The Girl of the Sea of Cortez Read Online Free PDF Page A

The fins could still be sold in the Orient, andtourists bought an occasional shark jaw, and a few people would eat shark steaks or shark hash if they couldn’t afford something else. But, in general, shark fishing was no longer worthwhile.
    So most sharks were taken by accident, when they bit a hook intended to attract something else or wound themselves up in a net, and the fishermen concentrated on the more readily marketable food fish.
    Jo and Indio and Manolo would start the day fishing with hand lines. Periodically, they would look through a glass-bottom bucket to see if any big schools were in the neighborhood. If the school fish were there, they would set their net and wait and then gather it, spilling masses of fish into their boat.
    If the big boat from La Paz was due that night or the next morning, the fish would be kept cool until they could be dumped into the boat’s ice-hold. If the boat was not due for a few days, the fish would have to be gutted and put on ice on the island, or they would spoil before the boat arrived.
    The islanders were at the mercy of the captain of the boat. He told them the price fish would bring in La Paz and the price he would pay them per pound, and they had no choice but to accept his price. But he was not an overly greedy man, and in some rare times when the market was glutted he was known to have paid the islanders too high a price, so they could continue to buy fuel and fruit and vegetables and clothing, and thus there were few serious complaints about him.
    Since Paloma was not a fisherman, and not a man, and had no official status in the community, she was not permitted to take up dock space for her little boat. She kept it beneath the dock, where it was out of the way.
    When she judged that Jo’s boat had traveled a safe distance, she lay on the dock and reached beneath it and pulledout her pirogue. It was eight feet long and two feet wide and, basically, nothing more than a hollow log. It was Paloma’s dearest possession.
    Her father had made it for her thirteenth birthday. He had ordered the log from La Paz, for there were no trees on Santa Maria, and it had arrived on the boat that came to take away the fish. Then he had built a fire on the log and burned a cavity in it, then attacked it with a chisel and a wooden mallet. Finally, he used coarse dried sharkskin to smooth the wood and erase the splinters.
    And all the while he had worked on it, he had never told Paloma who it was for. She had assumed it was for Jo, and she envied him the fun he would have, the places he would go, the things he would learn.
    She underestimated her father. When he gave her the pirogue, he said only, “This will give you good times.”
    This morning, she had tossed a broad-brim hat into the pirogue; later, around midday, when the sun was highest and the temperature over a hundred degrees, to spend more than a few minutes on the water without a hat was to invite a pounding headache and nausea. She had checked her mesh bag to make sure she had all her equipment: her face mask and flippers, a snorkel tube for breathing, her knife—a razor-sharp, double-edged blade of stainless steel with a rubber hilt—and a mango for her lunch.
    She carried the knife not to defend herself against an animal—before yesterday’s encounter with the testy sailfish she had never felt menaced by anything under the water, and she reasoned that if a shark was going to bite her it would move so fast that a knife wouldn’t do any good.
    The knife was more a tool than a weapon. Its primary use was to pry oysters free from the rocks on the seamount and to open them in her pirogue. Its less common but more importantuse was precautionary. Over the years, fishermen had lost a lot of monofilament fishing line. Made of nylon, the line did not degrade in water; colorless, it was almost impossible to see underwater. The skeins of line gathered in and around the rocks. Invisible, very strong, anchored to boulders, monofilament