Dolphin Island (11 page)

Three months later, quite by chance, a passing schooner sent men ashore to search
for food. Instead, they found the body of the Chinese cook, and, hidden in the undergrowth,
the iron tank. Huddled inside it was Mary Watson, with her baby son still in her arms.
And beside her was the log of the eight-day voyage, which she had kept to the very
end.

“I’ve seen it in the Museum,” said Mick, very solemnly. “It’s on half a dozen sheets
of paper, torn out of a notebook. You can still read most of it, and I’ll never forget
the last entry. It just says: ‘No water—nearly dead with thirst.’”

For a long time, neither boy said anything. Then Johnny looked at the broken spoon
he was still holding. It was foolish, of course, but he
would
put it back, out of respect for Mary Watson’s gallant ghost. He could understand
the feelings of Mick and his people toward her memory. He wondered how often, on moonlit
nights, the more imaginative islanders did believe that they had seen a young woman
pushing an iron box out to sea….

Then another, and much more disturbing, thought suddenly struck him. He turned toward
Mick, wondering just how to put the question. But it was not necessary, for Mick answered
without prompting.

“I feel pretty bad about the whole thing,” he said, “even though it was such a long
time ago. You see, I know for a fact that my grandfather’s grandfather helped to eat
the other Chinaman.”

Every day now, Johnny and Mick would go swimming with the two dolphins, trying to
find the limits of their intelligence and their cooperation. They now tolerated Mick
and would obey his requests when he was using the communicator, but they remained
unfriendly to him. Sometimes they would try to scare him, by charging him with teeth
showing, then turning aside at the last possible moment. They never played such tricks
with Johnny, though they would often nibble at his flippers or rub gently against
him, expecting to be tickled and stroked in return.

This prejudice upset Mick, who couldn’t see why Susie and Sputnik preferred, as he
put it, “an undersized little pale-skin” like Johnny. But dolphins are as temperamental
as human people, and there is no accounting for tastes. Mick’s opportunity was to
come later, though in a way that no one could have guessed.

Despite occasional arguments and quarrels, the boys were now firm friends and were
seldom far apart. Mick was, indeed, the first really close friend that Johnny had
ever made. There was good reason for this, though he did not know it. After losing
both his parents, at such an early age, he had been afraid to risk his affections
elsewhere, but now the break with his past was so complete that it had lost much of
its power over him.

Besides, Mick was someone whom anybody could admire. Like most of the islanders, he
had a splendid physique; generations of sea-battling forefathers had made sure of
that. He was alert and intelligent and full of information about things of which Johnny
had never heard. His faults were minor ones—rashness, exaggeration, and a fondness
for practical jokes, which sometimes got him into trouble.

Toward Johnny he felt protective, almost fatherly, as a big man can often be toward
a much smaller one. And perhaps the warmhearted island boy, with his four brothers,
three sisters, and scores of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces, felt the
inner loneliness of this runaway orphan from the other side of the world.

Ever since he had mastered the basic technique of diving, Johnny had been pestering
Mick to take him exploring off the edge of the reef, where he could test his new skills
in deep water and among big fish. But Mick had taken his time. Though he was impatient
in small matters, he could be cautious in big ones. He knew that diving in a small,
safe pool, or close to the jetty, was very different from operating in the open sea.
So many things could go wrong: there were powerful currents, unexpected storms might
spring up, sharks might make a nuisance of themselves—the sea was full of surprises,
even for the most experienced diver. It was merciless to those who made mistakes and
did not give them a second chance.

Johnny’s opportunity came in a way that he had not expected. Susie and Sputnik were
responsible. Professor Kazan had decided that it was time they went out into the world
to earn their own living. He never kept a pair of dolphins longer than a year, believing
that it was not fair to do so. They were social creatures and needed to make contact
with their own kind. Most of his subjects, when he released them, remained close to
the island and could always be called through the underwater loud-speakers. He was
quite sure that Susie and Sputnik would behave in the same way.

