The Dolphin
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2017 by Colin Barrett

I am in the place again.

I cannot stay away. It is the last place where Kitik is. Each time I come I want it to be the last, but each time I come again. I do not want to, but I know I will come another time soon.

Altauk is with me. He does not approve. He tells me as many times before, “Minacou, you live too much in shadow. Come back to the now.”

I know he is right. He is one of the oldest, and he is leader, he knows what is the way for us to live. He tells me again the tale of Acou, who he says also lives in shadow.

“There are bad things in shadow for him,” Altauk says. “He cannot leave them. I tell him, many tell him, that he must return to the now, but he does not. Then in his shadow pain he strikes out at another. We must drive him away.”

That is before I am alive, but Altauk is there and tells that this happens. Others also speak to me sometimes of Acou. I do not know why this is so, but it seems that I am like him in other ways too. It is different, but as with Acou, I cannot leave shadow.

Altauk looks at me sadly. “Will you go to the land?” he asks.

I tell him no, the land does not call me. It is Kitik who calls, who is calling ever since he is taken.

The others do not like me to speak it this way. They say it is as though some thing does the taking, and they do not want to think of that. They tell me that Kitik is gone to the land and will not return.

But I know better. I alone am there when the taking is done. The monsters above find us, us two, together when we are eating and not alert, and they trouble us. There are loud sounds, and there is big stirring in the water. I am not frightened, for the monsters are slow and easy to escape. But Kitik becomes afraid, and begins to swim very fast and without direction. For a time he seems to escape, but then they are there again and he grows more afraid each time. His fear tires him. I call to him to be calm, and where he might swim, but he does not listen. The weed ­comes and entangles him, and then it lifts up and takes him with it.

It is here that it happens. I hear again his cries as he is drawn away. Shadow overwhelms me for a moment.

But Kitik is not gone to the land. His cries are not the cries of one who will go to the land. It may be that he is gone since, after the taking, but I think I would know that. I think he is gone away but not to the land. I would go with him if I could find where he is.

Altauk knows that I am no longer in the now. He does not speak more. He starts away. Then he stops and turns back. “There will be a hunt,” he calls. “Will you come?”

The last time I do not come, nor the time before that. The hunts are without me. But I am very hungry now. Yes, I tell him, I will come.

I will lead the hunt. I am young for this, and I am female which is not usual, but while others can also lead a hunt, I am much the best. They will be glad of my being there. This time I will lead and we will eat well.

But shadow is still in me. I will lead, but I will have no joy. I am not sure when I will have joy again. I will come back to this place after the hunt and I will think of the shadow that is Kitik and then I will have as close to joy as is in me in the now.

And I will try to think how I may find Kitik.


It had been an irritating trip. Monday morning, and the lone road was clogged with weekenders heading north out of the Keys, to Miami and its bustle and business and further north. The rest of the week would be relatively clear until Friday afternoon, but this morning it was stop-and-go. She’d have to get used to that, but it was only two days a week and then only half the trip. At least there was plenty of parking. She took a deep breath to relax and headed into the motel lobby.

Morris was busy at the desk with checkouts. He waved her over. “Can’t talk now, it’s like this on Mondays,” he said brusquely. “Go on out, I’ll see you in a while. Jason’s there, introduce yourself.” He turned back to the impatient guest who was waiting for his credit card back.

She walked out through the sliding glass doors toward which he’d pointed. They opened, she found, onto a small boardwalk. Ahead she could see the lagoon, with a young-looking man hosing down the concrete apron.

The man—not much more than a boy, she thought as she drew nearer—turned and raised his head as she approached. “Sorry, ma’am, closed right now,” he said dismissively. “We’ll open back up at noon.” He started to turn away again.

“You’re Jason?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said tentatively.

“Margaret Russell,” she said. “Maggie.” She offered a hand. He simply stared. “Your new marine biologist,” she explained.

“Oh,” he said flatly. He looked at her outstretched hand long enough to border on open rudeness, but as she was about to withdraw it he finally reached out to take it in the briefest of grasps. “Gladdameetyou,” he muttered, with no more expression on his face than was in his voice. She stared at him; what was this? He turned back away to resume his washing, but she stopped him.

