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twinge of guilt. And all the while these odd bits of thoughts went through my mind, and the engine pounded, and the
Blue Fin
, rolling slowly,moved steadily out toward the forty fathom bank, Ethan May slept.
    When Pigeon Point was off our port quarter and I could just make out what looked like it might be Año Nuevo Island with its tiny white sliver of a light tower, May got up from the deck of the wheelhouse, put on his black skull cap and looked out through the window. Then he came over by the wheel and, after glancing at the chart, suggested we take a sounding. I threw the engine out of gear, got out the lead line and put some tallow in the cup at the bottom of the lead. As the
Blue Fin
drifted in a slow circle, I put the line down. We were in thirty-eight fathoms, and when I brought the lead aboard, there was green mud on the tallow. May took the wheel and headed west, stopping from time to time, while I took the soundings. When the depth showed forty fathoms and green sand was on the tallow, May went aft and let out the buoy line.

6

    I used to believe that time would efface certain memories, or at least take the pain out of them. I see now that this was wishful thinking. Time passes and things change. Outwardly I’m no longer what I was. I eat too much, gain weight. I’ve gotten soft, lost my hair. My wife, who was once quite shapely, is troubled by a figure problem. Her hair has turned gray. Time passes and things change. But, for the most part, they’re happy changes. We do not talk all night as we once did. We come and go pretty much as we please. Healthy love exists between us all, a tranquil kind of love engendered by the freedom from anxiety that springs from the security of affluence.
    But these doubts, these ugly shadows. They skulk about. I wait but they do not go away. And then one moment off guard, one little rift, and a whole scene appears before me. It is mid-afternoon, cool, bright with a moving shadow under the lee of the
Blue Fin
’s rust-mottled hull. I feel a slow rolling, driving forward, hear the prolonged S sound of the bow wake, the ominous hiss of the up-flung shark hooks. Ethan May’s sturdy figure stands framed against the sky. After twenty years, this scene, and one other, cling obstinately, at times obsessively, defying altogether the effacing power of time, and every effort of will.
    We were a good five miles offshore. The white sand beaches had sunk below the rim of ocean. Faintly, I could see the broken segments of yellow cliffs extending to the north and south and out of sight. Long hills, round and brown and parted here and there by wide hazy valleys,faded back into the dim gray peaks of the coastal ranges. The smell of land seemed far away. Over the stern roller, the heavy mainline, with its sardine pendants like silver ornaments, descending at a steep angle and disappearing far below the watery darkness, made me acutely conscious of the eerie depths below. At that moment I had but one desire, and that was not for sharks—I’d given up all hope by then—but to be back in the City, back with my wife and the children, however impoverished we might have been, however dismal the future might have looked.
    When the set was down and the last buoy line was out, we went below for a bite to eat and some hot coffee. As always, May sluiced down the deck, washed his hands, and after folding his black skull cap and putting it into his trouser pocket, followed me into the galley. Nothing seemed to disturb him. The fact that all the other boats had gone, that we had gotten almost nothing on our first set, that we were now far out on the ocean and completely alone with the end of the season almost on us, all of which had put me into a state close to despair, seemed to affect him not at all.
    Nor could I tell how he felt about the gull getting hooked that morning. I could only assume that he took that too, like everything else, as a matter of course. He ate the big