In fact, they simply refused to leave. When the gate of the pool was opened, they
swam a little way down the channel leading into the sea, then darted back as if afraid
that they would be shut outside.

“I know what’s wrong,” said Mick in disgust. “They’re so used to being fed by us that
they’re too lazy to catch their own fish.”

There might have been some truth in that, but it was not the whole explanation. For
when Professor Kazan asked Johnny to swim down the channel, they followed him out
to sea. He did not even have to press any of the buttons on the communicator.

After that, there was no more swimming in the deserted pool, for which, though no
one knew it, Professor Kazan now had other purposes in mind. Every morning, immediately
after their first session at school, Mick and Johnny would meet the two dolphins and
head out to the reef. Usually they took Mick’s surfboard with them, as a floating
base on which they could load their gear and any fish that they caught.

Mick told a hair-raising tale of sitting on this same board while a tiger shark prowled
around, trying to take a bite out of a thirty-pound barracuda he’d shot and foolishly
left dangling in the water. “If you want to live a long time on the Great Barrier
Reef,” he said, “get your speared fish out of the sea as quickly as you can. Australian
sharks are the meanest in the world—they grab three or four divers every year.”

That
was nice to know; Johnny wondered how long it would take a shark to chew through
the two inches of foam-and-Fiberglas in Mick’s board, if it really tried….

But with Susie and Sputnik as escorts, there was no danger from sharks; indeed, they
hardly ever saw one. The presence of the two dolphins gave them a wonderful sense
of security, such as no diver in the open sea could ever have felt before. Sometimes
Susie and Sputnik were joined by Einar and Peggy, and once a school of at least fifty
dolphins accompanied them on one of their swims. This was too much of a good thing,
for the water was so crowded that visibility was almost zero; but Johnny could not
bring himself to hurt their feelings by pressing the GO button.

He had swum often enough in the shallow pools on the great coral plateau around the
island, but to dive off the reef’s outer edge was a much more awe-inspiring experience.
The water was sometimes so clear that Johnny felt he was floating in mid-air, with
no means of support. He could look down and see absolutely nothing between himself
and a jagged coral landscape forty feet below, and he had to keep reminding himself
that it was impossible to fall.

In some areas the great fringing reef around the island ended sharply in an almost
vertical wall of coral. It was fascinating to sink slowly down the face of this wall,
surprising the gorgeously colored fish that lived in its cracks and recesses. At the
end of a dive, Johnny would try to identify the most striking of the reef butterflies
in the Institute’s reference books, but he usually found that they had no popular
names, only unpronounceable Latin ones.

Almost everywhere one might run into isolated boulders and pinnacles, rising suddenly
out of the sea bed and reaching almost to the surface. Mick called these “bommies,”
and sometimes they reminded Johnny of the carved rock formations in the Grand Canyon.
These, however, had not been shaped by the forces of erosion; they had
grown
into their present forms, for they were the accumulated skeletons of countless coral
animals. Only the thin surface was now alive, over a massive core of dead limestone
weighing many tons, and ten or twenty feet high. When the underwater visibility was
poor, as was sometimes the case after a storm or rain shower, it was startling to
come across one of these stone monsters looming suddenly out of the mist.

Many of them were riddled with caves, and these caves were always inhabited; it was
not a good idea to enter them until you had discovered who was at home. It might be
a moray eel, constantly snapping his hideous jaws; it might be a family of friendly
but dangerous scorpion fish, waving their poison-tipped spines like a bundle of turkey
feathers; and if the cave was a large one, it would usually be a rock cod, or grouper.
Some of these were much bigger than Johnny, but they were quite harmless and backed
nervously away when he approached them.

In a surprisingly short time he grew to recognize individual fish and to know where
to find them. The groupers never strayed far from their own particular caves, and
Johnny soon began to look on some of them as personal friends. One scarred veteran
had a fishhook embedded in his lower lip, with a piece of line still hanging from
it. Despite his unfortunate experience with mankind, he was not unfriendly and even
allowed Johnny to come close enough to stroke him.

