There were shrimp carousing in the breakers, and the whiting that fed on the shrimp, and the shark that munched whiting and found them admirable, in the sportive brutality of the sea. A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season.

Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz