The Girl Who Dreamt of Dolphins (28 page)

Perhaps she could go up onto the cliffs and scour the sea
below for any sign of a small dolphin trapped in the water. But
that too would be next to impossible. She had no idea where Spirit
might be, not really. She looked out intently at the sea beyond the
mouth of the cove, but other than a sailing dinghy in the far
distance, there was nothing to be seen. She thought about how much
energy she needed to stretch out with her mind and contact the
other dolphins to help her find Spirit. She knew that she needed a
lot more if that was going to work. She turned to Bethany, who had
sat down on a nearby rock, her bag of food resting by her feet on
the sand.

‘
I’ve got to eat’ she said.

Chapter Sixteen
:

Dancer slowly awoke as the pale morning light broke over the
horizon. It was the second day-break since Spirit had disappeared
and she really felt his absence. It made her feel sad and lonely.
If Spirit had left on his coming of age journey as she had left a
year or so before, with the blessing of the pod and the good wishes
of everyone, then she would still have missed him, but it would
have seemed the right and natural thing to do. But Spirit had
stolen away in the night. That felt very wrong. What was more, she
had been tutored closely by all of the pod on how to survive alone
before she had set off. Spirit had not been given the special
knowledge and, swimming alone, she knew that although he was a
strong and resourceful dolphin, his lack of that training made him
vulnerable.

There had been much anguish when the pod had woken the night
after he left. At first Dancer had raced around searching for him,
convinced that he was playing a trick on her and that he would
re-appear at any moment, laughing and happy as he often did. But
when she realised that he was nowhere to be found, she told Chaser,
who quickly told Storm and Moonlight and all the rest of the
pod.

Storm called out angrily in a whistle that could be heard for
miles across the sea, calling for Spirit to turn and come back
immediately, but there was no reply. Either Spirit was too far away
to hear or he did not want to reply. The whole pod swum in the
direction they thought he might have gone in, hoping to pick up
some sign or scent, or to hear his call across the empty seas. But
they heard and found nothing and turned back towards evening,
thinking that maybe Spirit would return to the same part of the sea
that he had left them in. They were all worried about Spirit and
all of them had an uneasy feeling about why Spirit had left in the
manner that he had. No one said anything openly, but Storm knew
that they were all thinking that he had driven the young dolphin
away and Storm became moody and taciturn as a result. It was the
right time for Spirit to take his coming of age swim and when Storm
had told him that he could not, it was no surprise that the young
dolphin should feel upset and frustrated. He wanted to prove
himself of course and that was why he had left under the cover of
night.

So when Dancer woke up that second morning after Spirit’s
disappearance, she immediately turned a circle in the water, hoping
to see her friend returning through the dappled sea towards them.
All she saw though was Moonlight swimming lazily around whilst the
others slowly roused themselves from their waking-sleep. Dancer
made a small leap to glance over the surface of the sea. It looked
like it was going to be a bleak morning.

When Lucy had come to him that morning, Spirit had been filled
with hope that somehow she would be able to set him free. Yet at
the same time he had wanted to be able to free himself and to show
that he could look after himself without even the help of Lucy.
That, after all, was the reason he had left for his coming of age
swim. But he knew that escape was now a forlorn hope. The wire was
tight around his tail. It had cut through his skin and blood was
leaching slowly into the water. No amount of struggling would help
him break free. Instead it would bring him closer to
death.

He looked around him. Anything that he might be able to eat
had by now taken cover and the small shoals of fish that darted
from rock to rock would not come anywhere close to his shadow. He
could still rise and breathe through his blowhole of course, but it
hurt his tail when he did so. He was weakening and he knew it.
Spirit glanced up at the weather. If high winds battered the
shoreline, they would smash him against the rocks along with the
waves.

Lucy had said that she would come back to him, that she would
have a plan, but he could not think what. He had spent hours now
sending out his whistling call with all his might in the hope that
a passing dolphin would hear him and come to his aid. There had
been no answer though. Any other dolphins must have been miles
away. The seas seemed empty of intelligent life. There weren’t even
any humans or boats on the horizon. He was completely
alone.

When Spirit was younger, his mother had always told him that
you were never alone in the ocean, no matter where you were or what
the circumstance. There was life everywhere and all you had to do
was seek it out. That, of course, was before she had disappeared.
He looked around him again in the water. Apart from a hermit crab,
creeping along a crack between two rocks and a couple of anemones,
there was nothing alive to be seen. Try as he might, the presence
of the crab did not really comfort him. Then he thought again,
somewhere out there in the sea, Dancer must be swimming, maybe
wondering where he was now. With Dancer would be Breeze, Chaser,
Storm, Moonlight and Summer. They were his pod, his family. In a
strange way he realised, his links to them felt stronger now that
he was a long way away from them, in danger. It was easy to take
them for granted, or even be irritated by them, when you lived with
them all the time.

A few moons ago, Chaser had teased him mercilessly because he
had hated eating the small squid that they would occasionally
catch. Chaser had poked fun at him, saying that all real dolphins
ate squid without a second thought and that Spirit could never
count himself amongst the adults until he did too. Spirit had
seethed inside, but could not bring himself to eat those horrid
rubbery, slimy squid. Right then he would gladly have been rid of
the teasing Chaser and the rest of the pod for good. Now he was so
hungry that even he would eat some squid and having Chaser around
to make fun of him was better than trying to get friendly with a
hermit crab.

After another five sandwiches and forty minutes or so at Old
Man’s Cove, Lucy began to feel her strength returning to her. She
and Bethany leapt from rock to rock at the edge of the cove,
looking in rock pools, peering through the fronds of green to see
if they could see any fish hiding at the bottom, stranded where the
tide had gone out. Bethany seemed to sense that Lucy was summoning
up all her energy and gave her time to do so. After a while,
Bethany produced a small drawing pad and a pencil from a pocket and
announced that she was going to sit and sketch a seagull that was
sitting on a rock nearby and eyeing them suspiciously. Bethany
started drawing with swift, confident strokes of her
pencil.

Lucy wandered across the sand and sat down on a shelf of rock
on the other side of the small cove. She stared out to sea, but
instead of looking at the view, she started to try and focus and to
stretch out with her mind across the waves to the place where,
somewhere, Dancer and the rest of the pod must be. She had got used
being able to make contact with Spirit, but she had never done so
with Dancer and it was much, much harder.

At first she could not do it and all her efforts to find a
door in the corner of her mind that would take her to Dancer
failed. What was Dancer really like? Lucy realised that she found
it easier to stretch out to Spirit because she knew him so well and
had dreamt about him for years and years. But she had also dreamt
about the other dolphins in the pod too and in that way knew all
the dolphins almost as well as Spirit. Dancer, she knew, was an
agile and fast swimmer with a great sense of fun and a ready sense
of humour. If she could think the way Dancer thought, maybe she
could find a way to stretch out with her mind and contact the
dolphin.

Lucy tried again, imagining Dancer playing, leaping, swimming
alongside Spirit. She focused and then relaxed, letting go so that
her mind wandered to its corners. Something seemed to click this
time and before she knew it, she seemed to tumble headlong into the
salty water, right next to the unsuspecting Dancer, swimming
morosely alone a few minutes away from the others.

‘
Hello’ said Lucy tentatively. Dancer glanced
around.

‘
Aaahh, what are you!’ she exclaimed in surprise and horror,
turning and swimming off away from the apparition of Lucy that had
appeared so unexpectedly next to her.

‘
Stop!’ cried out Lucy, gliding behind her, trying hard to keep
up. ‘I’m Spirit’s friend!’

‘
What?’ said Dancer, stopping and turning to look at the girl
following behind her.

‘
I don’t have much time’ continued Lucy. ‘Spirit is in danger.
He’s trapped by a loop of thick metal wire under a high grey cliff,
but I don’t know where. The wire is linked to a red and white buoy,
which is stuck in rocks at the base of the cliff. You have to help
me find him before it’s too late!’

‘
But there are no cliffs like that round the islands’ replied
Dancer, puzzled.

‘
It’s craggy and seems to go on a long way’ Lucy continued
hurriedly. She did not know how long her energy would
last.

‘
The mainland?’ asked Dancer. ‘I’ve never been
there.’

‘
I don’t know’ replied Lucy. ‘Maybe. If you can find him, you
can help me find out exactly where he is and then somehow, we’ll be
able to save him.’ Lucy began to feel her energy ebbing again. She
knew she only had a few seconds left. ‘But you must hurry, he’s
getting weak and I don’t think he can hold out for much longer!’
Dancer stared in wonder at the strange human girl, floating there
next to her in the water. Then she seemed to fade into the rippling
current and disappear in front of Dancer’s very eyes.

Lucy found herself on the beach again, sitting on the ledge of
rock, but this time her legs were as weak as jelly. With all her
willpower she tried to send out a message, ‘Don’t worry Spirit,
help is on its way!’

Dancer hung there in the water for a few moments, still in a
state of shock at what she had just seen and heard, but then it
suddenly dawned on her that she had to do something quickly to save
her friend. She raced back to the rest of the pod where they were
lazing on the surface of the sea, having just fed.

‘
Spirit’s in trouble!’ she cried approaching them. ‘We have to
go and find him, now!’ She started to babble out her story in a
confused and disjointed fashion.

‘
I think that one’s been stung by a jellyfish’ said Chaser.
‘Her brain’s addled.’

‘
No. Let her speak’ said Storm sternly, remembering seeing the
young girl floating next to Spirit that night at the council of
dolphins. What Dancer told them now confirmed his worst fears.
Spirit was a special dolphin, but he could be lost before they ever
got to learn the extent of his gifts. ‘This was precisely why I
didn’t want Spirit to leave’ Storm thought to himself. Eventually
Dancer was able to tell them the full story.

‘
I know those cliffs’ said Storm. ‘They are in the West. If we
are fast, they are maybe half a day’s swim from here. If we leave
now, we can get there while it is still light.’ The whole pod
clamoured to set off immediately, but they all knew that Summer was
now heavy with her calf. It would be born soon and she could not
swim at that speed for long at the moment. It was not safe. He
turned to regard Dancer.

‘
You are fast and the young girl came to you. I will lead you
there. We will be fast just the two of us. Moonlight? You know the
cliff in that area as well, I think. Follow us with Summer and the
others and we can all meet again at Black Rock Basin.’

The rest of the pod were surprised that Storm took what Dancer
said so seriously, but they were all concerned for Spirit and
quickly agreed.

‘
Let’s be off then’ he said, turning to Dancer.

They set out, with Dancer speeding ahead, cutting through the
waves, anxious to get to her friend as soon as possible.