I had this chapter written already many months ago, but never posted it because I wanted cover art for each one. I was lucky enough to trade and collab with friends so far but this time I had to resort to sketching something myself. I realise that -recognisable anatomy aside- it looks like a six year old was let lose on a box of crayons, but I figure a simple illustration is better than no illustration.

Now for the main event: the story

4. Oceanic whitetips and unwanted souvenirs

The two orcas finished their rest and set a course towards the next feeding hotspot: Another volcanic island.
“How is the next one different from this one?” Gina asked while she enjoyed the warmth building up in her moving, now well insulated body. Even the resistance caused by the fullness of her belly filled her with a sense of pride, even if it made swimming a bit more difficult.
“The next one is not just one big chunk of rock. It's a group of small islands centered on one volcano. And it is much further away from any landmass. The currents are strong and the drop offs steeper. It's an ideal hunting ground for a lot of large fish species, which means a buffet for us.” He could feel the questioning glance almost burning on his freshly padded flanks so he continued right away.
“We might see blue sharks and oceanic whitetips around the island. Occasionally even makos and hammerheads too. And there are dolphins. Hmm it has been ages since I gurgled one of those chatty things.”
Gina had most of her questions answered now, but Martin gave her a new one.
“You eat dolphins?”
“Of course I do. They and seals share the top spot on my menu. Both got landmarks on my travel route I seek out just for them, they are this good. But you are still years away from being able to just fit them down your throat. Unless we find young ones or one of the smaller dolphin species. Those happen by the large current we will be riding from our next feeding hotspot to the one after that.” he explained.

As Gina swam alongside Martin, trying to profit from his water displacement where she could and asking about his experiences and adventures on this migration route, her stomachs were very busy. The large swimming muscles clenching time and time again to propel her half ton body forwards helped a great deal in macerating the contents of her forestomachs. As a result, one spiny dogfish after another either popped like a pinata, spilling its entrails into the messy digestive organ or was skinned and ground up against the rough walls of it. At this stage, Gina even profited from the abrasive skin of her prey, since the churning foregut eagerly ground the six -former- sharks against one another.
So far her main stomach had just been an empty fleshy cavern with a puddle of warm, concentrated digestive juices sitting at its bottom. But that changed once her forestomach had broken up its contents down far enough to start pumping them onwards. The valve sealing off her acidic main stomach opened and a gory mass pushed inside. Her guts churned in unison with her swimming, so each time her thick tail moved down to propel her forwards, her forestomach convulsed, pushing another mangled bit of food upwards, but instead of her throat it was that link to her further digestive organs opening up. The puddle of acids and enzymes soon got visited by unidentifiable chunks of torn white flesh, squishy, fatty livers, conveniently cigar shaped spiral valves or clumps of emptied out shark skin. The larger tougher swimming muscles and especially the sharks’ jaws would linger the longest, needing to be laboriously broken apart before they could fit as well. But in any case the acid glands in Gina’s main stomach had their figurative hands full as it was filled with a dozen kilos of fleshy goodness in urgent need of chemical digestion. After all, the valve to her pyloric stomach was exceedingly picky about the granularity of objects it admits to pass. Luckily for Gina, her stomach juices -while coating shark meat for the first time- were plenty suitable for turning many organic materials like skin, meat or entrails into a nice smooth paste, waiting to be refined into fuel for her winding intestines. Just those pesky little denticles were going to sneak through her nearly unchanged. Gina already anticipated leaving a glittering trail of those in her wake once they were returned to the ocean.

