When she returned to the lagoon, there were no fish on the surface. All the dolphins now had their heads out of the water, watching the sky with attention.

She returned to the basket of butterfish. Over the next half an hour, she lobbed fish after fish into the sky. When all 20 pounds of fish were gone, she walked around again to the lagoon, coming in from the side, and saw the three men standing on the veranda, staring, having spent the last few minutes watching the fish rain down and the dolphins snapping them up out of the air, famished.

Blum turned to her, his bright eyes impressed.

Sunburned Tibbet and the young guy (the one who’d originally asked her to take the notes) looked at her in a different way, sizing her up, as though she’d just stepped into the room.

EIGHT
June 6–10, 1965

She fed the dolphins frequently over the next few days, trying to make up for their time without food. Five or six times a day, she walked down to the beach where they couldn’t see her and threw 20 pounds of fish, one body at a time up into the sky, so each splashed down into the lagoon.

Feeding the dolphins, however, didn’t take much time. So she relaxed snorkeling in the shallows, observing them with sideways glances, never approaching the dolphins but letting them approach her. She needed to learn about them, to know them intimately the way she knew her dad’s pigs, or the horses at Beach Ride Bobby’s, so she could figure it out if they needed something or were getting sick.

In and out of the water all the time, her hair got in the way. Under the water, a curtain of it would roll in front of her face, obscuring her view. Out of the water, it was wet most of the day. At night, she shampooed the sticky salt away and fell asleep with it in a damp lump on the pillow beside her. With her hair almost always soaking, she could not wear her hearing glasses. Instead, she moved back and forth, from the air (where noise was muffled and confusing), to the water (where the dolphins filled her skull and chest with sounds of surreal clarity).

Tibbet and the third man, the younger one who had told her to take notes the first day, seldom talked to her. They sat on the veranda, taking notes, or they bustled about, carrying equipment and tools and notebooks, watching her from the side. The younger man always seemed to have a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

She noticed that when she prepared to get into the lagoon, the men turned to look directly. She wasn’t sure if they turned because she was a young woman stripping down to a bathing suit or if they were worried about her getting in the water with the animals. They themselves stayed back from the water and the dolphins.

At the end of that first week, seeing her lug a basket of fish down toward the lagoon, Tibbet said to her—You’re like their maid.