The shark was not an accident .He had come up from deep down in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled and dispersed in the mile deep sea.He had come up so fast and absolutely without caution that he broke the surface of the blue water and was in the sun.Then he fell back into the sea and picked up the scent and started swimming on the course the skiff and the fish had taken.
“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.
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 paralyzed the lower leg and made the unbearable pain.
“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.