Martin always chuckled when Gina groaned in disappointment every time she released some of the unusable remnants of her feast only to register a complete lack of shiny denticles.
“You just ate them today Gina, it will take time for them to move through your guts, but it will work, don’t worry.”
“What if I shit them out at night and miss the glitter?”
“Then you will simply continue eating sharks until you dump one while the sun is out. That is your plan anyway, right?”
She groaned impatiently and ended up avoiding pooping at night anyway. And on the second morning after consuming her sharks number one through six, she woke Martin from his idleness with a loud celebratory chirp. When he turned around, all he could see was some graininess in the water, glittering in the sun, above where Gina danced around admiring her guts’ handiwork.
“Good girl, you digested all six of them.”
“It was SO good. It tickled a bit, like you said. That is when I knew it was the dogfish coming out at last. Then I turned and it was almost like an underwater rainbow but shiny.”
“And by the time you get to my age you will have done this up to a thousand times.”
That notion of her putting potentially thousands of sharks through her guts and returning them as ocean glitter made her shudder. She had imagined dozens, hundreds mayyyyybe if she was being heroic. But over a thousand? That was an inconceivably high number of removed dangerous predators.
“Thank you. I am not going to let you down.” she cooed and swam up to Martin, snuggling on his groaning belly. His longer intestines took longer to travel through, it seemed.
“Let me down? How would you do that?”
“I was talking to my stomachs.”
They had a good laugh and then resumed their long journey.

Soon, as the days crept by and the nautical miles piled up, Gina found out why Martin insisted on a detour to get her fed. Not eating in days was something she had only heard in old stories before. Then, when the storm hit her, she blamed it on it when she nearly starved. But now, she found out there were orcas like her mentor, that went on journeys with little to no food intake in three days.
“I am still hungry.” she complained after they shared a stray tuna they managed to wear out and run down.
“Me too. This is part of travelling. Good thing we started out well padded.” Martin had visibly lost weight already but unlike her, he knew what still lay ahead, or rather that their destination was already in range with their current reserves.
“We just need to keep swimming and then we will have a whole island group to plunder.” He tried to cheer her up.
Occasionally, when a promising sinar reflection dangled the idea of food in front of their inner eyes and empty bellies, they went on dives. On one such occasion they managed to each get a fraction of their daily needs when Martin seemingly casually snuck up on and slurped down a mid sized blue shark while Gina gobbled up the squid his prey had been after.
“Ahh that helped.” he sighed happily, even though the shark in his forestomach let him feel how much empty space it still had to wiggle around at first, until the grinding chamber came down on it.
“I wish there had been one of those for me too.” Gina replied. “All I got was some mushy invertebrates.”
“What you got was food in your belly. Now come on, it's just two more days I wager.”

Then, suddenly, Gina froze. She focussed hersonar someplace below and stared there. She had picked up a reflection and saw a shadow and with a cold shudder she realised what the ascending creature was. An oceanic white tip shark, like the one which had nearly made a meal of her, only smaller, was riding up to investigate the noise they had made.
“You!” Gina cried out in rage and charged at the shark. Her ears were utterly deaf to the calls of her protector and all she could think of was getting her jaws around that shark and killing it. All the fear and pain from that day which she remembered so vividly were fueling her rage now. The shark turned around sharply when it saw her and headed down, picking up speed rapidly, not wanting to mess with a pair of orcas. But Gina was not going to stop. She ignored all warnings, forgot about her inexperience or her once more weakened state. She darted after the whitetip as best she could and when she almost had it, the shark turned sharply. It was something she had never seen before. Martin’s blue shark had been consumed before it had realised what was going on. The dogfish had been easy snacks, except for the venom barbs. She was not prepared to see the two meter shark before her turn to the right and slow down much faster than she was even capable of.
“Come back here you sn AH!” she cried out first in rage, then in pain as the shark sank its teeth into her dorsal fin. She realised now that the maneuver had served the purpose of getting out of her jaws’ way and moving its in position to strike back. Another thing she learned, was how good that species was at biting. This one was a young adult so she did not end up having a chunk bitten out of her, but she still felt every cruel detail of the bite. One jaw had many pointy teeth like little daggers which punctured her flesh like it was nothing, the other one had broader, serrated teeth which sliced through her tough skin with ease. She could feel her flesh parting and even hear the little serrations sinking in, sawing through her outer layer. All of this happened in a flash, a fraction of a second. The sharp pain in her fin killed off her lust for blood, since Gina was now too concerned with the loss of her own.
“Gina, are you alright? What were you think... You are bleeding! Let’s get you up.”
She wanted to protest, to tell him to leave her and hunt that shark instead. She wanted to see it devoured, watched it crumble and melt in his guts like she had done with her first attacker. But she could not bring herself to utter those demands. She was scared and in the presence of a comforting, much larger orca, she readily went along with everything he said.
It turned out this was the right call too, because air was feeling like a luxury by the time she made it back up. Neither of them would have had the dive time to go after such a fast prey item anymore. Not after she had lost it.
“Argh! Why did I fuck this up? And how? I nearly had that shark in my maw.”
“They are clever. They do not just pass through here, they live here in the open. That is why they are so good at finding food and avoiding predation. This one probably did the same thing to a dozen larger sharks before in order to get this old. Now stop thrashing. I need to look at your fin.”

