by Wilbur Smith
Shasa stood beside the fighting-chair. The stubby rod was set in the gimbal. The Fin-Nor Tycoon reel was made of gold-anodized marine-grade aluminium alloy. Still it weighed over five kilos and held over a kilometre of the braided Dacron line. The line hissed softly as it streamed off the reel. Shasa adjusted the tension on it with a light touch of his fingertips.
He had marked the line with wraps of silk thread at intervals of fifty yards. He let out a measured hundred yards before he tightened the drag lever of the reel.
The deckie was already lowering the halyard of one of the twenty-foot outriggers that protruded like whippy steel antennae from each side of the hull. The purpose of the outrigger was to hold the lines separated and to allow the slack bight of line to drop back when the marlin struck.
‘No,’ Shasa stopped him. ‘I will hold it myself.’
This was a more precise method of determining the depth of the bait and amount of drop-back. However, it required patience and experience and fortitude to hand-hold the line rather than merely to loll in the chair and leave it in the clip of the outrigger.
Carefully Shasa stripped a hundred feet of line off the big Fin-Nor and coiled it on the deck. Then he perched on the stern of Le Bonheur and called to the skipper: ‘Allez!’
The skipper engaged the gear lever, and the propeller began to turn lazily. The diesel engine was ticking over at idling revs and Le Bonheur began to inch forward against the scend of the swells.
Slowly she built up to a leisurely walking speed. The tension on the line in Shasa’s hand increased. He could feel the weight of the bonito on the other end. The fish began to follow the boat like a dog on a leash. Shasa judged the depth of the bait by the angle at which the line entered the water. He could tell the condition and liveliness of the bonito by the faint vibration of its tail and the intermittent tugs and jerks it gave as it attempted to turn or dive.
Within minutes Shasa’s arm was numb and cramping, but he ignored the discomfort and called up to Elsa on the bridge: ‘How about a little more of your “fiddle me diddle me” magic?’
‘It only works once.’ She shook her head. ‘From here on you are on your own.’
At slow speed Le Bonheur rolled sluggishly over the swells, and at Shasa’s order began a wide and gentle turn up into the north.
Halfway through the turn, the line went slack in Shasa’s hand and he stood up quickly from his seat on the gunwale.
‘What is it?’ Elsa called down eagerly.
‘Probably nothing,’ he grunted, but all his concentration was on the feel of the line.
It came taut again, but now the bonito’s movements were altered. He could feel its frantic struggles transmitted through his fingertips. It ducked and dived and tried to turn, but the gentle progress of Le Bonheur drew it forward remorselessly.
‘Attention!’ Shasa alerted the crew.
‘What’s happening?’ Elsa asked again.
‘Something is frightening the bonito,’ he answered. ‘It’s seen something down there.’
He could imagine the terror of the small fish as the gigantic shadow circled it stealthily in the blue underworld of the ocean. The marlin would be wary. The bonito was behaving unnaturally. It should have darted away instantly. The marlin stalked it gingerly, but soon its appetite would exceed its caution. Shasa waited a minute and another minute, crouched over the transom, rigid with excitement.
Suddenly the line was plucked from his fingers, but for an instant he felt the mighty weight and majesty of the marlin as it struck the bonito with the broad blunt edge of its spike.
‘Strike!’ Shasa howled, holding both arms above his head. ‘Stop engines!’
Obediently the skipper slipped the gear lever into neutral, and Le Bonheur wallowed, dead in the water. Shasa picked up the line again and held it with the lightest pressure of his fingertips. It was slack; no sign of life. The bonito had been killed instantly by that massive blow.
Vividly he imagined what was happening in those mysterious blue depths. The marlin had killed and now it circled again. It might lose interest, or become alarmed by the unnatural movement of the carcass. It was essential that no movement or drift on the line scared it off.
The seconds dripped like treacle, slow and sticky.
‘He is making another circle,’ Shasa tried to encourage himself. Still nothing happened.
‘Il est parti,’ the skipper announced lugubriously. ‘Il a refusé.’
