It's normally not a bad gig. The captain hunts down the whales, then they get harpooned and tied to the side of the ship, then we hop down and start cutting free all the blubber a flensing blade. There's a blade to cut the blubber into strips, and when it's being pulled back there's another blade to help remove it from the rest of the body. Both blades are on poles, because no one likes to kneel on de-blubbered whale.
Norman is one of about a dozen other flensers on the Pequod. Usually I try to give him a wide berth, as he's a serial prankster with a penchant for outdoing himself.
I should have known to watch it that day, especially after I kept getting glimpses of that idiotic grin he wears right before a prank.
Anyway, there I am, pulling cutting away on a slab of blubber, when I take a step backward, and suddenly, I'm up to my neck in the side of a whale. I craned my neck to just enough to see an X cut where I've slipped through into the body cavity of the whale. I wonder where... Oh no! Then the smell hits me and I start yelling. I'm sinking fast, and thinking that I thought they smelled bad on the outside. Pretty soon, the only thing keeping me from disappearing entirely, is my death-grip on my flensing blade.
I'll spare you the rest, though if you're a sick-puppy, you can probably guess at the rest, since I'm alive to tell it.
The best part of the story, which I'll save for another day, is my stinking revenge on Norman.
It's normally not a bad gig. The captain hunts down the whales, then they get harpooned and tied to the side of the ship, then we hop down and start cutting free all the blubber a flensing blade. There's a blade to cut the blubber into strips, and when it's being pulled back there's another blade to help remove it from the rest of the body. Both blades are on poles, because no one likes to kneel on de-blubbered whale.
Norman is one of about a dozen other flensers on the Pequod. Usually I try to give him a wide berth, as he's a serial prankster with a penchant for outdoing himself.
I should have known to watch it that day, especially after I kept getting glimpses of that idiotic grin he wears right before a prank.
Anyway, there I am, pulling cutting away on a slab of blubber, when I take a step backward, and suddenly, I'm up to my neck in the side of a whale. I craned my neck to just enough to see an X cut where I've slipped through into the body cavity of the whale. I wonder where... Oh no! Then the smell hits me and I start yelling. I'm sinking fast, and thinking that I thought they smelled bad on the outside. Pretty soon, the only thing keeping me from disappearing entirely, is my death-grip on my flensing blade.
I'll spare you the rest, though if you're a sick-puppy, you can probably guess at the rest, since I'm alive to tell it.
The best part of the story, which I'll save for another day, is my stinking revenge on Norman.
Idiot Proof, black, XL