There was a dense half moon shaped series of punctures on one side and a few deep smooth cuts on the other one. But Martin could not see light through any of the bleeding wounds.
“You are lucky it was not bigger and that they have sharp teeth.”
“Why should I be glad the thing that tried to bite my dorsal off had sharp teeth?” she snapped irritably.
“Because smooth cuts heal fast. You can look at my belly where my one and only white shark meal bit me. It was closed after two days, never got inflamed and so on. But bites that rip and tear instead of cutting, they are nasty and always cause trouble and they heal badly.”
“If you put it like this. But still. That thing belongs in a stomach.”
“Agreed. Maybe next time you call out a shark nearly your size instead of rushing off. This ocean is home to sharks twice your size and while they leave me in peace, they would have taken off half your tail in a blink before I could protect you. I am at the top of the food chain, you have to get there yet. Please act like it.”
“I know.” repeated Gina, her bitten fin burning in an annoying but bearable way. “I only went after it because it looked exactly like the one trying to kill me. All I could see was the fleeing shark and my memories of how one just like it chased me until I was not sure if jaws or exhaustion would kill me. I hoped I could overwhelm it, hunt it down. Maybe share it with you or even just watch you eat it. I wish I could kill every last one of that particular kind.”
She was sobbing now, clearly not in a very rational state of mind and Martin was at a loss. He had been alone for most of the last three decades and had never helped raise a calf or similar. There was an uneasy silence as he pondered how to reply to her.
“I know it is hard sometimes to see something you want and not rush in to grab it. I could not do it myself and got kicked out of my pod for it. I want you to teach you how to survive out here, how to gorge on your favourite prey, but also how to avoid my mistakes. You just got your first little shark bite. But look at me.”
He opened his maw to reveal the close to ten dogfish barbs still embedded in his flesh and while Gina was a little distracted by the view of that closed off gullet which had casually slurped down a life blue shark only minutes ago, she swam around him and took in her lesson. There were plenty of abrasions over his rostrum from ramming into tough prey, like oceanic sharks. There were small longitudinal scars from seal claws. His flippers and flanks were peppered in smaller shark bites like her own. A deeper scar on his belly and a missing fluke tip, both caused by the same long digested white shark completed the look.
“Was it painful?” she asked, nudging the spot his fin tip used to be attached to, wondering how much worse than her current wound things could get.
“Very much so. I bled for a long time, the cut burned for weeks.
“But consuming a whole white shark was worth it right? It did feel so rewarding, I am sure.”
“Well, it was one of my proudest kills, that is true. But if I had the chance to get by without it, I would have done so. I did not hunt that guy for glory or greed. I did it because I had to to avoid starvation. This independent life of mine is not always fun and having a feeding hotspot all to yourself. It is lonely and it can get really dangerous. If I had fallen sick a day before that meeting that shark would have fed on me for a week or so and then went on his merry way.”
Now it was Gina’s turn to ponder. Her previously declared life goal sounded a bit silly now and instead she craved the community and support of her pod now. She swam alongside Martin and snuggled up, this time not to be close to his busy stomachs but just to have someone to touch, to connect to, someone to thwart each other’s loneliness with.
“I will come visit you sometimes, after you get me home again.” She had no idea how much that simple promise moved the ten ton behemoth besides her.

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