The groupers, the morays, the scorpion fish—these were the permanent residents of
the submarine landscape that Johnny was beginning to know and love. But sometimes
there would be unexpected and exciting visitors swimming in from deeper water. It
was part of the reef’s attraction that you never knew what you would meet on any given
dive, even in an area that you had visited a dozen times before and knew like the
proverbial back of your hand.

Sharks were, of course, the commonest prowlers of the reef. Johnny never forgot the
first he met, one day when he and Mick had given their escorts the slip by going out
an hour earlier than usual. He never saw it coming; it was suddenly there, a gray,
superbly streamlined torpedo, moving slowly and effortlessly toward him. It was so
beautiful and so graceful that it was impossible to think of it as dangerous. Not
until it had approached to within twenty feet did Johnny look around anxiously for
Mick. He was relieved to find his friend snorkling immediately above him, eying the
situation calmly but with loaded spear gun at the ready.

The shark, like almost all sharks, was merely inquisitive. It looked Johnny over with
its cold, staring eyes—so different from the friendly, intelligent eyes of the dolphins—and
swerved off to the right when it was ten feet away. Johnny had a perfect view of the
pilot fish swimming in front of its nose, and the remora, or sucker fish, clamped
onto its back—an ocean-going hitchhiker, using his suction pad to give him a free
ride through life.

There was nothing that a diver could do about sharks, except to watch out for them
and to leave them alone, in the hope that they would do the same to him. If you faced
up to them, they would always go away. But if you lost your nerve and tried to run—well,
anyone who was stupid enough to run deserved little sympathy, for a shark could swim
thirty miles per hour to a skin-diver’s three, without even exerting himself.

More unnerving than any sharks were the packs of barracuda that roamed along the edge
of the reef. Johnny was very glad that the surfboard was floating overhead the first
time he discovered that the water around him was full of the silver sea pike, with
their hostile eyes and aggressive, underslung jaws. They were not very large—three
feet long at the most—but there were hundreds of them, and they formed a circular
wall, with Johnny at the center. It was a wall that came closer and closer as the
barracuda spiraled in to get a better look at him, until presently he could see nothing
but their glittering bodies. Though he waved his arms and shouted into the water,
it made not the slightest difference: they inspected him at their leisure—then for
no reason that he could see, turned suddenly away and disappeared into the blue.

Johnny surfaced, grabbed the board, and held an anxious conference with Mick across
it. Every few seconds he kept bobbing his head underwater, to see if the wolf pack
had returned.

“They won’t bother you,” said Mick reassuringly. “’Cuda are cowards. If you shoot
one, all the others will run away.”

Johnny was glad to know it and took the next meeting more calmly. All the same, he
never felt quite happy when the silver hunters closed in on him, like a fleet of spaceships
from an alien world. Perhaps some day, one of them would risk a nibble, and then the
whole pack would move in….

There was one serious difficulty about exploring the reef: it was
too
big. Most of it was far beyond comfortable swimming range, and there were areas out
toward the horizon that had never been visited. Often Johnny wished he could have
gone farther into unknown territory, but he had been forced to save his strength for
the long swim home. It was on one of these weary return journeys, as he helped Mick
to push the surfboard loaded with at least a hundred pounds of fish, that the answer
occurred to him.

Mick was skeptical, but agreed that the idea would be splendid—if it worked. “It’s
not going to be easy,” he said, “to make a harness that will fit a dolphin. They’re
so streamlined that it will slide off them.”

“I’m thinking of a kind of elastic collar, just ahead of the flippers. If it’s broad
enough and tight enough, it should stay on. Let’s not talk about it, though—people
will only laugh at us.”

This was good advice, but impossible to carry out. Everyone wanted to know
why
they needed sponge rubber, elastic webbing, nylon cord, and oddly shaped pieces of
plastic, and they had to confess the truth. There was no hope of carrying out the
first trials in secrecy, and Johnny had an embarrassingly large audience when he fitted
his harness on Susie.