And there was also nothing in those rows of ticks that explained how he slept. He dozed like they all did, one eye closed, the other eye unfocused but open, surfacing regularly to breathe. The difference with Junior was that, while sleeping, he liked to hold Mother’s flipper in his mouth, rising in sync with her to breathe at the surface as one. He was long past the age of nursing from her, but he still retained this habit of holding onto her while sleeping (whether she was his mother or just a mother figure while in the lagoon).

And there was nothing in the tallied numbers to show how Junior sometimes beamed noise at Kat’s genital slit and then chased her, bumping her, his belly to hers, upside down, until she complied and angled her belly to his. An adolescent, he was old enough to be interested in, and apparently capable of, this action.

Each of these types of touches were simplified down to a simple tick mark. The more she counted different actions (how frequently they breathed, how often they chased each other), the less she found she liked the tallying. Simply counting actions missed too much information. It erased the dolphins themselves, their wants and personalities.

So after a day of counting, she returned mostly to keeping records the way she had before, sketching and writing notes. The only things she continued to count were activities that gave her an idea of their health. How many hours they slept during the day and how many pounds of fish the group was eating.

By now, when she fed the dolphins, she was only 20 feet up the chute away from the lagoon, close enough to see occasionally which dolphin jumped to catch which fish. She tallied the results. She let them at the apex of their jump glimpse her standing there, in the direction of where the fish came from. She didn’t think any of them had yet seen her in mid-throw. She wanted them to come to the conclusion slowly. So far, no matter what their suspicions were, they still caught the fish and ate them.

After another week or two, once they were certain that the fish came from her, she would step entirely into view to feed them.

In this way, she learned how little Bernie was eating.

* * *

Most times when the dolphins mated, it was fast and sensuous and mutual, the females as likely to start the behavior as the males, with much nipping and caressing and sonaring of genitals beforehand, the act itself fast. However it wasn’t always this way. One morning when Cora was in the water, Bernie sonared Mother’s genital slit until she bit at him and swam away. He chased her, his penis apparent now. He kept his body between Mother and the surface so she could not rise to breath. At high speed, they circled the lagoon, squealing and creaking at each other.