Yet it was these dangerous oddities that David Valentine led into one of the most daring actions of his career.
* * *
Valentine stood on the steady deck of the old Japanese factory-fishing ship, renamed the Redeye Run, in its permanent Puget Sound moorings in the east passage around Vashon Island and tried not to barf.
He'd smelled rotten fish before. He'd smelled sewage before. If it was possible to mix the two and come up with a third odor worse than the two component parts, the Big Mouths had discovered it in their hovels within the hulk.
He lifted his gaze from the open cargo hatches of the ship and looked at Vashon Island with its herds of sheep. The Big Mouths, when they wanted a change from seafood and crustaceans, had the run of the flat, muddy island and its flocks, stranded there for that purpose.
"Why this heap of junk?" Valentine asked.
"Mostly because the freezers still work", Finn Troyd said. Calling him "Finnegan" was a gilt-edged invitation to a punch in the mouth, and judging from the behavior of the OXFs on the ship, that was the civilized option. "You have to hand it to the Japs - they build industrial equipment to last. We've got a big supply of frozen emergency food. The last thing you want to do is run out of rations when you're handling Big Mouths".
Valentine nodded.
"Ready to go down and meet the gang?"
"I guess I'm dressed for it". Valentine, with the titular rank of captain, didn't bother with "sir's" - no one in the OXFs did.
They both wore old woolen pants and sweaters, covered by a layer of waterproof overalls and thick green plastic boots.
"Grab your S and S and let's go, then".
By "S and S" Troyd meant shotgun and shockstick. The shockstick was almost identical to the ones Valentine had seen and used in the Southwest, save that it had a longer and heavier rubberized handle.
They went down into one of the holds. The side of the ship was punctured below the waterline. Scale and rust gave some color to the old sides, and the barnacles and whelks were making inroads into the water pooled in the bottom of the hold.
The smell was even worse down here thanks to the confined space. Valentine looked around at the staring bright red goggle eyes of the squatting and lounging Big Mouths.
They were hard to describe. Scaled like fish everywhere but the mouth and belly, they had huge triangular heads that tapered off to thin hips, where they were equipped with the long rear legs of a frog, ending in flippers and residual digits - almost useless for gripping, according to Troyd. Short arms, mostly used for climbing out of the water and pivoting on land, had webbed, gripping toes. They had blue green backs and pale, tartar-colored bellies.
The hold echoed with the sound of their breathing, as they sucked air through gill-like openings: slee-kee, slee-kee.
They liked to position themselves against an object, an underwater rock or log, with their rear legs folded. They could execute fair-sized leaps even without something to push off, but when properly "sprung" they could cover thirty yards or more in a lightning-flash hop.
Valentine watched a larger Big Mouth come up through a hole in the bottom of the ship and crowd another one out of the way with a few threatening snaps of vertically hinged jaws.
"What keeps her afloat?"
"One of each of the holds, forward and rear, is full of buoyant stuff, and the slop barges to either side are fixed permanently as camels. Marker barrels, Ping-Pong balls, flotation foam from old life jackets and airplane cushions, coconut coir, just about anything guaranteed not to sink. You could rip out the whole bottom of this ship and she wouldn't go down. At least I don't think she would".
Pools of filth rested in the shallow water lapping in the hold.
"They like it dirty down here, don't they?"
Troyd shrugged. "The shit feeds the slime. Little fish and crabs feed off the slime. Bigger fish eat the little fish. The Big Mouths eat the crabs and bigger fish, leading to more shit. It's a regular circle of life".
A Big Mouth splashed around in the filth, wiggling its rear hips and hunching its back. "Lying around, eating, and shitting, that's about all they do when they're not in training".
Valentine noted that the full-grown Big Mouths had stainless steel rings at their forehump between the eyes and in a fleshy taillike growth between the legs.
"What are the rings?" he asked.
"Front one's a towline or tether line. You'll see how those work. Rear is attached to some gonad tissue - that's a control line. About the only way you can direct them is to yank 'em by the balls. But haul too hard on the reins - they'll swing around and try to bite yours off".
Troyd let Valentine absorb that factoid and then continued: "Okay, we've seen lying around and shitting. Let's go look at the eating and training".
They took a flagged motorboat over to a sheltered bay between Maury and Vashon islands. OXE, mostly male but with a few women, stood on little floating platforms heaped with white buckets, or paddled around in sea kayaks, or were pulled about lying on floats Troyd called "boogie boards".