Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  21

  It was extraordinary to witness how much one not-very-well boy could do to galvanize a group. Before anybody could object, Claudius had organized Jake to run to the lighthouse and Runway Beach to collect every bulb, pot, or container capable of holding water, plus some palm fronds to shade them all. Ben and Nathan were sent to gather firewood and catch fish, because, Claudius said, they would need all the energy they could get to make it through the night. Lucy and Sherilyn were dispatched to gather up the honeycomb, coconuts, spare clothing, and chunks of aloe. Martine hoped that the aloe leaf gel would help soothe the dolphins’ exposed skins and prevent them from cracking.

  She and Claudius stayed behind to dig holes in which to tuck the dolphins’ pectoral fins, which would help keep them upright and comfortable. Then they spread great armfuls of seaweed over the dolphins to keep them from literally cooking in their own blubber. Martine went from one to the next, putting her palms over their hearts and feeling the tingle of electricity in response. They gazed up at her with their limpid, knowing eyes as if they trusted her to help them, and that terrified Martine because she was afraid she might not be able to. And as she walked and murmured to them, not really knowing what she was saying, she became aware that what had started as a feeling of anguish when she saw the dolphins in distress, was gradually consuming her heart. It was as if they were extensions of her. When she looked into Little Storm’s eyes, she saw that he recognized something she herself had never understood until that moment. That she felt his pain. She took on the burden of it.

  Claudius was unaware of these internal revelations as he followed her, pausing in between dolphins to scoop up water from the departing sea with containers he’d improvised from a large shell and a coconut.

  “Thanks for what you did earlier,” Martine said as she watched him pour water onto Rain Queen’s head, taking care to avoid her blowhole. If water went into the blowhole, which she used for breathing, she could drown.

  Claudius’s mouth twisted. “No, thank you,” he replied. And she knew he wasn’t talking about the dolphins.

  When she reached Sun Dancer, Martine cradled the dolphin’s silver-gray head in her arms and kissed him. Fighting back tears, she said softly, “Please, Sun Dancer, find a way to tell us how to help you.”

  “What do you expect—that he’s suddenly going to start talking like Flipper?” Claudius jibed with a flash of his old sarcasm. But he knew right away that he’d been insensitive and tried to make amends, saying, “You really love them, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Why, how do you feel about them?”

  Claudius gave Sun Dancer’s back an experimental stroke. “I’m not sure. I haven’t been around them as much as you. I just know that saving them seems like the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. I care about that more than I care about getting off this island.”

  But saving the dolphins was, as Jake had predicted, backbreaking work. They split into two groups and worked in shifts. Martine, Jake, and Lucy took the first shift because Nathan and Ben were still out fishing. Each of them had responsibility for seven dolphins. They had to pour seawater over them, apply aloe gel to their skin, and then drape them with seaweed. The most tiring part was the trips to the lake for freshwater, or to the edge of the crashing waves around the peninsula, a stony beach they’d named Danger, to fill the various containers Jake had found. Every hour, they switched, and slept, ate, or stared into space while Ben, Nathan, and Sherilyn took a turn with the dolphins. Then they’d rotate.

  Claudius didn’t have the stamina of the others, so it was his job to keep the fire blazing, time the shifts, motivate everyone, and attempt to cook meals, which he did extremely badly—so badly that it was decided after a disgusting lunch that at mealtimes he should take over Sherilyn’s duties with the dolphins while she cooked.

  As night drew in, a wicked wind whipped up the surf on Danger Beach and the temperature plunged. They were filling the containers when Ben suddenly stopped what he was doing, straightened, and said, “Did anybody hear that?”

  Everyone fell silent. A wave crashed and the sea was temporarily hushed. The sound came again—a distinct ping. They waited a few seconds and it happened once more.

  “That’s the sound I heard when I was doing my exercises,” said Jake. “A pinging noise. I thought it was a bird, or some weird fish or other.”

  “It’s sonar,” Ben told him.

  “Sonar!” cried Martine.

