“Well, let’s get down, get the mer unstrapped, talk to the delphinos and get the net deployed.”
The scene underwater in the bait school was a maelstrom. The sounds of the cavitation of literally millions of fish filled the water with a sound like thunder. Scales from dead and damaged fish rained down in a continuous silver-glittering cloud. And in every direction fish of various sizes were swimming chaotically. Besides the sound and the movement, the colors of the fish were confusing. A group of sailfish, swimming past faster than a dragon, were changing hue along their sides, rippling with blue and yellow stripes as they passed. Narrow, torpedolike fish that Pete identified as wahoo were marked the same way. The mackerels themselves changed hue constantly, presumably to make it harder for their predators to fix on any one fish. The chaotic patterns, the sound, the enormous sense of movement were oddly terrifying.
Herzer finally tore his eyes away from the spectacle and grabbed onto Joanna’s spread wings. The delphinos had clustered in her shadow and he saw more forms clustering in the depths. As he watched a mackerel, squirted out of the school by the press of the predators, dart across towards the shadow and presumed safety. One of the forms rose in a way that at first seemed slow and lazy, then suddenly sped up, slashing in for a strike on the bewildered bait fish. The form turned out to be a massive marlin that quickly darted back into the deeps, the tail of the mackerel sticking out one side of its beak.
“I don’t know where to start,” Jason admitted.
“Don’t really look at it,” Herzer said. “Unfocus. Just let it all be a blur.”
The dragons were clearly having some of the same problems but it hadn’t slowed them much. They darted into the swarm, just a few more large predators to feast on the plenty, and started picking off fish at the edge, mostly the predators that had come for the mackerel.
Herzer had come for tuna, primarily, but they were running so fast it was hard to keep an eye on them. They would go by so fast that even by panning his head it was hard to see them as anything other than a blur. Their tails were a blur; they seemed to move faster than a hummingbird’s wing.
He found himself getting overwhelmed again and took his own advice, grabbing a corner of the net as Jason spread it out.
“Right,” Jason said, finally. “We’ll just head into the school. When I give the word, Herzer and Elayna just try to hold steady and Pete and I will swing it around.” He looked at the wall of fish of every conceivable size and gulped some water. “Follow me.”
Pete and Jason headed straight into the baitball, through the wall of predators. Herzer saw one yellowfin tuna that was bigger than Bast slam into Pete as he neared the mackerel but Pete was merely buffeted for a moment and kept on heading in. Jason was at the top of the net and Herzer could see clearly when he entered the baitball because he simply disappeared.
The net in their way immediately affected the mackerel and a large slice of them, ten meters or so long and a few meters deep, turned aside and formed their own ball as predators slashed into them. Herzer tried to pull the net to a halt at the edge of the main ball but it was wriggling madly in his hands. A tuna slammed dead into his side and both of them rebounded from the impact, shaken. He stuck a hand out and jammed it into the momentarily drifting tuna’s gills and was rewarded by a panicked frenzy for his troubles. The tuna, which was not much smaller than he and probably weighed more, thrashed against his side, dragging him off in an upward spiral. He got his hand free and grabbed the net with flesh and metal hands, striving with all his might to kick his way out into the open water. By this time he had been dragged fully into the mackerel and their flashing bodies were all he could see. They swarmed all around him, butting into his side, face, legs, like a thousand maddened cats. Suddenly his head crested the water and try as he might he could not get the net to budge; the weight of the fish in it, their frenzied fighting, Pete and Jason pulling on it, all combined to simply tow him through the water.
Suddenly a talon shot out of the water and grasped the net by his hand. He let go as Joanna took over, dragging the net, and a mass of fish, out of the main school. He gratefully swam out of the frenzy and into the comparative peace alongside.
The net was a gill net, long and relatively short, not the purse seine that would have been ideal for the purposes. But by tying it on the bottom and ends and letting it float to the surface they had gathered a huge quantity of mackerel, and several relatively small and confused tuna.
“You know,” Joanna said. “Just when we need that damned ship.”
Jason was pulling mackerel out with his hands, mostly those stuck in the net, and handing them to the delphinos. He pulled one out for himself and expertly stripped it of its skin, then tore into the flesh. Joanna dipped her muzzle into the net and caught a couple more along with one of the small tuna.
“Tuna,” she said after she swallowed. “Tastes just like chicken.”
“The question is,” Herzer asked, floating at the surface, “did this work better than, say, diving in and grabbing them by hand or mouth?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jason replied. He dipped under the water and blatted at the delphinos.
“Better,” Herman said. “Less energy. Better.”
“But we have to get the net back to town,” Herzer replied.
“Eat fish, fill net, go town,” Herman replied. “Fish fresh.”
“Yeah,” Jason mused. “They’ll live in the net, so they’ll be fresh when we get back. And they can stay in the net for a day or so, except for getting caught in the weave.”
Herzer was watching Chauncey try to catch the big tunas. He had tried to snatch them on the run, but they were just too fast. Finally, he struck out with his half-folded wing and managed to temporarily stun one, which he quickly picked off. Others followed his example and the wyverns were quickly replete with fish.
“They learn,” Herzer muttered.
“Oh, yeah,” Jerry said. He and the others had swum over to the floating net, from which the delphinos were now stripping the gill-caught fish. “They’d never learn anything if it wasn’t by example. When one sees something that works, it copies it. That’s half of the way that they’re trained.”
“That’s unusual in the natural world,” Herzer pointed out.
“They’re not natural,” Jerry replied with a shrug. “All this swimming is fun, but this water is damned deep and we’re way out here. How long are we going to stay?”
Herzer hadn’t really noticed the depth, concentrating on the problem, but he realized they were out over the deeps for sure. The water was a deep, rich blue and the light from the sun formed a cone fading into the depths, his shadow in its midst.
“Dragons are fed, delphinos are fed, mer-dudes and dudettes are fed,” Herzer said, tearing his eyes away from the attraction of simply going down and down. “I’d say we fill the net and head for home.”
“Works for me,” Jerry replied. “I’m getting tired of paddling.”
“Try to get the dragons over to you,” Herzer said. “They float. In the meantime, we have to try to fill this thing again.”
The second time they left the bottom tied and swam the net, with both ends open, into the school. It quickly filled with mackerel, and in this case several very irate, very large, yellowfin tuna. They tied the top and end for good measure, then started dragging it back towards town.
The dragons were content to scull along on the surface and their riders, including Bast and Herzer, took that method of transportation. The mer switched off with the delphinos, who had stubby fingers on the ends of their pectoral fins, dragging the squirming net back to town. So it was a group of very tired, but triumphant, hunters that returned just as the sun was setting with enough protein, on the fin moreover, to last the town for a few days.