A Best Fisherman,the old man (2)

circled again.
“He’s got something,” the old man said aloud. “He’s not just looking.”
He rowed slowly and steadily toward where the bird was circling. He did not hurry
and he kept his lines straight up and down. But he crowded the current a little so that he
was still fishing correctly though faster than he would have fished if he was not trying to
use the bird.
The bird went higher in the air and circled again, his wings motionless. Then he dove
suddenly and the old man saw flying fish spurt out of the water and sail desperately over
the surface.
[33] “Dolphin,” the old man said aloud. “Big dolphin.”
He shipped his oars and brought a small line from under the bow. It had a wire
leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited it with one of the sardines. He let it go
over the side and then made it fast to a ring bolt in the stern. Then he baited another line
and left it coiled in the shade of the bow. He went back to rowing and to watching the
long-winged black bird who was working, now, low over the water.
As he watched the bird dipped again slanting his wings for the dive and then
swinging them wildly and ineffectually as he followed the flying fish. The old man could
see the slight bulge in the water that the big dolphin raised as they followed the escaping
fish. The dolphin were cutting through the water below the flight of the fish and would be
in the water, driving at speed, when the fish dropped. It is a big school of dolphin, he
thought. They are widespread and the flying fish have little chance. The bird has no
chance. The flying fish are too big for him and they go too fast.
He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements
of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving out too
fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up [34] a stray and perhaps my big fish is around
them. My big fish must be somewhere.
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long
green line with the gray blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that
it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in
the dark water and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them
go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton
because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was
higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird
was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some
patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent,
gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating dose beside the boat. It turned on
its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple
filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.
“Agua mala,” the man said. “You whore.”
From where he swung lightly against his oars he looked down into the water and saw