‘I’ll kick your pessimistic butt if you wish it on me,’ Shasa told him furiously. ‘He hasn’t bloody well parti-ed. He’s coming around for another circle.’
The line twitched in his fingers, and Shasa let out a shout of relief.
‘Le voilà! There he is!’
Elsa clapped her hands. ‘Eat, fish. Smell that lovely sweet flesh. Eat it,’ she implored.
The line jiggled and tugged softly, and Shasa let a few inches slide through his fingers. He could imagine the marlin picking up the carcass in its horny beak and turning it head-first to swallow it down.
‘Don’t let him feel the hook,’ Shasa whispered a prayer. The loop of line should allow the point of the hook to lie flat against the bonito’s head as it slid down the marlin’s gaping maw. If, however, the loop had twisted or hung up – Shasa did not want to think about that.
There was another long pause, and then the line came taut again and began to move off with sedate but purposeful momentum.
‘He’s swallowed it,’ Shasa exulted, and let the line flow through his fingers; coil after coil unwound from the deck and slipped away over the transom.
Shasa leapt to the swivel chair and swung himself into the seat. He clipped the harness to the rings on top of the glittering Fin-Nor reel. The harness formed a hammock-like sling around his lower back and buttock and was attached directly to the reel.
Only the ignorant, or the deliberately misinformed, believed that the angler was buckled into the chair like a fighter pilot and that this gave him some sort of unsporting advantage. The only thing that kept him in the chair was his own strength and balance. If he made a mistake, the fish, weighing over a thousand pounds, as fast and powerful as a marine diesel engine, could pluck him and the rod effortlessly over the side and give him a very swift trip down to the five-hundred-fathom mark.
As Shasa settled behind the rod and engaged the brake, the line came up short against the spool and the rod-tip bowed over, as though it was kow-towing to the fish’s brute strength.
Shasa thrust his feet against the footboard and took the strain with his legs.
‘Allez!’ he yelled at Martin the skipper. ‘Go!’
The diesel bellowed as Martin opened the throttle wide and a dense cloud of oily black diesel smoke belched from the exhausts. Le Bonheur leapt forward and crashed her shoulder into the swell.
No man had the strength to drive the point of the huge Mustad hook into the iron-hard mouth of the marlin. Shasa was using the power and speed of the boat to set the hook, to bury the barb deep in the horny beak. The spool of the reel hummed against its own massive brake-pads, and the line streamed away in a white blur.
‘Arrêtez-vous!’ Shasa judged that the hook was in. ‘Stop!’ he cried, and Martin closed the throttle.
They stopped and hung in the water. The rod was arched over as though the line were attached to the bottom of the ocean, but the reel was still, held by the brake.
Then the fish shook his head, and the power of it crashed the butt of the rod back and forth in its gimbal as though it were a twig in a high wind.
‘Here he goes!’ Shasa howled. The fish had been taken aback by the unexpected drag of the line, but even Le Bonheur had been unable to move his massive body against the drag of the water.
Now at last he realized that something was seriously wrong, and he made his first mad run. Once again the line poured off the reel in a molten blur, and Shasa was lifted high off the seat like a jockey pushing for the post. So great was the friction in the massive Fin-Nor reel that it
began to smoke. The grease on the bearings melted and boiled. It bubbled and spurted from the casing in steaming jets.
Leaning back with the full weight of his body, Shasa kept both hands well clear of the humming reel. The Dacron line was as dangerous as the blade of the butcher’s bandsaw. It would take off a finger effortlessly or slash skin and flesh and muscle to the bone.
The fish ran as though there was no restraint upon him. The line on the spool melted away, three hundred yards were gone, then four, and in seconds half a kilometre of line had gone over the side.
‘He’s a goddam Chinaman and he’s going home to Daddy,’ Shasa yelled. ‘He’s never going to stop!’
Abruptly the ocean parted in a maelstrom of white water, and the fish came out. Such was his girth and mass that he gave the illusion of moving in slow motion. He rose into the air, and the water poured from his body as though from the hull of a surfacing submarine. He came all the way out and, though he was five hundred yards from Le Bonheur, he seemed to blot out half the sky.
