THEN
LI WOKE IN the night. There were no caves at this other bay, but good roosting-ledges where the tribe could huddle for warmth. She turned on her back and watched the stars, at first in a thoughtless dreamy wonder, but then, as they vanished one by one behind the black lip of the cliff above, in wakeful amazement. They were moving, in just the same way the sun moved through the sky by day. The whole vast heavens moved all together, like the march of rollers towards the shore. She gazed, rapt, waiting for each prick of light to blank out, until she heard Ma-ma mutter a call in her sleep: Careful, little one.
Ma-ma must be dreaming. At once Li fell into a new wonder that someone could dream, as she herself dreamed, inside her own head as she slept, seeing and knowing things that nobody else would ever see or know. Ma-ma, who lay so close, was utterly other. Utterly not-Li. All of them, all the tribe. Other. Before the last rains a stranger had joined the tribe, a female with a dying baby. Where had she come from? Somewhere beyond the tribe’s territory, which ended at a crocodile-infested river to the north. How had she come? Why? There were no answers. These things were the stranger’s, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams.
The stranger had hung around on the fringes of the tribe for a few days and then they’d accepted her, but her baby had died. Where had it gone? Not the body – the stranger had carried that back into the dunes and left it – but the little sick person who’d looked out of the weary eyes? That too was other, never-to-be-known, like dreams. The stranger seemed to have forgotten her baby and her grief, but Li hadn’t.
Li didn’t sleep again. She watched the stars fade and vanish and before the rest of the tribe began to stir, climbed down and made her way out to the rock spit that half-enclosed the bay. From here she could see the central volcano of the island already bright with the rising sun, but her mind didn’t take it in except as part of the whole strange marvellous world whose hugeness and otherness she was learning to recognize. At first she was shuddering with cold, then the sun rose, warming her through, tingling her skin with animal pleasures, but she barely noticed either the cold or the comfort. She felt she was close to something enormous, some knowledge – not a piece of knowledge like how to bash a mussel open on a rock or the way the stars moved – but a whole knowledge. The knowledge had the shape of a question. It seemed to fill her world like the light of the rising sun, to send tremors of its presence through her like the warming sun-rays. Other questions, the ones about using and seeing, she was outside of. She could study them and think and find their answers. This one she was inside of, part of. In fact she was herself the question. To answer it she would need to become somehow other, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams or the stranger’s lost baby. Perhaps she would need to go where the baby had gone.
Ma-ma rose with a slither and slop beside the rocks and broke in on Li’s trance by making disapproval-clicks and sluicing water over her, the way mothers did until their children were old enough to know that as the sun rose they had to stay in the water or in shadow, or at least keep their bodies wet through the heat of the day. The skins of the tribe were a very dark purply brown and almost as thick as pig-skin, but an hour in the unveiled noon sun could still make them burn.
In fact it was not yet that hot, but Ma-ma was fussing partly because she was heavily pregnant and partly because she was puzzled by Li’s behaviour. The others took it for granted, in the same way that they took for granted Bola’s passion for scooping holes in the sand for no purpose at all. They didn’t consider that Li’s lonely trances or her rapt experiments in any way affected them, though some of them were already becoming expert with the minnow-nets she’d invented.
On the northward journey from the shrimping beach, Li had noticed a mat of gourd-vine draped down a cliff. It was a common plant of that coast, but the tribe ignored it as the gourds were inedible, but now Li had made the connection with the fragments she’d used for shrimping, and had found that fallen gourds in the right state of decay contained intact and stronger nets which could be washed free of the pulp and then used to trap small prey. Carefully treated, such a net might last a whole day.
Li herself was not satisfied with the discovery. She’d seen the spider make its trap. She wanted to make something too, and experimented with grass stems, with seaweed fronds, with vine-strands, with the long coarse reeds that grew by the northern river. Most of her trials ended in failure. The materials were so weak and hard to fasten, her fingers so clumsy. It took her three journeys to the shrimping beach and back before she achieved her first knot. But failure didn’t matter. The real excitement lay in thinking. Her days were electric with thought. It was better than food, better than warmth, better than sleep. At dusk she would lie down and fight off sleep so that she could think a little longer, and wake with a rush of joy that she could begin again.
But Ma-ma felt that children should be like other children. There’d been a gap in her pregnancies, and Li was still the most important person in her life. Li understood this and was glad of it, so now she slid down into the water and hugged and kissed her as they dipped below the surface. Still holding each other they kicked gently away from the rocks, with the ripple-patterned sunlight wavering across their bodies. They kissed again as they rose for breath, and then Ma-ma swam off to look for food.
Li should have gone too. Her stomach was empty, but she wanted to return to the trance of thought. A gang of young came foaming out to the rock spit to play the running game, crying to her to join in. They lined up a pace apart in the water with only their heads above the surface, while the runner climbed ashore and then tried to run out along the line, using the heads as stepping-stones. Just as the foot came down, the swimmer kicked up to take the weight, and if they all timed it right the runner reached the end of the line and dived triumphantly into deep water, then joined the line while the next runner climbed out.
