The Girl of the Sea of Cortez Read Online Free PDF

line was a trap that could kill a person in a few minutes. If a hand or a foot became entangled, she could not hold her breath long enough to strip away every thread and wiggle free. She would have to slash her way out.
    Paloma untied the pirogue from the dock and stepped in. Immediately she dropped to her knees, to keep the boat steady. She dipped the double-bladed kayak paddle into the still water, back-paddled away from the dock and turned west.
    N ow, as the last of the dolphins leaped away out of sight toward the horizon, Paloma looked around to reorient herself in the open sea, then dug her paddle into the water and continued toward the seamount.
    The highest point on the seamount was not in shallow water—nowhere did it come closer to the surface than forty-five or fifty feet—so she could not see it from her boat. Nor could she hope to find it by timing her journey from the dock, for each day the winds and currents varied a bit from the day before. If the tide was with her, the trip would take less time; if against her, more time; if the tide was with her but the wind was against her, the sea would be rough and hard to paddle into. A difference of five or ten minutes could mean that she would miss the seamount entirely, for its summit was less than an acre around. So Jobim had taught her to locate the seamount by using landmarks.
    A few miles to the west there was an island, and on theisland grew giant cactus plants. From a distance it appeared that at the very highest point of the island was a particularly tall, thick cactus. But as Paloma paddled closer to the island, her perspective on the cactus would change, and soon she would see that it was not one but two cacti. When she could barely discern a sliver of sky between the two plants, she knew she was on target.
    Still, the cactus plants told her only that she had come far enough westward. The wind or the current might have taken her too far north or south. The top of the seamount was a rough oblong that faced east and west, so that its north-south contour was narrower and easy to miss. She had to locate a second landmark that would tell her her north-south position.
    As soon as she saw blue sky between the cactus plants, she shifted her gaze to a fisherman’s shack at the end of a point of land on a neighboring island. If she was too far north, the shack appeared to be far inland; too far south, it seemed to be floating on the water, disconnected from the land. When the shack was precisely on the point, she knew she was directly over the seamount.
    She tossed her anchor overboard and let the rope slip through her fingers. Her “anchor” was nothing but an old rusty piece of iron, called a killick, but it held the small boat as well as a proper anchor would have. And it was expendable. Anchors tended to get caught in the deep crevices in the rocks of the seamount—often in water far too deep for a swimmer to reach them—and then they had to be cut away. Paloma could not have afforded to replace a steel anchor, but there was always another piece of rusted metal to be scavenged.
    When the killick had set and Paloma had tied the rope to a cleat on the bow of the pirogue, she dipped her face maskin the water, then spat in it and rubbed the spittle around with her fingertips to keep the glass from fogging (not even her father had been able to explain to her why spit kept glass from fogging, but it worked); then she rinsed it again in salt water. She fit her knife down the back of her rope belt, slipped her feet into her flippers, adjusted the snorkel tube in the mask strap and, with as little splash as possible, slid over the side.
    She kicked gently along the side of the boat until she reached the anchor line. There she paused, looking down through a blue haze streaked with butter-yellow shafts of sunlight, eager for the surprise that always came with the day’s first glimpse of life on the seamount.
    Sometimes she thought of herself as a sudden, welcome