“I wish I had a stone for the knife,”the old man said after he had checked the lashing on the oar butt.“I should have brought a stone.”You should have brought many things,he thought.But you did not bring them,old man. Now is no time to think of what you do not have.Think of what you can do with what there is.
Sometimes he lost the scent.But he would pick it up again,or have just a trace of it and he swam fast and hard on the course.He was a very big Mako shark built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws.
The breeze was steady.It had backed a little further into the northeast and he knew that meant that it would not fall off.The old man looked ahead of him but he could see no sails nor could he see the hull nor the smoke of any ship. There were only the flying fish that went up from his bow sailing away to either side and the yellow patches of gulf-weed.He could not even see a bird.
The next shark that came was a single shovel-nose.He came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it.The old man let him hit the fish and then drove the knife on the oar down into his brain. But the shark jerked backwards as he rolled and the knife blade snapped.