Free Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

in
him, and rose high out of the water showing all his
great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in
the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a
crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff.
       The old man felt faint and sick and he could
not see well. But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his
raw hands and, when he could see, he saw the fish was on his back with his
silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the
fish’s shoulder and the sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from his
heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more than a mile
deep. Then it spread like a cloud. The fish was silvery and still and floated
with the waves.
       The old man looked carefully in the glimpse
of vision that he had. Then he took two turns of the harpoon line around the
bitt in the bow and hid his head on his hands.
       “Keep my head dear,” he said against the
wood of the bow. “I am a tired old man. But I have killed this fish which is my
brother and now I must do the slave work.”
       Now I must prepare the nooses and the rope
to lash him alongside, he thought. Even if we were two and swamped her to load
him and bailed her out, this skiff would never hold him. I must prepare
everything, then bring him in and lash him well and step the mast and set sail
for home.
       He started to pull the fish in to have him
alongside so that he could pass a line through his gills and out his mouth and
make his head fast alongside the bow. I want to see him, he thought, and to
touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But that is not why I wish
to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought. When I
pushed on the harpoon shaft the second time. Bring him in now and make
him fast and get the noose around his tail and another around his middle to
bind him to the skiff.
       “Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a
very small drink of the water. “There is very much slave work to be done now
that the fight is over.”
       He looked up at the sky and then out to his
fish. He looked at the sun carefully. It is not much more than noon, he
thought. And the trade wind is rising. The lines all mean nothing now. The boy
and I will splice them when we are home.
       “Come on, fish,” he said. But the fish did
not come.
       Instead he lay there wallowing now in the
seas and the old man pulled the skiff upon to him.
       When he was even with him and had the fish’s
head against the bow he could not believe his size. But he untied the harpoon
rope from the bitt, passed it through the fish’s gills and out his jaws, made a
turn around his sword then passed the rope through the other gill, made another
turn around the bill and knotted the double rope and made it fast to the bitt
in the bow. He cut the rope then and went astern to noose the tail. The fish
had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed
the same pale violet colour as his tail. They were wider than a man’s hand with
his fingers spread and the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a
periscope or as a saint in a procession.
       “It was the only way to kill him,” the old
man said. He was feeling better since the water and he knew he would not go
away and his head was clear. He’s over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he
thought. Maybe much more. If he
dresses out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?
       “I need a pencil for that,” he said. “My
head is not that clear. But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me
today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly.” I wonder
what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it.
       He made the fish fast to bow and stern and
to the middle thwart. He was so big it was like lashing a much bigger skiff
alongside. He cut a piece of line