Free Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway Page B

not the
ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s
fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the
fingers of the old man and they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides.
This was a fish built to feed on all the fishes in the sea, that were so fast
and strong and well armed that they had no other enemy. Now he speeded up as he
smelled the fresher scent and his blue dorsal fin cut the water.
       When the old man saw him coming he knew that
this was a shark that had no fear at all and would do exactly what he wished.
He prepared the harpoon and made the rope fast while he watched the shark come
on. The rope was short as it lacked what he had cut away to lash the fish.
       The old man’s head was clear and good now
and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last,
he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close
in. It might as well have been a dream, he thought. I cannot keep him from
hitting me but maybe I can get him. Dentuso, he thought. Bad luck to your
mother.
       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 plowed over the water as a speedboat 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 anymore
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