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

arrival at a big party, where the hundreds of regulars would silently accept her into their midst. Certainly she felt more kinship with the animals of the seamount than with most of the people on Santa Maria, for here all relationships were direct, uncomplicated, trusting.
    Usually, though, such fancies embarrassed her, and she swept them from her mind, for Jobim had told her time and again not to think of animals as human beings, not to attribute to them impossible human characteristics, but to regard and respect them as entirely different creatures. Still, once in a while she indulged herself in childish fantasies.
    Some days she would see a sailfish, some days a shark, some days a porpoise or a pilot whale. Some days, like today, she saw nothing but haze, for the water was not clear, made dim and murky by vast clouds of plankton and other microscopic animals driven up from the deep. She could see the top of the seamount, a rough plain of rocks and corals, and she could make out the shadowy movement of large animals. But it was all vague and misty.
    If nothing would come to the surface, and if she couldn’tsee well enough from the surface, she had only one choice: She would go down to the bottom.
    Most of the islanders, knowing little about swimming, knew even less about diving and virtually nothing about preparing for a long breath-hold descent into the sea. Paloma’s training had come from Jobim, who had taken her down in stages of five feet, teaching her how to prepare for each depth, how each depth felt different in her lungs, how to avoid panic. And her training had come as well from four years of practice, and from instinct. She did not think of herself as a good diver, or a not-good diver. She knew only that she could hold her breath long enough to dive to the top of the seamount and spend enough time underwater to have fun—and return to the surface to dive again.
    Lying on the water, face down, with her snorkel poking up behind her head, she took half a dozen deep breaths, each one expanding her lungs farther than the one before. After the last breath, she inhaled until she felt she was about to burst, clamped her mouth shut and dived for the bottom. She pulled herself hand over hand down the anchor line and pushed herself with powerful, smooth strokes of her flippers. As she plunged downward, she let little spurts of bubble escape from her mouth, until the feeling in her lungs was comfortable.
    She reached the bottom in a few seconds and, to keep herself from floating upward, wrapped her knees around a rock. She felt good, relaxed, her lungs pleasantly full. Time had a way of expanding underwater. She might be able to stay down for only a minute and a half, perhaps two minutes, but because every one of her senses was alert, every sound and sight and feeling registered sharply on her brain. On the surface, two minutes could pass without her noticing anything; down here, everything was an experience, so two minutes could seem as full as an hour.
    For the first seconds after her descent, the animals of the seamount retreated, wary of any disturbance in the water and quick to distance themselves from it. Now they began to return, as if accepting Paloma as part of life.
    Something slammed her from behind, knocking her forward. She clutched at her rock perch and spun around, one arm up by her face. For a split second, she couldn’t see through the cloud of bubbles. If a shark had bumped her, as sometimes they did to test for prey, it would strike again and she would be dead. Whatever it was had not been an accident; accidental collisions underwater were as rare as straight lines in nature.
    Arm up, squinting through her bubbles, fighting to suppress panic, Paloma found herself face to face with her assailant. And she laughed into her snorkel.
    It was a big grouper—three or four feet long, thirty or thirty-five pounds—and it hovered a foot from her face, its lower jaw pouting out from under the upper, its round