Question

Write an analytic response

Answer 1

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. 5 He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there 1 0 his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses 1 5 stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, 2 0 and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, 2 5 fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, 3 0 the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes 3 5 which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses 4 0 of old scratched isinglass.1 They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. 4 5 I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— 5 0 grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks 5 5 grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap 6 0 when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. 6 5 I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow 7 0 around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts2 the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels3 —until everything 7 5 was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.