The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well. But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his raw hands and,when he could see,he saw the fish was on his back with his silver belly up.The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the fish's shoulder and the sea was discoloring with the red of the blood from his heart.First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more than a mile deep.Then it spread like a cloud.The fish was silver and still and floated with the waves.
“It was the only way to kill him,”the old man said.He was feeling better since the water and he knew he would not go away and his head was clear.He's over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is,he thought.Maybe much more.If he dresses out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?
The old man looked carefully in the glimpse of vision that he had. Then he took two turns of the harpoon line around the bitt in the bow and laid his head on his hands.
“I have no cramps.”he said.“ He'll be up soon and I can last.You have to last.Don't even speak of it.”
He did not dream of the lions but instead of a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating and they would leap high into the air and return into the same hole they had made in the water when they leaped.