  Ben raised his eyebrows. “Yes, sonar. When my dad was in the navy he took me to see the testing of a new transmitter, and I’d know that noise anywhere. Basically, a transmitter sends out pulses of sound that bounce off submarines and other objects in the ocean and are detected as returning echoes. That’s what the ping is. But why would anybody test it out here? If we can hear it, it’s probably low-frequency active sonar, which is used by the navy.”

  “A lot of scientists believe that sonar’s one of the main causes of dolphins and whales getting stranded,” said Martine, remembering her conversation with Mr. Manning during the Sardine Run.

  “If scientists know that, why does the navy still use it?” Sherilyn asked.

  “Grown-ups don’t always fix the obvious things,” Nathan told her.

  “That’s because they’re so busy telling us not to eat too many sweets, or run in the house, or talk to strangers, or stand under trees when there’s lightning, they don’t have time,” Lucy remarked.

  There was quiet as they listened again for the pinging noise, but it had stopped.

  “That’s a pity,” said Jake. “If there’s sonar, maybe it means the navy are about, and if the navy are about, they might save us and take us back to Cape Town.”

  Everybody glared at him and he had the grace to look ashamed. “I’m just saying . . .” he said defiantly. “Of course I care about the dolphins.”

  22

  To be fair, Jake more than pulled his weight during the endless night that followed. It was so cold and the ritual rinsing of dolphins’ skins so mind-numbing that half the time Martine wasn’t sure if she was awake, asleep, or hallucinating. She worried that the unaccustomed pressure could damage their kidneys, livers, and hearts, so she focused what little healing power she could summon on those organs. Once an hour, she moved from dolphin to dolphin in the fire-lit darkness, running her hands along their abdomens and bellies in such a subtle way that not even Ben noticed.

  To take her mind off her muscles, which soon grew sore to the point of screaming, she allowed her thoughts to drift to Sawubona. There was a giraffe-shaped hole in her heart where Jemmy was supposed to be. She wondered what he was doing now, and whether he missed her as much as she missed him. She wondered if she’d ever again have the chance to ride him up to the escarpment on a starry night, as she’d done before Gwyn Thomas stopped her from riding after sundown, and to lie with her head on his withers and her feet on his hindquarters, losing herself in Mars, the Southern Cross, and the Milky Way. On those nights, she’d felt cloaked by Africa, almost as if the mother spirit of the landscape had cast a protective veil around her shoulders.

  She missed Grace’s wisdom and Tendai’s bass-drum laugh and, increasingly, she missed the evenings with Gwyn Thomas. Sometimes her grandmother was worn out from a hard day on the reserve and they’d just sit quietly together after dinner, listening to the radio or reading books, but at other times she’d tell Martine tales of the history of Southern Africa—of rivers running red with the blood of spear-throwing Zulus and Voortrekkers, the early white settlers; of epic, malaria- and blackwater-fever-racked journeys by ox wagon; of tribes displaced by the whims of politicians in Europe; of men driven mad with greed for gold and diamonds.

  She talked too of Martine’s mum and dad, and those were the stories Martine cherished most. “Your mum always said that she knew David was the man for her when she watched him wade into the middle of a torrential river to rescue a baby monkey clinging to a fragment of rock,” Gwyn Thomas had told her with
a smile.

  David Allen was an Englishman, in Cape Town for a medical conference, and for both him and Veronica it was love at first sight. They’d been married at the game reserve, three months after David waded from the river with the dripping baby monkey, and David had moved to South Africa to be with his new bride. He’d found a job at a famous hospital, and for a while the future had looked perfect.

  Until fate had intervened. Or, at least, until Grace had told Veronica that her baby—born on New Year’s Day, a year after their wedding—had a gift with animals. The sangoma warned her that the gift would carry an awe-some responsibility, and that Martine’s destiny was unalterable. Those words had changed everything.

  “Martine. Martine!”

  Martine shook herself. Nathan was standing in front of her. “You can rest now,” he said. “You look as if you need it.”

