"I should have brought a stone." You should have brought many things, he thought.
But you did not bring them, old man.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with what there is.
"You give me much good counsel," he said aloud. "I'm tired of it."
He held the tiller under his arm and soaked both his hands in the water as the skiff drove forward.
"God knows how much that last one took," he said.
"But she's much lighter now." He did not want to think of the mutilated under-side of the fish.
He knew that each of the jerking bumps of the shark had been meat torn away and that the fish now made a trail for all sharks as wide as a highway through the sea.
He was a fish to keep a man all winter, he thought.