This world may never change the way it’s been, And all the ways of war can’t change it back again. And I’ve been searchin’ for the dolphin in the sea, Sometimes I wonder do you ever think of me.
FRED NEIL, “THE DOLPHIN SONG”
THAT MORNING in the spring of 1970, I flew into Bimini in the Bahamas to do something at last about the dolphins. Some people would say that it was foolish, a vainglorious gesture that would do no good and would soon be forgotten. For that reason, I told no one. Actually, I wasn’t clear myself about why I was doing it. The only thing I knew for sure was that I had to do something.
These were the days when bad laws were under siege, ordinary citizens challenging the law by breaking it and facing the consequences for the right to speak out against it.
The law I wanted to strike down was the one permitting the ownership of dolphins. I wanted people to realize that it was wrong to own dolphins, and even worse, if possible, to make them do those silly tricks. Owning dolphins is wrong because it goes against their nature. Dolphins are part of the sea and should remain there.
Because dolphins don’t complain, at least not in the conventional sense, we assume they don’t object to their captivity. For a long time I went along with that, a willing accomplice, lulling myself into acquiescence with an acquired taste for the good life. But now with the death of Kathy, the dolphin I most dearly loved, I flew to Bimini as if on a pilgrimage to try to undo, at least in part, the mess I had made of things.
Diving is my life; diving, living in the water, studying fish and dolphins. Because of the nature of my job, I’ve probably spent more time in the water with dolphins than anyone else in the world, and probably I’ve trained dolphins to do more tricks and stunts than anyone else in the world—if that’s really what I was doing. Looking back on it, I’m not sure whether I was training the dolphins or they were training me. Anyway, I was the trainer of the dolphins for the TV series Flipper, a show about a lovable and resourceful sea mammal that a whole generation grew up with. The series ran four years originally, and is still shown in about thirty-six foreign countries. So the whole world, to some extent, has grown up with him. I grew to respect and love all five of the dolphins that played the part of Flipper, but especially Kathy. The most valuable and highly trained animal in the world, she played the role most of the time. Six days before my flight to Bimini, Kathy had died most horribly in my arms of a broken heart.
Bimini, a dot on the map, is about fifty miles east of Miami—just across the Gulf Stream. The commuter trip is made by Chalk’s Flying Service. From its terminal on Watson Island between Miami and Miami Beach, Chalk’s twelve-seater amphibian makes the round trip twice a day, early morning and late afternoon. I traveled light, my only luggage a diving bag and the tools I would need for the job.
The westernmost island of the far-flung Bahamas chain, Bimini is actually two islands, North Bimini and South Bimini, the bay between them serving as a harbor and a landing strip for seaplanes. The keys and cays of Florida and the Bahamas are pronounced “keys,” going back to the Spanish cayos, which means “small island,” and to the Bahamian corruption of that: cay. To the later settlers, all this sounded like “keys,” and that’s what they called them. These days the island is full of smugglers wearing lizard-skin boots and Rolex watches, and thick gold chains around their necks. Many of them carry beepers and can be seen taking off at all hours in their ninety-mile-an-hour ocean racing boats.
Smuggling is not new in the Bahamas. The same sort of thing happened during Prohibition, the Bahamas serving then as a home port for bootleggers. Before the dope dealers took over, Bimini had been for years the way Hemingway celebrated it in his book Islands in the Stream. His metaphor for the relentless flow of time was the Gulf Stream, the huge river in the Atlantic that sweeps up from the Gulf of Mexico between Florida and the Bahamas, then swings northeast and curls its soft, warm tongue of tropical water along the southwest coast of Ireland. The Gulf Stream also turns Bimini into a sportsman’s paradise. Bill fishing is especially good: swordfish, marlin, sailfish. In the Hemingway period, sports fishing was king in Bimini. Hemingway’s people drank lots of rum and beer, they smoked long Havana cigars and laughed like gods, they got wonderfully drunk, and, late into the night, they talked of fish with brave hearts that would never be forgotten.
Some things change, some things don’t. From the air the water was a vast emerald, flashing a thousand greens and blues. As we approached Bimini, I could see everything it had to offer. Brown’s Marina. The End of the World Saloon. The Bahama Mama Hotel. The native settlement of Alicetowne. My eye went to where I was headed, to the Lerner Marine Lab and its dolphin pen protruding out into the harbor.
