Chapter Seven
We trap and kill the mosasaur
That did it, everyone got the idea. The next morning teams were organized to get strong boats and go onto the water. The entrance of Long Island Sound was blocked and lining up next to each other the boats, equipped with sonar, started sweeping the entire bay. When they found it, they would radio the second half of the ships. The ships with the all the weapons we could need, at least we hoped so. I was on one of the latter ships.
On my suggestion, there was a twenty-gallon bucketful of raw bloody meat, basically shark chum except for an animal bigger and way meaner than any shark. The searching boats were two thirds across the bay when they found it. They radioed us and we poured in the chum and waited. At first nothing happened but then the sonar on the searcher ships started going off. It was approaching the chum, just as I'd suspected and hoped that it would.
I could picture it in my mind, slowly drifting up toward the bloody meat floating on the surface. Eyes locked onto it, not noticing or not caring about the ring of ships around the meat. Hunger clouding its judgement, it was moving right into the trap.
"Twenty feet below the surface and closing" someone called out.
The mosasaur was very close now, so close that I could see it. It reached the surface and started to feed on the meat.
"Now!" I yelled and all the ships fired Hephaestian netting which merged in midair to form a single massive net which landed on the unsuspecting mosasaur. The instant it touched it snapped shut and completely trapped the predator. The mosasaur let out an angry roar. The netting held as the angry beast writhed and thrashed. Water sprayed everywhere, drenching us all as the mosasaur tried to escape its magical bonds. Its struggles quickly proved to be in vain as it stopped thrashing and just floated on the surface, glaring at us.
On another signal harpoons fired, stabbing deep into the mosasaur's body causing it let out a roar of pain and rage that died away as its life slipped away. It started to sink but the ropes connected to harpoons prevented this. So, we towed it back to camp and guess what was for dinner, mosasaur. I mean what were we supposed to do with it? We had this huge dead thing that we simply couldn't let rot and stink up the entire area, or worse leave it where some random person would come across it and find it.
Anyway, there was quite a lot of joke making, after all we were eating a creature not seen for at least 65 million years. Being so large, the creature fed everyone for a week. After that, the skeleton was put on display in between half-blood hill and the big house. A special frame for it forged by the Hephaestus campers supported it on its pedestal. Everyone was still in awe and amazed by the sight of the massive reptile's skeleton. The very memory of the animal when it was alive was both frightening and amazing. It truly was a shame to have kill it, truly regrettable, but at the same time it couldn't be allowed to roam free and pose a mortal danger to every living thing that moved.
In addition to that, the campers were now aware that I had an incredible knowledge of animals, both living and fossil. As in the case of non-mythological monsters anyway. However, despite everyone's celebrating and going about normal routines, I couldn't shake an ominous feeling of worry and unease. How had the mosasaur been here? I couldn't at all picture the actual logic of it.
Even if its species had survived the great extinction 65 million years ago, a whole population would have had to have survived for there to be one around now. That was improbable, something as large as it couldn't at all possibly have endured the millions of years between then and now. In addition to that, in the entire record of human history, there is no evidence of the continued existence of these prehistoric animals. In our modern world, despite the many unexplored areas of the oceans, the chances of even a single individual remaining undetected is infinitesimally small.
Especially for an animal that needed to breathe air, because to be honest, something that needs air therefore needs to surface and that means it could be spotted. Not only that but in order for there to be an individual that had been brought into existence there would have to be at least a relic population. That frankly was just impossible, yet its presence filled me with foreboding at what this meant for everyone. How had it been here and therefore a population of them here as well escaped notice for centuries?