‘Qu’il est grand!’ shrieked Martin. ‘Je n’ai jamais vu un autre comme ça!’ And Shasa knew it was true – he had never seen a fish to match this one, not by half. He seemed to light the heavens with a reflected blue radiance, a flash of distant lightning.
Then, like a steeplechaser taking a fence, the fish reached the zenith of its leap and curved back to the surface of the ocean. It opened in a shockwave to his bulk, and then he was gone, leaving them all shaken by the memory of his majesty.
The line was blurring from the reel. Though Shasa had the brake dangerously heavy, pushing the drag up near the 120-pound breaking-strain, it still streamed away as though there were no check upon it.
‘Tournez-vous! Turn!’ There was an edge of panic in Shasa’s voice, as he yelled at the skipper. ‘Turn and chase him!’
With full rudder and opposite engine-thrust Martin spun the boat on its heel and they roared away in pursuit of the fish. Le Bonheur was rushing into wind and current, and the swells battered her. She dug her nose into them and burst them open in white spray. Then as she leapt over the crests she was almost airborne, and came pounding down into the troughs on her belly.
In the chair Shasa was thrown around mercilessly. He hung on to the arms of the chair, and rode the swells with his legs, his backside not touching the seat. The rod was bent like a longbow at full stretch. Even though Le Bonheur was running at full throttle, he was still losing line. The marlin was outrunning them by ten knots. The line on the reel wasted away, and Shasa watched helplessly as the spool seemed to shrink.
‘Shasa!’ Elsa shrieked from the bridge. ‘He has turned!’ She was so excited that she spoke in Italian. Shasa had by now enough practice with the language to understand her warning.
‘Stop! Arrêtez!’ he howled at the skipper.
For no apparent reason the marlin had suddenly turned completely about and was charging back towards the boat.
This was not yet apparent from the direction that the line was running into the water. The marlin had thrown a half-mile loop in the line, which was potentially catastrophic. The side-drag of the loop in the water could snap the heavy line like cotton when the marlin came up tight on it. Elsa had spotted the turn in the very nick of time.
Shasa had to pick up that loop before the marlin passed under the boat. He pumped with his legs in a powerful mechanical rhythm, coming up to gain a foot of line, sinking down to give himself slack to take it on to the reel with two quick turns of the handle. Up and down he bobbed, grunting for air with each cycle, legs and arms working together, and the wet line coming on to the spool under such tension that a fine haze of droplets sprayed from the braid. The line was cutting sideways through the water, slicing a tiny feather from the surface. The loop was shrinking. The fish passed under the boat. The line began to straighten.
Shasa pumped with a frantic rhythm, getting those last few turns of line on to the reel.
‘Turn now!’ he gasped. Sweat was pouring down his naked chest. It mingled with the lipstick design that Elsa had drawn and ran down to stain the waistband of his shorts. ‘Turn quickly! Quickly!’
The fish was tearing away in the opposite direction, and the skipper got Le Bonheur around just as the line came up tight again. The full weight of the fish came down on the rod-tip, and it whipped over like a willow tree struck by a gale of wind. Shasa was levered up out of the chair to the full stretch of his legs, and the strain on the line was ounces short of snapping it.
He thumbed off the brake, releasing the tension, and the line crackled off the spool at fifty miles an hour. With despair he watched as those precious feet of line which he had won back with so much effort blurred effortlessly over the side.
‘Chase him!’ he blurted, and Le Bonheur pounded after the fish.
It was exquisite teamwork now. No single man could subdue a fish like this alone and unaided. The handling of the boat was critical, each turn and run and back-up had to be quick and precise.
Precious seconds before it was apparent to the men on the deck below, Elsa called out to warn of each new wild evolution of the great fish. For an hour those irresistible rushes never ceased. Every second of that time the thin strand of Dacron was under immense pressure, and Shasa stood in the chair and used his weight against it, pumping the rod and churning the reel. He took turn after agonizing turn on to the spool and then watched it dissipate again as the fish made another charge.