“Where’s—?” she began.

“Toby? He’s out there.” The boy gestured vaguely toward the lagoon. “He’s already had breakfast. He’ll be back later on. Usually comes back by noon, anyhow, or if he doesn’t I call him so we can do the first show. You’ll see him then.” He turned away again, clearly dismissing her.

She waited for a while, but he showed no signs of even acknowledging her presence much less an interest in talking. She shook her head. Teenagers! she thought. He couldn’t be much more. She hadn’t held out a lot of hope of real professionalism, but a surly kid was more than she’d bargained for. She was going to have to establish their working relationship quickly.

“Jason, please take me to my office,” she said firmly. “Morris is busy now, he said you’d show me around.” He hadn’t quite said that, but invoking the authority with which the boy was familiar had to help.

For a minute it appeared that he was going to ignore her, but then he dropped the hose—a lot too casually, she thought, as she sidestepped quickly to avoid the spray, and then had to sidestep again as it whipped around. He took his time reaching the outlet valve, receiving, she noticed, a fairly thorough drenching himself in the process, and rotated it off.

“Get wet here,” he muttered—seemingly to the air, he still wouldn’t look at her. “Follow me, office is there.” He pointed toward the endmost of a set of cabanas lining the apron.

The “office,” when they reached it and he shoved the door open, proved as barren as she’d feared. A cheap desk, an equally cheap (and fairly obviously uncomfortable) wooden chair, an electrical outlet that had clearly been recently installed, no more. The floor w was the same unadorned concrete as the apron itself, but had apparently gone without the cleansing spray of Jason’s hosing or anything like a sweeping; there was a fairly thick veneer of the marl that passed for dirt here, and cobwebs were prominent in the corners where it met the cinderblock wall

“That’s it, okay?” the boy said. “Got to get back to work.” He turned to leave.

She’d had enough; this would have to stop. “Jason!” she snapped. He stopped. “Are you always this rude, or do I rate special treatment?”

He turned back, and for the first time looked directly at her. It was an insolent stare; his eyes started at her face and gradually traversed downward to her feet and then back up. There was still no expression on his face.

“You’re from Flagler, right?” he said at last, naming the government research facility twenty-five miles south across Seven-Mile Bridge.

“That’s where I was working, yes,” she said, returning his level gaze.

There was another pause. Then, abruptly: “Look, we need to get a couple of things straight.”

“It appears that we do,” she responded flatly.

“I know how you work at Flagler,” he said with now-overt hostility. “The way you work with them. What you do to them.” He gestured sharply toward the lagoon.

“And what’s that?” she asked.

“You keep food away from them when they don’t do what you want. You starve them until they do like you tell them. There’s some kind of fancy name for it—”

“‘Positive reinforcement,’” she murmured.

“Whatever,” he said. “You hurt them, too. You whip them into submission, into doing just what you want them to do when you want them to do it. You—”

“Jason,” she interrupted loudly, cutting him off in the middle of what was obviously some kind of prepared speech. But instead of ending the tirade she had merely diverted it.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “that doesn’t go here, OK? None of it, not while I’m here, and I think I’m going to be here a while, Morris can’t get anybody else for what he’s paying me and he’s cheap. Toby eats when he’s hungry, OK? Not because he ‘earned it,’ nobody has to earn food. He does what he does because he wants to, not because I make him or anybody else makes him. And nobody hurts him. Nobody!”

“Jason,” she started again. But he wasn’t done.

“Morris said you’re here to take care of him, take care of his health, and that’s all right. He said you also want to study him, do your research, and I guess that’s all right, too, as long as you don’t hurt him. But I train him. Me. He responds to me, we’re friends, and all you’ll do is beat him down and that’ll finish the shows and there won’t be any good for Morris if the shows are done, and—”

“Jason!” she barked in her most commanding tone. “Shut up a moment.”

He looked at her in surprise, but with the same dislike hovering around the corners of his eyes.

“Do you know what Morris is paying me?” she asked obliquely. He didn’t respond. “A hundred bucks a week. Oh, I also get meals, all of them if I want. But that’s it. Not even a room, I pay for my own roof—and my car, and my clothes, and my medical care, and anything else I want or need.”