As the plane cocked itself on its port side to come in for a landing, I squinted down for a glimpse of Charlie Brown alone in his pen and remembered spending time with him on my last trip here a couple of months earlier. I was here then to get underwater photos of what some people have called the Ruins of Atlantis. In Bimini they’re called the Bimini Road, which is northwest of Alicetowne. These “ruins” look like concrete slabs that have been measured and poured. At least it makes a good story, which is not exactly discouraged in a tourist resort, but it’s probably about as real as the Bermuda Triangle. On that particular trip the water wasn’t as dear as it should have been for underwater photography. To get the kind of shots I wanted, the water had to look like gin. But the weather was squally that week, with thunderstorms popping up all around and roiling the water into what Bahamians call a raging sea.
To help keep down expenses while I waited for the water to clear, I stayed with a couple I had known in Coconut Grove, aboard their thirty-two-foot sailboat, which they had run aground on a sandbank when they approached Bimini and which was in dry dock at Alicetowne for repairs.
There wasn’t much to do because of the weather, so I wandered down to the Lerner Marine Lab and out on the dock to the pen area. They have several pens in a row, about thirty by twenty feet each. The pens are made of galvanized chain-link fence—one for sharks and rays, another for sawfish, barracuda, and other sea creatures, and one, on the end, for dolphins. The water in the pens is about eight feet deep and the fence is nailed to a four-by-eight-inch beam running between the pilings. The beam goes in and out of the water as the tide comes in and goes out, but the top of the chain-link fence extends several feet above the water even at high tide. In the last pen there lived a single dolphin. As I knelt down by him, the guard came up. He had bloodshot eyes and seemed to be suffering from a terrible hangover. He frowned and probably would have tried to run me off, but he noticed that I was wearing a Miami Seaquarium T-shirt, which must have made me seem semiofficial to him because he hesitated, looking at me with indecision for a moment.
“I was interested in the dolphin,” I explained. The dolphin had surfaced and was taking it all in. Dolphins have a sophisticated sense of hearing. Like bats, they are sonar creatures, sending out sounds and analyzing the echoes. They “see” with their echolocation system. They can tell how far away something in the water is, its speed and direction, its size, and even its density. I’ve done tests to show that they can even tell the difference between gold and silver—blindfolded. They live in a world so different from ours that it would seem impossible that the two should ever touch. And yet they do. All the time. Dolphins make a number of different kinds of sounds: clicks, grunts, whistles, and high-frequency pings like musical notes, some of the sounds going not only through the water but also into the air. The dolphin in the pen was making airborne sounds like that now as he reconnoitered things.
The guard, arms akimbo, nodded and shot me a hooded look.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
He weighed whether to answer me or to run me off. “Charlie Brown,” he said finally.
I nodded. “Are they doing experiments with him?”
“Experiments?” He shook his head. “No, mon. He’s a pet.”
Some pet, I thought. I had been watching for several days and no one had come near the pen. I’m sure they did come to the pen to feed him, but he was hardly a pet. “Seems lonely to me,” I said, squinting at the guard and frowning.
The guard, a Conchy-Joe, the Bahamian term for mulatto, seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. “Oh, yeah?” He smirked. “Seems happy enough to me, man.” Charlie Brown had reared his head up to see better what was going on. “Look, man,” the guard said. “He’s laughing.” With that he grinned crookedly and turned on his heel.
“He’s blind in one eye,” I said. I had noticed almost immediately that the dolphin always kept me on one side of him. I thought he must be blind in the other eye and confirmed it by waving my hand on that side, which he didn’t respond to. The guard kept walking.
“Did you know that?” I said sharply.
The guard acted as if he didn’t hear me.
“Do you know which eye he’s blind in?”
The guard stopped and turned around. He was scowling. “He’s not blind in either eye, mon.” Then he turned again and was walking away.
“His right eye! He’s blind in his right eye!”
