It looked as if he did want to swim in the deeper water, for he would swim up to the edge of it, his beak (what she now knew was called a rostrum) just beneath the sliding glass doors, peering out at the water beyond. Still, he did not swim under the doors. He just looked, his eyes big, a little like a child afraid of the deep end of the pool.

So, she pulled on her mask and ducked down in the water next to him to examine the size of the opening. When designing the homearium, she’d measured his height from stomach to the tip of his dorsal fin to make sure she left enough room for him to fit. She eyeballed the height of the opening and his height to confirm she’d done this correctly. The gap was more than tall enough.

She modeled for him how to swim into the deep end, ducking underneath the doors, then swimming around on the far side and clicking at him underwater. Excited, he scooted back and forth on the other side, with his rostrum right underneath the doors, but he would not swim through the opening. He just clicked and crinkled and squealed, staring at her.

Perhaps his unwillingness to do this had something to do with why the dolphins would not jump over a net, not even to escape the men. It might have been that (accustomed to the wide-open sea and needing to return to the surface to breathe every few minutes) they had developed a strong physical aversion to any type of constrained space. They could not risk getting trapped anywhere, or caught on anything, for they could drown within minutes, in just a few inches of water.

Or maybe it was that their echolocation was confused by objects like rope nets and glass. Maybe that confusion made it difficult for them to see into the area beyond to know it was safe.

So she asked Blum to have the men remove the sliding doors, to take down that whole wall of them. The glass doors were her favorite part of the homearium and were by far the most expensive part. When she made this request of Blum, Tibbet jerked around to look at her. He muttered a sentence in which the only word she heard was women. Blum snorted, amused. He did, however, tell Tibbet and Eh to help her remove the doors.

When building the homearium, it had taken a half day to install the tracks for the doors. Removing the tracks and the doors, however, took only twenty minutes. She slid each door to the end of the track, and Tibbet and Eh unhitched them, one by one, piling them up on the lawn outside. Then they began to unscrew the lower track that the doors had rested on.

Junior watched all of this with attention, his head out of the water. Once the track was unscrewed, Eh picked up one end of it and began to walk it out onto the lawn, while Cora carried the other end through the water to the side of the pool. There, Tibbet took it from her, and the men carried it away.