  In the end, the actual saving of the dolphins was almost an anticlimax. The tide came in shortly before four thirty a.m. and left foaming outlines around the dolphins, who by then were as weak as their carers. The water took an age to inch high enough up the beach to actually lift the dolphins off the sand, and by that point nobody was capable of doing anything but encouraging them to swim out to sea.

  The dolphins moved tentatively at first and then with increasing fluidity and speed. Martine’s chest was tight with emotion as she watched them go, especially when Sun Dancer wheeled back and clicked to her before leaving.

  “We did it!” whooped Jake. Everyone came together for a group hug, which, despite their wet, clammy skins, was somehow the warmest Martine had ever had. Then they collapsed in hysterical laughter on the sand.

  “That’s it,” said Lucy. “I’m officially on vacation. I refuse to lift a finger between now and when we leave the island. I don’t care if we’re stuck here for a year.”

  “How is that different than usual?” Claudius asked dryly, and even Lucy had to giggle.

  All of a sudden Sherilyn said, “Oh, no!”

  Nathan groaned.

  “What is it?” asked Martine. She sat up and squinted into the sunlight. Mini was on the fringe of the surf. It was plain she intended to beach herself again.

  Martine was distraught. The weight of the dolphins’ suffering returned to crush her again. “Maybe she’s so traumatized she’s lost the will to live. That happens to some dolphins. No matter how many times they’re returned to the sea, they keep trying to escape it.”

  “Come on, everyone,” Claudius said tiredly, “back to work.”

  “I can’t,” Lucy whined. “I just can’t.”

  “Get up off your lazy bum and come and help,” Sherilyn ordered, much to everyone’s astonishment, and Lucy, to her credit, did just that.

  Three times they pushed Mini out to sea and three times the dolphin returned. Finally their strength really did run out. The marathon night had taken its toll.

  Mini dragged herself onto the beach one final time and Martine went to sit beside her, to try to comfort her in her last moments. “Don’t you want to be in the ocean anymore?” she asked despairingly. “Don’t you want to be with your friends?”

  She was stroking Mini’s head when she noticed something jutting from the dolphin’s mouth. She removed it carefully. It was a section of clear cable.

  “Ben,” Martine called, and he was by her side in an instant. He took the cable from her and examined it closely, and they both looked over at Mini. The grandmother dolphin’s eyelids slid shut and she heaved a big sigh.

  “No, Mini, you’re not allowed to die,” Martine sobbed, but it was already too late.

  Sherilyn came over and tried to console her, but Martine was beyond consolation. Someone, or something, had killed Mini as surely as if they had shot her, and she was not going to rest until she found out who, or what, had done it.

  “I think you’re right,” she said in a low voice to Ben when Sherilyn stepped away to talk to the others. “There is a reason why people are staying away from this island. It’s cursed, or protected, or there’s a secret here. There is something wrong with this place. And what do the cables have to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But I know we’re not going to be able to find the answers on our own.”

  23

  “Who do you think the men are?” Nathan said. “CIA spies? Foreign mercenaries plotting a coup?”

  They were up in the lighthouse, thawing out around a roaring fire. They were filthy, smelly, and so sleep-deprived they practically needed matchsticks to keep their eyelids open, but the discovery that the sea around the island was a virtual minefield, and that they were not alone at all but so close to “civilization” that men in dhows could be on the scene in minutes, had temporarily reenergized them.

  “We’re not sure,” Ben told him. “They could even be pirates.”

  “Pirates?” Lucy said skeptically. “Are you making this up? Did they also have eye patches and cutlasses and a black flag with a skull and crossbones on it?”

  “Modern pirates aren’t like that,” Nathan informed her. “I saw a documentary on them. They prey on tourist boats and cargo vessels in isolated locations just like this one, and are so bold they’ll swarm aboard in broad daylight and rob people at knifepoint. They’re ruthless.”

  “Oh. My. God! So, along with being half drowned and marooned on an island, we’re now going to be murdered by pirates?”

