“Dolphin,”the old man said aloud.“ Big dolphin.”
The tuna,the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again.The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed.
The iridescent bubbles were beautiful.But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtles eating them.The turtles saw them,approached them from the front,then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all.The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them pop when he stepped on them with the horny soles of his feet.
The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats,low on the water and well in toward the shore,spread out across the current.Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then,as it rose clear,the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it.He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.He kept them straighter than anyone did,so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.