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Contents (45)
  1. ALSO BY AUDREY SCHULMAN
  2. THE DOLPHIN HOUSE
  3. ONE Tampa, Florida Feb. 1965
  4. TWO Aug. 1957 Ogunquit, Maine
  5. THREE May 1965
  6. FOUR March 1958 Orlando, Florida
  7. ARRIVAL
  8. FIVE June 4, 1965
  9. SIX June 4, 1965
  10. SEVEN June 5, 1965
  11. EIGHT June 6–10, 1965
  12. NINE June 11–16, 1965
  13. TEN June 17–26, 1965
  14. ELEVEN June 27–30, 1965
  15. TWELVE July 1–8, 1965
  16. THIRTEEN July 9–13, 1965
  17. FOURTEEN July 14, 1965
  18. LANGUAGE LESSONS
  19. FIFTEEN July 15–17, 1965
  20. SIXTEEN
  21. SEVENTEEN July 18–25, 1965
  22. EIGHTEEN July 26–Aug. 1, 1965
  23. NINETEEN Aug. 2–7, 1965
  24. TWENTY Aug. 8–15, 1965
  25. TWENTY-ONE Aug. 16, 1965
  26. TWENTY-TWO Aug. 17–30, 1965
  27. HOMEARIUM
  28. TWENTY-THREE Homearium, Day 1
  29. TWENTY-FOUR Homearium, Day 3
  30. TWENTY-FIVE Homearium, Days 4–7
  31. TWENTY-SIX Homearium, Week 2
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN Homearium, Week 3
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT Homearium, Week 4
  34. TWENTY-NINE Homearium, Week 5
  35. THIRTY Homearium, Weeks 6–8
  36. THIRTY-ONE Homearium, Weeks 9–11
  37. THIRTY-TWO Homearium, Week 12
  38. THIRTY-THREE Homearium, Week 13
  39. THIRTY-FOUR Homearium, Week 14
  40. THIRTY-FIVE Homearium, Week 15
  41. THIRTY-SIX Homearium, Week 16
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN Homearium, Week 18
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  45. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Each week, from then on, he stated the correlation associated with this replication, and every week that number rose. To her, there was nothing more satisfying than Tibbet’s weekly summaries of her work.

* * *

She read a book on animal cognition. One of the experiments caught her attention. The researcher placed different species in a cage with a mirror to see how they would respond.

At the sight of their own reflection, birds and prairie dogs and almost every other species tested, began a display of aggression, alarmed by the foreign intruder peering at them through the frame of the mirror. Their display did not change over time, the animals never realizing the reflection was not an invader. The only species who calmed down quickly (figuring out this was their reflection) were great apes and elephants.

Curious, she tried the experiment with Junior. She tied a large hand mirror onto a rope, with a buoy at one end of the rope and a weight at the other. She threw the whole thing into the water at the deep end, the mirror twirling slowly about 3 feet from the surface, held between the buoy and the weight. She ducked into the water with her mask to watch as Junior swam over to investigate. The moment his face came abreast of the mirror, seeing his reflection, he reared back in surprise, snorting out a swarm of bubbles.

He squawked and began to swim back and forth in front of the mirror, his body curved into an almost S-shape with his head high and his tail low. Puffed up this way, he looked twice as big as normal, and he was screaming loud enough to be an army of enraged dolphins. Moving with power and speed, he continued to display for a solid minute before his reaction began to lose conviction and his squawking became confused.

Gradually, he came to a stop, eyeing the mirror. He circled behind it, clicking, searching for the invader. Tense and ready to bolt, he eased in toward the mirror, from the side, to look into his own eyes.

He paused there for a long moment, then tilted his head. Staring in the mirror, he rotated 180 degrees, then quickly reversed the rotation. He snapped his beak, flapped his flippers and moved his tail from left to right, watching to see if his reflection did the same.

Now he was curious, inspecting his own body, twisting this way and that to examine what he looked like from different angles, his back, his dorsal fin, his blowhole, the sides of his head. He opened his mouth wide and considered the inside of his mouth, twisting his tongue this way and that to see his teeth and the back of the throat.

Afterward, she wrote up extensive notes about this, but had no proof of the kind Tibbet preferred: no tallies, no recording of any kind.

So the next day she explained to Blum what had happened and asked him to have the men set up two cameras. Because the cameras couldn’t go underwater, they had to film from above. She had them point one camera at where she sat on the side of the pool, the other looked down through the water to where the mirror was.