“Can’t live on that,” he muttered.

“No, I can’t,” she agreed. “I’m going on savings. Look, I have a doctorate in marine biology. Do you have any idea what that brings on the open market? What it brought me at Flagler?”

“No,” he said grudgingly.

“Not your business, either. But more. A lot more. So why am I here?”

“Fucked up?” he guessed. “Fired?”

“Not even. I didn’t fuck up, I wasn’t fired, in fact I had some commendations and I was in line for more. Care to try again?”

For the first time the hostility seemed to abate. Neither of them spoke for a moment, but she outwaited him. “So?” he said, but it was now clearly bluster.

“You tell me,” she challenged.

He looked away again, but this time in discomfort. “You didn’t like their way either,” he murmured.

“Bing-fucking-go,” she said, throwing in the obscenity to get his attention. There was another pause. “I spent eight years in school studying to be a marine biologist. Studying what everybody’d done before me so I could start my own research, begin to learn about these wonderful creatures. Do you know dolphins have bigger brains than we do? Not that that’s necessarily important, I mean Balzac’s brain was one of the smallest ever recorded, and some of the biggest human brains are in idiots. But they do, dolphins do, bigger than ours.”

“Okay.” The hostility was on full hold now, replaced with genuine interest.

“And they show it; they’re smart,” she went on. “You tell me Toby does the things he does because he wants to, not because you make him, and that means intelligence. Not just intelligence, you say you’re friends, and Toby wants to please his friend. Just like you want to please him, right?”

“Right!”

“So that means he’s smart enough to know what you want and cooperative enough to do it for you, follow me?”

“Sure.”

“Q.E.D., I don’t want to treat them like training chimpanzees, or dogs, or whatever. Any more than you do, smartass. It’s why I left Flagler for this bed of roses.”

“Huh.”

“The point is, I don’t need a teenage kid thinking he knows enough to tell me how I should do my work.”

The boy barked a laugh. “Not quite a teenager,” he said.

“What, all of twenty?”

“Twenty-three, cupcake. You’re not that much older.”

“Some,” she said, reflecting that the four-year difference really wasn’t that great. “Enough,” she continued firmly. “Teenager, dropout, whatever. Don’t try to tell me how to work, OK?”

They stared at each other for a moment. Then he shrugged. “OK. I guess we got off to a bad start. I’m Jason Vreelander, pleased to meet you.” He put out his hand. This time the hesitation was hers, but it was brief; he was offering an olive branch, and she wasn’t disposed to reject it from the only co-worker she’d have here. She gave his hand a firm shake.

But there was more to be settled.

“All right, Jason Vreelander,” she said, “so tell me how a twenty-three-year-old gets here and winds up working for what you say is peanuts as an amateur dolphin trainer. And why you’re so damn protective of Toby anyhow?”

He laughed disingenuously, his open, smiling face a complete turnaround from the scowling visage he’d been presenting. “I guess you called it. Dropout. I was Harvard when I got down to the Keys sophomore spring break. Never went back. One of the charter captains needed a mate, and I did it for a few days, then break was over and I stayed anyhow. My folks didn’t like it much, but they told themselves it’s just a phase, he’ll get over it. Five years later, I’m still not. Over it. But they send me a few bucks from time to time, and I make some, and I live cheap, so that’s how it keeps on.”

Twenty-three take away five is eighteen, she thought—a Harvard soph at eighteen? Hmm.

“Anyhow, that captain turned out to be kind of an asshole,” he continued. “We’d see dolphins sometimes, he had a rifle on board, he’d shoot at them. Never hit one, I think he couldn’t hit the water, but he’d go bang-bang. Said they drove away the fish. Mostly they don’t unless they’re hunting, you know, just keep the sharks off.” She nodded. “But some of these tourists, they come for sharks. Anyhow, I got to liking the dolphins a lot, thought they were really neat. So I went down to Flagler, looking for a job with them.”

“Couldn’t get on?” she asked.

“Oh, they hired me. I lasted a week. They caught me sneaking food to one of the dolphins who was being punished for something he did, or didn’t do, or whatever, I forget. Fired my ass.”

