The shark closed fast astern and when he hit the fish the old
man saw his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop
of the teeth as he drove forward in the meat just above the tail.
The shark’s head was out of water and his back was coming out and
the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the
big fish when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark’s head at a
spot where the line between his eyes intersected with the line that
ran straight back from his nose.There were no such lines. There was
only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the clicking,
thrusting, all-swallowing jaws. But that was the location of the
brain and the old man
hit it. He hit it with his blood-mushed hands driving a good
harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with
resolution and complete malignancy.
The shark swung over and the old man saw his eye was not alive
and then he swung over once again, wrapping himself in two loops of
the rope. The old man knew that he was dead but the shark would
not accept it. Then, on his back, with his tail lashing and his
jaws clicking, the shark ploughed over the water as a speed-boat
does. The water was white where his tail beat it and three-quarters
of his body was clear above the water when the rope came taut,
shivered, and then snapped. The shark lay quietly for a little
while on the surface and the old man watched him. Then he went down
very slowly.
“He took about forty pounds,” the old man said aloud. He took
my harpoon too and all the rope, he thought, and now my fish bleeds
again and there will be others.
He did not like to look at the fish any more since he had been
mutilated. When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself
were hit.
But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he thought. And he
was the biggest dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows that I
have seen big ones.
It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a
dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed
on the newspapers.
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be
destroyed but not defeated.” I am sorry that I killed the fish
though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even
have the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and
intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not,
he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.
“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail on this course
and take it when it comes. ”
But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left.
That and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked
the way I hit him in the brain. It was no great thing, he thought.
Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a
handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything
wrong with my heel except the time the sting ray stung it when I
stepped on him when swimming and paralysed the lower leg and made
the unbearable pain.
“Think about something cheerful, old man,” he said. “Every
minute now you are closer to home. You sail lighter for the loss of
forty pounds.”
He knew quite well the pattern of what could happen when he
reached the inner part of the current. But there was nothing to be
done now.
“Yes there is,” he said aloud. “I can lash my knife to the
butt of one of the oars.”
So he did that with the tiller under his arm and the sheet of
the sail under his foot. “Now,” he said. “I am still an old man.
But I am not unarmed.”
The breeze was fresh now and he sailed on well. He watched
only the forward part of the fish and some of his hope
returned.
……
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