One of the deck-hands spilled sea-water from a bucket over his shoulders to cool him. The salt burnt the abrasions around his waist where the nylon straps of the harness had rubbed through his skin. The blood seeped from the injuries and strained his shorts watery pink. Every time the fish ran, the harness cut in a little deeper.
The second hour was bad. The fish showed no sign of weakening. Shasa was streaming with sweat, his hair was sodden as if he stood under a shower. The galls of the harness around his middle were bleeding freely. The working of the boat hammered his thighs against the arms of the chair, and he was bruising extensively. Elsa came down from the bridge and tried to pack a cushion between the harness and his torn flesh. She gave him a handful of salt tablets and made him drink two cans of Coke, holding them to his mouth while he gulped them down.
‘Tell me something,’ he grinned crookedly at her with agony in his single eye. ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’
‘Because you are a crazy macho man. And there are some things a man must do.’ She towelled the sweat off his face and kissed him with a fierce protective pride.
Some time during the third hour Shasa got his second wind. Twenty years ago it would have come sooner and lasted longer. The second wind was an extraordinary sensation. The pain of the galling harness receded, the cramps in his arms and legs smoothed away, he felt light-headed and invincible. His legs stopped juddering under him, and he planted his feet more firmly on the footboard.
‘All right, fish,’ he said softly. ‘You have had your innings. Now it’s my turn.’ He leant back with all his weight against the rod, and felt the fish give.
It was only a tiny check on the rod. A shudder of movement, but down there in the blue depths the great fish had stumbled slightly.
‘Yes, fish,’ Shasa whispered, as his spirits soared, ‘it’s hurting you, too, now, isn’t it?’ He pumped with legs that were once more strong beneath him and laid four tight white coils of line on the reel – and he knew that they would stay there this time. The fish was coming at last.
By the end of the fourth hour the fish had no more wild dashing runs to make. He was fighting deep and dogged, making slow, almost sedate circles three hundred feet below the drifting boat. He was working on his side, offering as much resistance as possible to the pressure of rod and line. He was almost four feet deep across the shoulder and he weighed nearly three-quarters of a ton. The great half-moon of his tail swept back and forth to a stately beat, and his enormous eyes glowed like opals in the semi-dark. Waves of lilac and azure flame rippled ac
ross his body like the aurora of the Arctic skies. Around he went, and around again in steady sweeping circles.
Shasa Courtney was crouched in the fighting-chair, bowed over the rod like a hunchback. All the euphoria of the second wind had evaporated. He bent and straightened his legs with the deliberate agony of an arthritic, and every muscle and nerve screamed a protest at the movement.
Fish and man had established a dreadful pattern in this final phase of the struggle. The fish went out on the far lap of its circle, and the man hung on grimly, his sinews strained to the same pitch as the Dacron line. Then the fish swung through the circle and came back in under the boat; for a few moments the tension on the line abated and the arc in the rod straightened.
Shasa took two quick turns of line and then hung on again as the fish swung on to the outward leg. With each circle he recovered a few feet of line, but he paid the full price for it in sweat and pain. Shasa knew he was coming to the end of his endurance. He thought about the risk of doing permanent damage to his body. He could feel his heart pulsing like a swollen fragile sac in his chest, and his spine was shot through with fire. Soon something must snap or burst inside him, but he pulled with all his remaining strength and felt the fish give again.
‘Please,’ he whispered to it. ‘You are killing us both. Just give up now, please.’
He gathered himself and pulled again – and the fish broke. It rolled like a waterlogged tree-trunk and succumbed to the pressure of the rod. It came up, sluggish and heavy, and thrust its head through the surface so close to the stern of the boat that it seemed to Shasa that he could reach out and touch one of its great glowing eyes with the tip of the rod.
It stood on its tail and pointed its nose spike to the sky and shook its head the way a spaniel coming ashore shakes the water from its ears. The heavy steel trace whipped and whistled around its head, and the rod was battered and slammed from side to side. The butt clattered and banged in the gimbal, and the line flashed and looped and traced sweeping designs in the air.