He shook his head. “Anyhow, I hung on, piecework as a mate for this one and that one. I love it here. Then Morris decided to get Toby, boost the bookings against the big chains, you know? And he’d heard of me, and I told him I’d work cheap, so here I am.”

“But why that way about Toby?” she persisted.

“Shit, you should’ve seen him when he first got here,” he said, passion in his voice. “You know how they get ‘em?” He seemed to be waiting for a response, so she shook her head. “I ­didn’t either until I talked to the skipper who brought him. They go out, two, three boats at a time, and they find one or two that are isolated and start dropping bombs. I mean literally, underwater explosives. Confuses the shit out of them, sets them in a panic. Then they set up a cordon and drop a net and haul them up on board.”

She stared at him.

“That’s how Morris got Toby. Hired the guy to go out and get one. Toby was a fuckin’ wreck when they dropped him off, I swear to God nearer dead than alive. The captain told me half the time they don’t make it, just curl up and die.

“Anyhow, Toby wouldn’t come near me at first, not even to eat. I had to get into the water and leave a fish and back way off before he’d touch it. Even then, it was hours before he took the first one. After a while he wouldn’t wait so long, and finally he took one right out of my hand. But it was at least a couple of weeks before I could get him up to the apron to take it while I was standing on dry land.”

“Sounds like you put in a lot of work,” she said admiringly.

“It wasn’t so bad,” he said with another grin. “Toby’s a sweetie, really. He was just traumatized by what had happened to him. Now he comes to me when I call him—come on, I’ll show you.” He turned and walked back out, gesturing to her; she followed.

“Here, this is how I call,” he said, walking up to the apron’s edge and bending over to slap the concrete. In no more than a few seconds a dolphin’s big snout broke water directly in front of him. Almost despite herself Maggie broke out a huge smile; she’d worked with them for years, but the beautiful mammals continued to give her a thrill every time she saw one.

“Hey, buddy,” said Jason, running his hand gently along the side of the animal’s face. Still rubbing the snout, he turned back toward Maggie. “Come over and meet him. Come soft and slow, OK? He still spooks pretty easy if you get close.”

She sidled carefully over to the boy and the dolphin. The animal watched her in obvious trepidation as she came into its view, but remained with its snout above water, still accepting the petting. Unselfconsciously, Jason reached out to take her hand with his free one. “Okay, Toby, this is Maggie. She’s a friend, all right?”

She squatted beside him. For a moment the dolphin submerged entirely, but in short order its head reappeared a few feet away.

“Here, put your hand in the water,” the boy said to her. “Let him come to you. Don’t worry, he won’t bite.”

She suppressed a grin at this kid—it was hard not to think of him as a kid—telling her not to be wary of animals she’d been working with for more than two years now. But she held her tongue and did as he said. Again the snout disappeared, but beneath the surface she could see the dolphin approach until she felt a gentle nudge against her hand. She held still; there was another, stronger nudge. Then the animal went out of view for a moment. Abruptly it broke the surface again with a full leap that culminated in a hard slap of its fluke against the surface, sending up a huge wave that drenched both of them.

Jason burst out laughing. “I told you,” he sputtered, “you get wet here.”

She matched his laughter. “No shit,” she said.

“I think he likes you,” the boy said. “Does that to me when he’s playful, but not much anybody else.”

“I hope he does. Like me,” she said. The dolphin’s snout popped up again a few feet away, and she pushed a spray of water at it with her hand. The snout vanished immediately, followed by another leap and tail-slap.

“Okay, okay, you win,” she said as she stood back up, water dripping off her. The dolphin gave her another, less vigorous dousing, and then was gone, surfacing briefly now at the other side of the lagoon.

“I’m going to have to re-think work clothes,” she said ruefully, staring down at her sodden shirt and slacks.

“Swimsuit,” the boy told her. “Or shorts and a shirt, like I’ve got. Not likely to keep real dry if you plan on getting close to Toby.”

“And that’s what I plan,” she said. “At least I seem to have got off to a better start with him than you and I did.”

He shrugged with a little embarrassment. “Sorry about that, but Toby’s my bud. Got to cover his butt. We’re OK, though?”

