That morning she studied the dolphins with short glances. In order to feed them, she had to understand them, to sense what was the problem.

To her, at this point, their smooth seamless bodies appeared as similar as mass-produced toys. All of them had brown eyes and pink mouths, their skin an identical battleship grey. There was no visible sign of gender, just an indented slit along the underbelly. Their bodies were different sizes, but it was hard to see the difference unless they were lined up next to each other and motionless, which hardly ever happened.

The easiest way to distinguish them was their injuries. The biggest dolphin had the rope burn across its chest, just in front of its flippers. She called this one Burn. Burn spent time that morning clicking at the sandy bottom of the lagoon and then digging its beak through the sand. Occasionally it ate something it found. Some small burrowed fish? Some type of worm?

The medium-sized one with the cut on its side, she named Cut. The smaller one, the adolescent, was Junior. And the fourth one, the one with no marks or differences, the same size as Cut, was Other. At times, since Junior and Other didn’t have distinguishing marks, she got them confused, but she worked at learning which was which, testing herself, trying to see at a glance the difference in size and style of movements, the way Junior’s face was a little rounder and Other’s eyes deeper set.

Partway through the morning, the surface of the lagoon began to ripple with the wind. A storm blowing in. A short time later, something blew into the water 20 feet to her right. Fabric. She recognized the sleeves of her shirt, but before she could kick toward it to retrieve it, a dolphin streaked in to grab the shirt in its mouth. The dolphin (she guessed Junior from the size and playfulness) zipped away, delighted, the arms of the shirt waving bye-bye.

Junior did several circuits of the lagoon, turned slightly sideways to watch the fabric rippling through the water. Then it dropped the clothing beside Cut, who, without missing a beat, grabbed a sleeve in its mouth while corkscrewing forward so the shirt twisted around its body like a maypole. Once it let go, the shirt swirled off in a watery striptease, landing next to Burn, who snagged it neatly on its tail and drove toward the surface, jumping repeatedly, a needle sewing in and out of the water. Burn dropped the shirt beside Other, who deftly swirled it round its head and, using the shirt as a blindfold, chased the others in a squealing game of Marco Polo.

The dolphins never tugged the shirt from each other or fought for it. Instead they passed it, letting it go precisely in front of the next dolphin, clean as soccer players. Polite as Canadians.

After ten minutes, when they finally got bored with the shirt, she fished it out with a pool skimmer and looked around for another toy. There was a football and a frisbee on one of the tables. The dolphins had their heads out of the water, watching her. She threw the frisbee in first. They tracked it through the air with interest, watching it skip across a wave and tumble in. When it landed, they looked back at her. Not one of them swam toward it. So she fished it out and tossed the shirt back in, figuring that was what they liked. Burn, with its head out of the water, watched her. The shirt fluttered down into the water and Burn looked back at her with sadness. None of them moved toward it.