactics and was trying to run from the pain that tormented him. The rest of the pod followed at a slower pace. Sharks snapped alongside and Hal drew his feet up out of their way. He was thankful to the big bull. The monster that he had been helping to kill was now saving him.
    He looked back and saw with relief that the two other boats were now able to come in and pick up the survivors.
    Would anyone think about him? Some of them must have seen him dive, but perhaps no one had seen him rise again, because he had come up on the off side of the whale. They could not know what a wild ride he was getting.
    Many a man had ridden horseback, camel-back, elephant-back, and even ostrich-back, but who had ever gone for a ride whale-back?
    In other circumstances he might have thought it was great sport. It was like riding on the bridge of a submarine before it submerges.
    Submerges. That was an unhappy thought. If this living submarine took a notion to dive, what would happen to its rider?
    The bull, as if the same idea had just occurred to him, slid below the surface. Hal caught his breath as his head went under, and held on grimly. Perhaps this was just a surface dive. On the other hand it might be a ‘sound’, a dive far down to a depth of as much as a quarter of a mile. The whale might stay down for an hour. Three minutes of that would be quite enough to exhaust Hal’s air, and the terrific pressure would crush him as flat and dead as a pancake.
    But he had no sooner thought of these things than his head rose again above the waves. The whale sent up a terrific spout of blood and steam. And Hal remembered being told that a whale spouting blood never sounds, perhaps because its pierced lungs and drained arteries cannot retain enough oxygen for a long stay under water. However this may be, the big bull made only brief dips below water, coming up within a minute or so.
    Every time he emerged he blasted more blood into the air which showered down upon Hal until he was so plastered from head to toe that his own mother would not have known him.
    Wherever this deposit touched his skin it stung like fire. It was not the blood that caused this violent irritation, but the poison gases expelled from the monster’s lungs. The wind blew these vapours back upon Hal along with the blood.
    During a whale’s stay of a half hour or an hour beneath the sea the pure air with which it has filled its lungs gradually changes, much as it does in the human body. Perhaps if a human could bottle up his breath for a half-hour or an hour it would, when expelled, be poisonous too.
    The whale’s spout is not kind to any living thing that gets In its way. A sailor who looked over the gunwale of his ship just as a whale below happened to spout got the blast full in his face; the skin itched terribly and a day later peeled off so that he looked as if he had come through a fire. Fortunately his eyes had automatically closed when the jet struck him. Eyes fully exposed to the fumes may be seriously damaged or even blinded.
    If the healthy whale’s spout is poisonous, the breath of a wounded whale is much more so. Again, the whale is like you and