“We’re OK,” she said.

“He look all right to you?” the boy asked. Confused for a moment, she looked at him questioningly. “Health, I mean. What you’re here for, right? He look healthy enough? I love dolphins, love working with Toby, but I don’t pretend to know much about them in that kind of way.”

She nodded. “I didn’t get a really good look, but I didn’t see anything that seemed to be a problem. With dolphins you don’t exactly get them in for a routine physical; it means cradling them out of the water, and then you have to keep the skin moist and keeping them calm is always a problem unless you sedate them; they hate it. You make sure the skin’s clear and the eyes are bright and they’re acting all right and eating all right, and mostly you just look for symptoms and treat those.”

“About what I thought,” he said. “We can get him out of the water if we need to, there’s a winch over there.” He pointed. “But the last time he was in that was when they brought him, and it’s bound to scare him. I don’t want to use it unless we have to, OK?”

“Right.”

“So, he’s healthy,” he continued. “You’ve been here, what, half an hour, and you’re telling me that. I train him, got him doing all kinds of jumps and rolls and tail-walking and all when I ask him to— hell, you’ll see it, we do a show at noon and another one at six. So...” his voice trailed off.

“Why am I here?”

“That’s it,” he confirmed. “Why not just a visit from time to time, or if I see something that doesn’t look right?” A little of his original truculence began to color his voice. “Morris told me you’re going to do some kind of research or something with him, want to let me in on what you have in mind?”

“Calm down, babe,” she said, picking up on the change in his tone. “Nothing like what you seem to be thinking. I told you already, no punishments, no discipline. I’ve seen quite enough of that,” she added, remembering.

“In fact,” she went on, “for the kind of work I want to do anything negative would be counterproductive. He and I need to work together as a team for my purposes.”

“Which are?” he asked.

She took a deep breath. Too many had laughed at her derisively when she told them, would he be another? “Interspecies communica­tion.” She watched his face carefully, but there was nothing in it but interest. “I’m trying to find out how much we can talk to them, and they to us.”

He seemed to consider what she’d said. “Huh,” he said finally. “Neat idea. You mean not just getting them to say words—”

“A parrot can do that,” she interrupted. “A macaw. You can fit their brains into thimbles.”

“You mean real communication?”

“Why not?” she said defiantly. “We can do a little of that with some of the apes. I’ve read in the literature where they’re using sign language with chimps and some of the other great apes—they use signs because the apes aren’t anatomically equipped for speech—and they have vocabularies of a hundred words or more and can even put them together into sentences, sort of. But dolphins are smarter than apes by a pretty big margin, and they can imitate human speech. So why not real communication?”

Jason was shaking his head, but more in surprise than rejection. “I never thought about it,” he said. “But I mean, dolphins are terrific and smart and all that, but when you get down to the bottom line they’re animals, aren’t they?”

The same old argument that was really a non-argument. “And we’re what?” she snapped. “Gods?”

He picked up her tone. “Hey, hey,” he said, making a smoothing gesture with his hands. “I’m not arguing.”

She gave him a tight smile and tried to lighten her mood. “Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve heard all this shit before, so damned many times. They wouldn’t let me even touch this at Flagler, just told me I was young and I’d learn. Patronized me!” She heard her voice rising again and consciously lowered it. “But dolphins communicate among themselves, some pretty complicated ideas from the way they behave. Just like we do. I want to see if we can take it cross-species.”

“So what do you do?” he asked. “Will you do, I mean. Teach them our language, try to learn theirs, what?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Probably some of both. I’ve only got Toby to work with, instead of a whole pod”—for an instant she thought longingly of the numbers at the facility she’d left—”and who knows if he’s typical or whatever. For all I know he’s the dolphin equivalent of a moron.”

Jason was shaking his head vigorously. “Naw, man, he’s smart, you don’t know him and I’ve been working with him, you should see how sharp he is.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s from our perspective, not his. Theirs. He wasn’t smart enough not to get caught, after all. But be that as it may, it’s a place to begin. And that’s what I plan to do, begin. If I’m right, if we really can communicate ... well, let’s see how the beginning goes.”

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