The guard snorted and walked off. I went down to the end of the dock in Charlie Brown’s pen and kneeled. Charlie Brown came over, clicking. I rubbed his back. His back was cut here and there. Grooved with old scars. Male dolphins often get battle scars in play or in their quest for suitable mates. That’s one reason we used females in the Flipper series: fewer scars. The other reason is that dolphins are an amorous breed and producers don’t want an unscheduled erection to mess up a scene. Many adult dolphins in the wild have scars from shark bites, and for that reason we used young dolphins in the role. Charlie Brown kept me in range with his good eye.
Charlie Brown and I had met briefly some seven years before. I was on the Seaquarium Collecting Team, and we rounded up four dolphins that day, including Charlie Brown. He was then a young, vigorous male, swimming free in Biscayne Bay off Miami. All four of the dolphins caught that day were traded to Lerner Lab in Bimini for a box of electronic equipment. But it was a stormy crossing and one of them died of seasickness.
Then it occurred to me: where were the other dolphins who were part of that trade? I glanced around, but I knew where they were. They were dead. Charlie Brown smiled at me with his mouth and looked at me with his one good eye. He was being held prisoner here. Dolphins are gregarious creatures. Social animals. In the wild, dolphins swim together in family pods, groups of from three to ten individuals, pods upon pods or tribes of sometimes hundreds of dolphins, all swimming in a straight line, mile after mile. The kind of life that had befallen Charlie Brown in this small, ugly, and boring pen was worse than death for a dolphin.
“Sorry, Charlie Brown,” I said, patting him on the head. He clicked and bobbed his head with that implacable dolphin smile, and I realized that it was I who had betrayed him to this and that I did not deserve his forgiveness.
It was a bright, hazy day, with a light chop on the bay, as the plane landed smoothly between the islands. The pilot gunned the motor and headed for the ramp, then gunned it again, and the big seaplane, its wheels now lowered, pulled itself up by its own power. The plane turned slightly and the motors died with a cough of white smoke. There were only three other passengers on board with me, and we filed into the customs shack. There the agent performed a perfunctory examination of our luggage. “Anything to declare?” he asked me.
I told him no.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Diving gear. I’ve got a diving job to do here.”
I opened my diving bag and exposed my black fins, a black face plate, gloves, my black tank suit and a black sweatshirt, a wire cutter, and a bolt cutter. The wire cutter and bolt cutter were new. I had just bought them.
He touched the bolt cutter and threw me a skeptical look. “You don’t intend to sell these things here, do you?”
“No. I intend to use them.”
He nodded, then noticed my green armband. “What’s that?” he asked casually.
“That’s for Earth Day,” I said. It meant nothing to him, I could tell. In fact it had meant nothing to me till just a week before I had come over here, when Joe Browder, president of the Coconut Grove branch of the Audubon Society and a friend of mine, explained it to me and gave me the armband. I wore it because it tended to legitimize what I was about to do. I didn’t realize it then, but 20 million Americans were celebrating the day and the federal government would soon join the crusade with billions of dollars. “Earth Day,” I explained, “that’s when we celebrate the blessings of the earth and demonstrate some concern for our environment.
“Hmm.” The customs agent smiled slightly. “When is it?”
“Tomorrow.”
He nodded again and turned to the next passenger.
I grabbed up my stuff and took off. I had to check out a boat for the job and make sure that Charlie Brown was still being held captive; I hadn’t been able to see him from the air. But except for that, there was nothing to do till nightfall, which comes late in the subtropics. I checked in at the Bahama Mama, a native hotel a few blocks north along Queen’s Highway from Chalk’s ramp. Everything is nearby in Bimini. I tossed the diving bag into the room, closed the door behind me, and looked at myself in the mirror. “Am I really doing this?” I asked myself
Unsurprisingly, I looked just like I felt inside: scared.
I waited in the bar downstairs, one of the few dark and cool places to while away the time in Bimini, and drank beer, working up my nerve. Someone was playing “Long Time Gone” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the jukebox, the words aimed at me: Speak out speak out against the madness/Speak your mind if you dare. . .
Time dragged. I made circles of water on the bar with the bottom of the beer bottle. I peeled off the label. Someone had left a swizzle stick there, and I twisted that all around. Who was it said something like, “Fear, thy name is too much thinking”? Or did I make that up? The beer tasted heavy. I kept thinking in a circle. First I asked whether this was really the right thing to do. That was easy. The answer was yes. But then came the real question, not whether it was the right thing to do but whether it was the best thing to do. And who could tell?