This was a good place for the game, but Li watched only a turn or two before swimming off to the other side of the spit to drift and think. Here she was in open sea, so she fell into the rhythm of shark-watch, with her head below the surface, ready for any large shadowy movement in the clear water. She kept one hand on a jag of rock and now and then eased herself up for a fresh lungful, then sank again. She did this automatically, without effort, but perhaps it was a slight distraction, or perhaps watching the game had broken the thread, or perhaps the intensity of thought itself had exhausted it, but whatever the cause Li found she couldn’t bring back the rapt, overwhelming wonder of being she had felt as she’d sat on the rocks while the sun rose.
All that came to her were fragments, memories of how it had felt, like reflections in a pool disturbed by a splash. Now she became aware of her hunger, and was about to swim off and forage when she saw a movement in the water, not a single shape but a small shoal of fish, hurtling towards her. Something was hunting them. She clutched the rock, ready to leap to safety. To the fish, Li’s body must have seemed part of the dark rock, along which they swerved aside, their bodies almost brushing against her. Catching fish in open sea was a matter of luck, but she timed her strike right, grabbed one, gripped it in her teeth and shot herself out on to the rock.
She shook the wet hair from her eyes with the fish still threshing in her mouth. Immediately below her a dolphin surged past, its back arching out of the calm sea. She had never seen one so close.
Li knew about dolphins. Once the tribe had found a stranded one, dead and decaying, and had feasted on it and then been ill. They saw several hunting together, sometimes. Though dolphins came, like sharks, from the mysterious vast outer sea, they weren’t dangerous to people.
The fish convulsed as she bit out a chunk of back-muscle and started to chew, delighted with not having to waste time foraging. Perhaps she might go and join the game – they sounded as if they were having fun . . . She bit and chewed again, wondering at herself. Why wasn’t that kind of fun so important to her now? Why had she changed since the shark-hunt? She’d been perfectly happy before . . .
She had her right knee drawn up under her chin but her left leg dangled towards the water. Something nudged it. One of her friends must have swum round under the surface to tease her. She pretended not to notice, but at the next nudge glanced disdainfully down. It was the dolphin.
It hung, poised in the water, its blunt nose poking at her ankle. She snatched her leg away. The dolphin half followed, sank, nosed up again. Li bit another chunk from the fish and then leaned over the water, dangling it teasingly by its tail. Effortlessly the dolphin rose and took the fish from her hand, with its gleaming pale underside showing clear before, with barely a splash, it flipped over and down.
They were strong signals in the tribe, the giving and taking of food. They meant friendship, alliance, trust. Without hesitation Li dived into the sea and waited, tense but thrilled. The dolphin was several times her size. If it had been a shark it could have killed her outright, but it drifted slowly towards her and past, brushing its long, smooth flank against her chest. She watched it turn and come back. This time as it passed she slid her arm round its body and laid her own body trailing against its flank as it swam. It accepted her for a little, but then seemed to become alarmed and sprang violently forward. Alarmed herself she let go and rose for breath, and seeing that she was now well away from the rocks paddled quickly back, dipped below and waited again.
She thought it had gone, but when she had risen for several more breaths she saw a vague shape moving at the limits of her underwater vision. She swam a little out from the rocks and watched it zigzag warily in till it stopped, just out of reach. They faced each other, poised in the water, until she was forced to surface for breath.
Again they faced each other and again she was forced to surface, but this time it rose too and snorted a cloudy spout from the hole in the top of its head, its gasp echoing hers. Now it let her edge closer, until she could reach out and carefully touch its snout. As she stroked its forehead it came in and past her, brushing against her side as before, turning and coming back. This time when she reached her arm round it, she was careful to clasp it only loosely, and it seemed to decide to let her stay there until she had to let go and rise for breath. It was waiting for her when she dived.
They swam, played, danced together in the sunlit ocean and her sense of wonder came back, but changed. This was not a thinking wonder, but a wonder like the sunlight, pure, itself and nothing else. Or it was as if she and the dolphin were themselves thoughts in the delighting mind of the sea, moving with the same exhilaration as the thoughts that moved through her mind, telling her that she was in the presence of, part of, an immense mystery. The dolphin was far more other than Ma-ma’s dreams, or the stranger’s lost baby, but it and Li shared the moment and the mystery in the rippling golden-green water.
So it was a timeless while before she saw, rising for breath, how far their game had taken them from the shore. The dolphin rose beside her as if to ask what kept her so long out in the barren air, and she put an arm round it and gestured with her other arm towards the land, confident that it would understand what she wanted. Now she needed to clasp it close as it used its full power to surge through the water, arching clear and plunging under, while she gasped and laughed with the excitement of the ride. For a few moments she knew what it was like to be a dolphin, to share in the life of the open ocean.
Kerif on shark-watch saw them coming without understanding what he was seeing. At his shout of Shark! the dolphin swerved aside, so Li let go and swam on alone. Reaching Kerif she gave him the respectful triple hoot which a she-child used on meeting an adult male, but he stared at her with his mouth hanging open and forgot to answer.