Read Online Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez - Free Book Online Page A

with my oar.
    Killing a fish inside a raft isn’t easy. The vessel tottered with each blow; it might have turned over. It was a perilous moment. I needed all my strength and all my wits about me. If I struck out blindly, the raft would turn over and I would plunge into a sea full of hungry sharks. If I didn’t aim carefully, my quarry would escape. I stood betweenlife and death. I would either end up in the gullet of a shark or get four pounds of fresh fish to appease the hunger of seven days.
    I braced myself on the gunwale and struck the second blow. I felt the wooden oar drive into the fish’s skull. The raft bounced. The sharks shuddered below. I pressed myself firmly against the side. When the raft stabilized, the fish was still alive.
    In agony, a fish can jump higher and farther than it otherwise can. I knew the third blow had to be a sure one or I would lose my prey forever.
    After a lunge at the fish, I found myself sitting on the floor, where I thought I had a better chance of grabbing it. If necessary, I would have captured it with my feet, between my knees, or in my teeth. I anchored myself to the floor. Trying not to make a mistake and convinced that my life depended on my next blow, I swung the oar with all my strength. The fish stopped moving and a thread of dark blood tinted the water inside the raft.
    I could smell the blood, and the sharks sensed it, too. Suddenly, with four pounds of fish within my grasp, I felt uncontrollable terror: driven wild by the scent of blood, the sharks hurled themselves with all their strength against the bottom of the raft. The raft shook. I realized that it could turn over in an instant. I could be torn to pieces by the three rows of steel teeth in the jaws of each shark.
    But the pressure of hunger was greater than anything else. I squeezed the fish between my legs and, staggering, began the difficult job of balancing the raft each time it suffered another assault by the sharks. That went on for several minutes. Whenever the raft stabilized, I threw the bloody water overboard. Little by little the water cleared and the beasts calmed down. But I had to be careful: aterrifyingly huge shark fin—the biggest I had ever seen—protruded more than a meter above the water’s surface. The shark was swimming peacefully, but I knew that if it caught the scent of blood it would give a shudder that could capsize the raft. With extreme caution I began to try to pull my fish apart.
    A creature that’s half a meter long is protected by a hard crust of scales: if you try to pull them off, you find that they adhere to the flesh like armor plating. I had no sharp instruments. I tried to shave off the scales with my keys, but they wouldn’t budge. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I had never seen a fish like this one: it was deep green and thickly scaled. From when I was little, I had associated the color green with poison. Incredibly, although my stomach was throbbing painfully at the prospect of even a mouthful of fresh fish, I had trouble deciding whether or not that strange creature might be poisonous.
My poor body
    Hunger is bearable when you have no hope of food. But it was never so insistent as when I was trying to slash that shiny green flesh with my keys.
    After a few minutes, I realized I would have to use more violent methods if I wanted to eat my victim. I stood up, stepped hard on its tail, and stuck the oar handle into one of its gills. I saw that the fish wasn’t dead yet. I hit it on the head again. Then I tried to tear off the hard protective plates that covered the gills. I couldn’t tell whether the blood streaming over my fingers was from the fish or from me; my hands were covered with wounds and my fingertips were raw.
    The scent of blood once again stirred the sharks’ hunger. It seems unbelievable but, furious at the hungry beasts and disgusted by the sight of the bloody fish, I was on the point of throwing it to the sharks, as I had done with the sea gull. I