I think I felt his heart, he thought.
When I pushed on the harpoon shaft the second time.
Bring him in now and make him fast and get the noose around his tail and another around his middle to bind him to the skiff.
"Get to work, old man," he said. He took a very small drink of the water. "There is very much slave work to be done now that the fight is over."
He looked up at the sky and then out to his fish. He looked at the sun carefully. It is not much more than noon, he thought. And the trade wind is rising. The lines all mean nothing now. The boy and I will splice them when we are home.
"Come on, fish," he said. But the fish did not come. Instead he lay there wallowing now in the seas and the old man pulled the skiff up onto him.
When he was even with him and had the fish's head against the bow he could not believe his size.
But he untied the harpoon rope from the bitt, passed it through the fish's gills and out his jaws, made a turn around his sword then passed the rope through the other gill, made another turn around the bill and knotted the double rope and made it fast to the bitt in the bow.
He cut the rope then and went astern to noose the tail.
The fish had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed the same pale violet colour as his tail.