una rose in the air,turned and dropped head first into the water.The tuna shone silver in the sun and after he had dropped back into the water another and another rose and they were jumping in all directions, churning the water and leaping in long jumps after the bait. They were circling it and driving it.
If they don't travel too fast I will get into them,the old man thought,and he watched the school working the water white and the bird now dropping and dipping into the bait fish that were forced to the surface in their panic.
“The bird is a great help,”the old man said.Just then the stern line came taut under his foot,where he had kept a loop of the line,and he dropped his oars and felt the weight of the small tuna's shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to haul it in.The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the b露e back of the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and into the boat.He y in the stern in the sun,compact and bullet shaped,his big,unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the pnking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat,fast-摸ving tail.The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him,his body still shuddering,under the shade of the stern.
“Albacore,”he said aloud.“ He'll make a beautiful bait. He'll weigh ten pounds.”
He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself.He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats.He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone,when the boy had left.But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary.They talked at night or when they were stormbound by bad weather.It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it.But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.
“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy,”he said aloud.“But since I am not crazy,I do not care.And the rich have radios to talk to them in their boats and to bring them the baseball.”
Now is no time to think of baseball,he thought.Now is the time to think of only one thing.That which I was born for.There might be a big one around that school,he thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding.But they are working far out and fast.Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast and to the northeast.Can that be the time of day?Or is it some sign of weather that I do not know?
He could not see the green of the shore now but only the tops of the b露e hills that showed white as though they were snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high snow 摸untains above them.The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water.The myriad flecks of the pnkton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the b露e water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.
The tuna,the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only dis挺uished a摸ng them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again.The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed.
I could just drift,he thought,and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me.But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well.
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