  “Well, we don’t have anything to steal,” Ben said, hiding a smile, “so I don’t think they’d be too interested in us, even if they are pirates. It’s more likely that they’re treasure hunters who’ve booby-trapped the wreck to keep other fortune seekers away from it, or that they’re working for the organization that laid down the cables. If we’re right and Mini was trying to tell us that there’s a connection between the dolphins beaching themselves and the cables, then we urgently need to find out what the cables are for. Especially if it turns out that the undersea mine was designed to protect the cables and not the wreck.”

  “Why don’t we have a closer look at them?” Jake suggested.

  “What, and get blown to pieces like the manta ray?” exclaimed Lucy. “No thanks.”

  “What about the sonar?” asked Martine. “Do you think the men we saw could be involved with that?”

  “Sonar can travel for miles, so the transmitter that’s being used could be anywhere,” Ben said. “Some navy might be testing in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Maybe we should concentrate on the divers, because they and the cables are our only clues. The fact that they responded to the explosion so fast means that they must be based reasonably close to us, possibly on another island—although not close enough to know that we’re here. Unless it was just chance and they happened to be sailing nearby.”

  “What happens if they do notice we’re here?” fretted Sherilyn. “Are they going to come to the island and shoot us with their spearguns?”

  Claudius made a scary face at her. “No, they’ll just kidnap us and hold us for ransom.”

  “Well, that’s a real comfort,” Lucy said, and Martine smothered a giggle. Claudius was definitely on the mend.

  “The one thing I keep thinking about is how proud Alberto was there was no crime in the Bazaruto Archipelago,” she said. “He told me that the islanders don’t even have locks on their doors and that the smallest child can walk anywhere by herself. He didn’t say anything about pirates or undersea mines. So maybe there’s an innocent explanation for all of this.”

  “We’re forgetting the most important part of this,” Claudius said, “and that’s the dolphins. I mean, we owe it to them to find and stop whatever it is that’s causing them to beach themselves.”

  “Why don’t we start by trying to find out where the divers are operating from,” Ben suggested. “If we can get them to come to the island, we might be able to follow them.”

  “Oh, sure,” Lucy said. “Let’s just phone them up and invite them over!”

  Jake snorted. “Follow them? In what? Th
e raft we’re going to build out of bamboo, I suppose. That’s going to be really effective.”

  “We’ll take their boat,” Ben responded calmly.

  “And how do you suppose we’re going to do that?”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Martine, remembering something Ben had once said to her. “Sometimes the most obvious way is the best way.”

  Ben laughed. “That’s right.”

  As eager as they were to get started, everyone agreed that, in order for any plan to be effective, sleep was their first priority. Claudius’s water-resistant watch had survived the storm, so he set his alarm for three p.m. That would give them four hours of rest, leaving them with three hours to execute Phase I before dark.

  They were awakened at 2:10 P.M. by the sound of an airplane. Jake heard it first. He scrambled to his feet, brown hair sticking up porcupine-style, stumbled outside, and started leaping up and down and waving his arms. Lucy and Nathan went after him and the three of them did wild dances on top of the dunes. But the Cessna was circling Dolphin Bay and gave no indication it had seen them.

  They ran back into the lighthouse and tried, in a comical way borne of haste, to restart the fire so they could send up a smoke signal. The first flames were just taking when Claudius threw water on them.

  Jake snatched the gourd from him. “Claudius, what the hell are you doing, mate? Has the man-o’-war venom attacked your brain? We’ve got a chance of getting off this island. Don’t you want that?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jake,” said Nathan. “They’ll see the SOS on Runway beach.”

  Jake glared at Claudius, tossed aside the gourd, and raced outside again. The others joined him. Martine had snatched the tin lid from her survival kit, and she tilted it upward in the hope the pilot might spot the reflected glare of the sunlight, but the plane flew past without seeming to see them. It dipped low over Runway Beach and circled twice.

  “They’ve seen it,” yelled Jake. “Whoooee! We’re saved. We’re out of here. I’m going to play rugby again. I’m going to eat steak and chips again.”