I finally finished the beer and walked down to Lerner Marine Lab. The same guard was there. He was not just the guard, he was also the utility man. He cut the grass, changed the lightbulbs, and, as I noticed now, fed the fish. Fed the fish? He was dumping food in. Big chunks of it. Charlie Brown alone was supposed to eat 15 to 20 pounds of fish a day, so the guard must have been dumping 80 to 100 pounds of fish in all the pens every day. I had fed the fish at the Seaquarium for years. Six days a week and five shows a day, I had walked around on the bottom wearing a Miller-Dunn helmet. I know when someone feeding the fish doesn’t give a damn about them. And the guard at Lerner Marine Lab didn’t. If you care, you make eye contact with them. I used to make eye contact with each of the creatures I fed, with turtles, moray eels, sawfish, and sharks. Dolphins were not fed like that. They were kept hungry so they would do their tricks later in the Topside Show.
If I had any doubts about what I must do, they were gone now. I looked closely at the fence. It was thicker than I remembered. The wire cutter probably wouldn’t work. I would have to use the bolt cutter. Even then it wouldn’t be easy. I walked down to Brown’s Marina and rented a thirteen-foot Boston Whaler. I looked at my watch. Good Lord! Ten o’clock. I had ten more hours to kill!
I thought about my mission once again. It was a simple job but also quite exacting. I would cut down the fence of Charlie Brown’s pen and he would escape. That was the simple part. At this point, it was mere vandalism.
The part that was quite exacting required that I break only the law that I intended to challenge. No point in being arrested for the wrong crime. After I had freed Charlie Brown, I had two options, it seemed to me:
1. I could turn myself in, defend myself noisily, and deal with the consequences, even if it meant incarceration in Nassau’s notorious Fox Hill Prison.
2. Or, I could tie my green Earth Day armband where I had cut the fence, sneak away, and free other dolphins in other pens. I could free dolphins everywhere, leaving my calling card of the green Earth Day armband. My next target: the U.S. Navy Undersea Warfare School at Point Mugu in California, where dolphins were being trained to fight in the Vietnam War. I knew that was what they were doing there, because the CIA had tried to get me to help them.
The problem with making gestures in civil disobedience, whether political demonstrations or environmental statements, is that they depend on others for their meaning. You can make all the symbolic acts you can think of, but if they’re not interpreted the right way, there’s no point to them. No matter which plan I followed, it was only a matter of time before I got caught, which was part of the plan. But the important thing was to get caught for the right reason. And that was the problem with Plan 2. If I had freed Charlie Brown, tied the green armband on the cut fence, and disappeared, then liberated the dolphins from the U.S. Navy Undersea Warfare School, chances are the Charlie Brown incident would be classed as vandalism and would have been lumped with the other anti–Vietnam War demonstrations going on then.
Obviously, I must go with Plan 1.
I headed back to my hotel room. On the way I passed the bar, went in, and sat down. Without a word, the bartender set me up with the kind of beer I had been drinking earlier. The jukebox kept telling me, speak your mind if you dare. Halfway through the beer I realized I didn’t want it. I put a dollar on the bar, went to my room, and looked at myself in the mirror again. No change. I closed the blinds, turned up the air conditioning, faked a yawn, and lay down on the bed. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and felt myself get very tense. I was now wondering if my plan, foolproof though it seemed to be, was the smart thing to do. Charlie Brown had crossed my path, and look what had happened to him. Kathy had crossed my path, and she now lay dead. How many dolphins had I done this to? I tried to count all the dolphins I had helped to catch. I marked them off, the living and the dead, and tried to recall where they all were now. These things were done, and I couldn’t undo them, but there were many other dolphin collectors still at work. Some of them harpooned dolphins; others tossed lassos around them, laid nets down, or shot huge metal pincers called tail grabbers at them. One collector chased dolphins down in his speedboat and leaped on them like he was bulldogging cattle. It was madness.
Lying down was a bad idea. I got up and went back downstairs to the bar and nursed another beer. Why hadn’t I taken the second flight to Bimini instead of the first? I glanced at myself in the mirror. Face tense, mouth taut, eyes with a fanatical gleam. It was amazing that I hadn’t been arrested for looking like this.
