His wave was wicked froth spilling over him as it barreled, and he angled his board to right across its face, the dark water below him ripping like a muscle of blue. Then he was streaking down a steep hillside that was carrying him forward and fast in a precipitous skid. It took all the strength he had in his legs to stay upright and to keep the board jammed against the moving slope of gleaming water, and just as he thought he was free of it, a shadow fell over him, the peak of the wave toppling him into a swallowing barrel and speeding him sideways. He shot through it, enclosed by a glittering narrowing cone. He rode it until it swelled and subsided under him, and he was released as the wave broke utterly and flattened and washed and pooled against a wave draining down the beach, allowing Sharkey to float almost to shore. He dropped off his board and pushed it onward to avoid a wave now breaking behind him and threatening to swamp him.

Out of the surf zone, he fell to his knees. All his strength was gone in the effort and exhilaration of that one great ride. He carried his board up a dry sand mound on the beach and gasped with delight. He was exhausted and knew that a good part of that fatigue was the result of anxiety when, in the middle of his ride, he had felt the ache in his lacerated toe and feared that adjusting his feet for the pain would put him a fraction off-balance and send him off his board. He would be buried. High, dense, and unforgiving, it was the sort of wave that would push him down, and the waves behind it would keep him down. The thought of it, together with his unexpected fatigue, kneeling alone on the beach, his lungs burning, made him briefly tearful.

As a younger man he might have gone out again, but this ride was enough. And he saw that the risk he’d taken was real—the slice in his toe had opened and had begun to bleed again, probably from the effort of holding the board down against the force of the wave. That injured toe and clawed foot might have been his undoing.

He had proven himself and felt reprieved, and now the daylight was fading, the last of the sun snagged in low clouds floating on the horizon, beyond Kaena Point, the early sunset of winter, hardly six, when the sun sank and glowed in a green flash in the sea.

Going home, he passed an improvised sign, FRESH FISH, and pulled onto the grassy shoulder of the road, where a man was sitting on the flap of his pick-truck, kicking his feet, a plastic cooler next to him.

“What have you got?”

“Got plenny ahi,” the man said, lifting the lid of the cooler. “I catch ’em myself today morning.”

“Looks nice.”