Cora would say—MA-ree had a LI-ttle lamb, LI-ttle lamb, LI-ttle lamb.

Kat would answer—ah IH-eh ah IH-eh ah, H-eh ah IH-eh ah.

Standing above Kat in the wading pool, Cora could lay her fingers on the skin around the blowhole to ensure she was counting Kat’s syllables correctly without her hearing glasses on. She could feel the sound in her fingertips. She noticed the blowhole didn’t always have to open to make the sounds. In general, it moved very little, knuckling tighter or loosening slightly. The sound made somewhere inside.

When Kat exhaled that stench of rotten eggs and fish, Cora would peer inside. A short muscled tunnel down to a moist flap of skin that obscured what was below. However the sounds were created, there were no teeth involved, or tongue or mobile lips.

Even without hearing glasses, she could tell the vowels were increasingly accurate and clear. It sounded a little like a balloon learning to speak, a whistled squeaky enunciation. Perhaps there was a muscled orifice in there squeezing from one air sac to another. Consonants, so far, seemed impossible.

Tibbet hung a spare microphone from the tree over the wading pool. He recorded the training sessions between Kat and Cora, then printed out the oscillographic tracings so he could tally the results. He circled and counted the different components that Blum had discerned and created terms for: sonic bursts, stimulus trains and matched responses. Blum loved to invent terminology. They used other vocabulary too that Cora tried to memorize: vocal stimuli, phonemes, waveforms, reinforcers and schwas.

Even when Cora wasn’t giving Kat lessons in talking, Kat at times continued to burble to herself. Bored and all alone, she played with the interesting new sounds. When she vocalized underwater, the noises echoed through the sides of the pool. Cora lay on the deck chair nearby, listening, her eyes closed. Out of the pool, she could put on her hearing glasses. Muffled through plastic and slightly distorted, it was still obvious that the noises each day became increasingly human, the beat and inflection. The voice of a toddler babbling nonsense to itself, mastering some language made of mostly vowels: Hawaiian perhaps or Finnish, a sense of umlauts. The sounds emerging from underwater.

When Cora stepped inside the building to get a new book, she could see two speakers set up, one on either side of the main room. Kat’s babbling came from the left speaker. From the right came the squeals and clicks of the dolphins in the lagoon. The two sets of noises so different.

In the middle of the room sat Tibbet, his head cocked like a dog that had heard a whistle in the distance, listening with all his attention. He tallied the differences between the sounds again and again. No matter how he counted them, it was clear something dramatic was happening.

He would glance at her, his gaze so very cold, unable to understand how she could be involved with this work.

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