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.
“Agua mala,”the man said.“ You whore.”
“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 blue 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 lay in the stern in the sun,compact and bullet shaped,his big,unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat,fast-moving tail.The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him,his body still shuddering,under the shade of the stern.
The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east.There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low and far inshore.
Now the old man looked up and saw that the bird was circling again.
From where he swung lightly against his oars he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were colored like the trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble made as it drifted.They were immune to its poison.But men were not and when some of the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple while the old man was working a fish,he would have welts and sores on his arms and hands of the sort that poison ivy or poison oak can give.But these poisonings from the agua mala came quickly and struck like a whiplash.