Chapter 58: Ambergris
The whale's intestines are huge, as thick as my thighs, and compared to the intestines of pigs, they are almost the ratio of a toothpick to chopsticks.
I tugged at the huge intestines, dividing them into three-metre segments, and then extracting the filth from them, and I did this in search of ambergris.
I don't know how long the sperm whale's intestines are, anyway, there are still more than half of the intestines piled up there after a busy morning, but after a morning's work, I didn't find a piece of ambergris, but made a large piece of whale excrement, and the smell was not too bad to die.
I was a little hungry near noon, but I didn't want to eat the whale's intestines anymore because it didn't taste and texture very good.
At first, I thought that whale tails were all bones or fish-like fins with no flesh, but when I saw real whale tails, I realized that sperm whales have a lot of meat on their tails.
So I cut off a piece of meat from the whale's tail, and found that it was neither muscle nor fat, and I didn't know if it was delicious or not.
I roasted a piece of the whale's tail over the fire, and wrapped a piece of the whale's intestines and burned it directly in the fire.
The whale tail roasted on the fire looked delicious, and I couldn't wait to take a big bite after the roast, but I didn't expect it to taste great.
The texture of the sperm whale's tail is neither lean nor fat, it tastes very chewy but also very soft, and glutinous collagen is very rich.
It's so delicious,,,,,
The whale tail wrapped in intestines also tastes super good, and it is perfect if it is served with a little salt.
After a full meal, I took a break and prepared to continue my work to see if I could find ambergris, if I still couldn't find it, I wouldn't waste time, give up these intestines because they didn't taste very good, and there were more than a dozen tons of good whale meat waiting for me to deal with in front of me.
But my luck came, when I cut a section of my intestine again, I finally found what I was looking for in the excrement inside.
I found a hard object the size of a soccer ball with a grayish-black color, and I'm not sure it's ambergris.
In some sources, ambergris is the secretion of sperm whales, and the beak bone, which cannot be digested after swallowing large squid and octopus in the deep sea, will form a solid bond with the secretion in the intestine and then spit it out. Freshly spit ambergris is dark and soft, with an unpleasant smell, but it hardens, fades and emits a fragrance after years of washing by sun, air and seawater, and can be used to make perfumes.
There are only one percent of sperm whales that can form ambergris, but because of this one percent possibility, sperm whales have attracted large-scale hunting in modern times and almost perished, but fortunately, the world has begun to protect this large cetacean sperm whale in recent years to reproduce.
Looking at this piece of hard object, it is obvious that it is in line with the original form of ambergris, and it seems that this sperm whale is the one percent.
With the discovery, I had the motivation, I spent two days to clean the sperm whale's intestines one by one, especially in its huge stomach found more ambergris, after the cleaning of these ambergris is hundreds of catties at most.
I know that these ambergris are not yet ripe, and they have to go through wind and rain, sun and water to become real ambergris, although the process is long, but the value of these unripe ambergris is also huge.
I pile up ambergris together and wait for it to be processed later, and the most important thing to do at the moment is to divide this sperm whale, with the meat of the sperm whale, I don't have to worry about food in the future, if you put aside the premise of food shelf life, this more than 20 tons of sperm whale can let me eat for twenty or thirty years, enough for me to eat for a lifetime.
There is actually no difficulty in dividing sperm whales, for me, there is no suitable knife, I can only use a non-sharp foam knife to slowly divide, and the work efficiency is very low.
At my speed, it will take at least 20 days to complete the division of this 20-ton sperm whale, but fortunately, there are no flies on this island, and there is no need to worry about the whale meat being eaten by maggots.
As for the natural decay, as long as I remove the whale's internal organs, the rotting rate of muscle and fat will be much reduced, and in any case, I still divide the sperm whale as soon as possible and dry it to preserve it for a long time.
But I knew in my heart that it was impossible for me to dry the whole sperm whale in one fell.
I built some racks out of bamboo in the woods not far from the whales to dry the whale meat.
I started cutting along the sperm whale's tail, first cutting off the fat from the top layer of the whale and then cutting the dark red muscle out of the bone.
To know why the muscles of sperm whales are dark red, it is because it can dissolve and store more oxygen, allowing sperm whales to dive underwater for half an hour for 2,000 to 3,000 meters, so the muscle hemoglobin content of sperm whales is very high to be dark red.
Finally, I cut the cut meat into arm-thick strips and hung them on a bamboo rack to dry.
This is obviously a big project, and I think I can accomplish as much as I can.
In the days that followed, I cut the sperm whales, cut the meat into small pieces and dried them, and I also dried the heart, liver, and tongue of the whales, which are said to be the most nutritious things in whales.
The heart can be used as medicine to treat a variety of diseases, improve immunity, have a special effect on rheumatism, the liver can supplement vitamins and trace elements, although things are good, but don't eat more, eating too much is counterproductive.
I didn't expect that the two foam knives I made myself were very powerful, and they were not damaged for more than ten days, of course, I tried not to let the foam knives touch the bones of the sperm whale when I used them, but the two foam knives were ground off a little and a half.
What is even more unexpected is that I removed most of the meat of the sperm whale, which is far more than I expected, at first I just wanted to cut off part of the whale meat enough for me to eat.
But watching the remaining meat of the sperm whale rot little by little, it was a waste, I am a perfectionist and an obsessive-compulsive person how could I allow such a thing to happen, so after hard work, I really separated most of the whale meat and hung it on a wooden rack to dry.