The Old Man and the Sea

He’s headed almost east, he thought. That means he is tired and going with the current. Soon he will have to circle. Then our true work begins.

He saw him first as a dark shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he could not believe its length. “No,” he said. “He can’t be that big.”

The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just summoned, into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man’s chest.