She tried throwing in different things for a while, assuming she had to find the right toy, a new one that would interest them. A plastic cup, a stick, one of the men’s bathing suits. The dolphins just watched her throw in object after object, curious to see what she would do next. They didn’t move toward any of the objects.

Then a towel, hanging on the railing, was blown into the water by a wind gust. This, they bolted for, sprinting around with it, passing it back and forth, playing.

Perhaps the wind was the secret.

She placed the football on the dock, next to the water’s edge and sat down to wait.

When the wind nudged it forward into the water, they bolted for it. Cut got to it first, grabbing it with its mouth to dash forward, faster than any running back, then flicking it with its nose sideways to Other (or maybe Junior, hard to tell from above). This dolphin bopped the ball into the air with its tail, passing it to Cut.

When they finally stopped playing with the football, she repeated the experiment with the frisbee and then a towel. If the wind blew the object in, they would play with it. If she threw it in, they wouldn’t touch it. She didn’t know if this was distaste for her or some type of dolphin etiquette.

It was at this point, sitting by the lagoon, watching them play with the towel, that the idea hit her. She coughed with surprise. This was why they wouldn’t eat the fish. She was throwing it to them.

So she lugged the basket of fish 30 feet up the chute, walking up the cement ramp between the boulders to the beach, where the dolphins couldn’t see her. She left the basket weighed down with rocks in the water of the sluice, the fish inside being washed clean, while the dolphins could taste them in the water pouring into the lagoon. She ate her lunch nearby on the beach, watching the clouds roll by.

After twenty minutes, she returned to the basket, picked up a fish with tongs so it wouldn’t smell of her and lobbed it high into the air over the boulders. She was out of sight of the dolphins and had been for a while, so they didn’t know where she was. The tossed fish landed in the water of the lagoon like a gift from God.

She waited a few minutes, then wandered around, carefully approaching the lagoon from a different direction. She couldn’t see the fish floating anywhere. She put on her mask to look under the water and still didn’t see the body. Burn had his head up out of the lagoon, looking in the direction of the chute.

So she went back to the basket of fish and over the next few minutes, from different places on the beach, well out of sight, tossed ten more fish high into the air so they dropped from the sky into the lagoon.