When there was no training going on, Kat played with all the squid she’d accumulated, slinging them around the lagoon, at the dolphins and the humans. Gradually her range improved. If the men had lunch on the veranda, they learned to hunch over their food, protecting it. The windows of the building became targets. From inside, there’d be the slap of a squid, a silhouetted fleshy Rorschach, then the slow puckered release of its fall. Each morning, squid bodies lay scattered on the veranda and table and chairs as though there’d been a light rain of cephalopods.

Stepping out onto the veranda one morning, holding his coffee, Tibbet’s heel landed on one. It was slimy from decomposition. His foot slid out from under him. He fell, bringing down several chairs. The clatter and yelling.

Cora ran up the stairs to make sure he was ok. Before he even got to his feet, he was bellowing that the dolphins were not allowed more squid. With her hearing glasses on and his voice so loud, she heard these words clearly.

(She noticed that he did not say Kat was not allowed more squid, but instead the dolphins. It was possible he did not know that Kat was the perpetrator, that she was the only one who threw squid at the men and the house. The only time he focused on individual dolphins was when he tallied specific behaviors. For him, the dolphins might appear to be one indistinguishable streamlined body, one grinning fishlike face.)

Stepping out onto the veranda, Blum listened to Tibbet’s demand, then shook his head.

Tibbet limped around the rest of the day, furious.

* * *

Each day Mother was still letting go of leaves and twigs and seaweed by the exit stream, watching them roll through the water and get caught on the log wedged there against the gate. The log was no longer recognizable as a log, looking now like a large mound of debris. The mound no longer bobbed in the water so much, having become wedged in the space, bit by bit blocking the exit stream. The water riffled over it, backed up a bit.

* * *

One day Kat managed to hurl a squid and hit a seagull flying low over the lagoon. The gull tumbled in the air, then recovered. It flapped its wings, hovering, shrieking all around, not quite sure what had happened.

Kat surfaced to fling another squid. It hit the gull with a smack, sideswiping the bird so it tumbled into the water, then flapped off terrified.

The dolphins turned to Kat, impressed.

* * *

Tibbet noticed today that the water in the lagoon was higher and walked over to the exit stream to see what was going on. He looked at the mound of debris with disgust and, rather than touch any of it with his hands, simply slid the gate up out of the cement dam, removing it from the mouth of the stream to lay it down on the ground. Released, the water gushed down the stream, sweeping the debris away in chunks. Soon, just the log was left, too large to bump over the lip of the cement. Tibbet nudged the log with his foot twice, trying to get it over the lip, then reached down and picked it up and tossed it onto the ground, wiping his hand on his shorts. With the exit stream clear and the water draining, he picked the gate up and slid it back into its notched channel in the cement dam. He lowered it to the desired height and pushed it back into a notch to hold it there.