Like everything else in Bimini, nightfall takes an eternity, but evening finally came and began slipping into night. The last flight back to Miami had left and I had drunk about all the beer I could hold, but once again I was full of doubt. This time I wondered if I was being professional about it. I was breaking all the rules. Rule No. 1 of the Diver’s Code is “Do not dive alone.”
Especially at night.
And never just after drinking.
Even now I could back out. And that might be the smart thing to do, I thought. No one would ever know. Had I drunk too much beer? I was full of it but didn’t feel it. I glanced at my watch. Eight-thirty. At last! I stood up and stretched. “Well,” I said to the bartender, “guess I’ll go on up and get some shut-eye.” We hadn’t said ten words all evening. He nodded. I went to my room and put on my black tank suit under my other clothes, put on a black sweatshirt, and got my diving bag with the tools, the fins, and the face plate. Then I headed for the boat at Brown’s. I had paid for the room in advance as well as for the boat.
It was a dark night. No moon. Perfect.
I got into the boat, kicked it over, and chugged slowly out to the dolphin pen. It was so dark I couldn’t see the shore fifty feet away. At the pen, I put on the fins and face plate, got the wire cutter, and, with a ripping belch that must have been heard in Alicetowne, I slipped over the side like a seal. In the water, I set the Danforth anchor by hand deep in the sandy bottom and away from the fence so that the Boston Whaler would look like one of the dinghies from the many boats at anchor there. I tried the new wire cutter first. It didn’t make a dent in the chain-link fence, so I slipped it into the boat and got the bolt cutter. It wasn’t easy, but it worked. The first cut made a wonderful “pinging” sound underwater.
I can hold my breath about ninety seconds, two minutes if I have to. Even so, it was taking me more than one dive to cut each link of the fence. Working underwater is about a third as efficient as working in air, especially with a tide running. I would take a deep breath, go under and find the link I was working on by feel in the inky water, cut as long as I could, and then come up, catch my breath as quietly as possible and go back down again. This took several hours, much longer than I thought it would take. And I was being much too noisy. Sounds, even the sound of breathing, carry amazing distances over water. That’s why I had not brought a snorkel with me. When you clear the snorkel, you blow the water out and the noise seems to be magnified.
I hadn’t given the job itself much thought because it seemed so simple: cut the fence, which was nailed to the four-by-eight-inch beam, then pull the nails holding the fence to the beam loose and let it fall.
When I cut the last of the links in the fence, I was flat on the bottom. I should have started at the bottom so that I would end up at the top. When I cut the last of the links, the nails holding the fence to the beam pulled loose and the fence fell silently through the water, pinning me to the bottom like a giant hand.
At first I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Of all the rules in the Diver’s Code, the most important one says, “Don’t panic.”
No matter how long you live with that rule, there’s a panicky moment when your stomach knots up and you have to think yourself out of it. “Easy,” I said to myself.
I was squashed down to the bottom, flat on my stomach. I couldn’t move. What a dumb way to go, I thought.
It was a sandy bottom, or it once had been. Now it was littered with beer cans and broken bottles. Barnacles, which are as sharp as razor blades on top, had attached themselves to the bottom of the fence. When I tried to twist to get away from whatever had caught me, the barnacles slashed my back, legs, and arms. I was hung up on something. I was also almost out of breath when the fence had come down on me. My head was pounding.
In situations like this, I try to get a mental image of where I am. It’s like seeing myself from the outside. The fence had snagged the back of my sweatshirt. I tried to rip the sweatshirt to get free. I couldn’t. My head was throbbing. Whether I had thought this thing through or was just reacting, I don’t know, but I twisted and pulled myself out of the sweatshirt and felt for the fence again. I let it push me back to the bottom—it must have weighed a ton—and then, my lungs bursting, I drew my feet up under me, and gave a karate-like push with everything I had. Back went the fence. I pushed off the bottom and popped to the surface, gasping for air. In my hand was the bolt cutter.
I’ve had worse tight squeezes in my diving career, but none quite so dumb. In spite of it all, though, I was free now. And so was Charlie Brown. I was holding on to the gunwale on the port side of the boat outside the pen as I caught my breath. I thought, or I hoped, that Charlie Brown would go streaking past me and out to the open ocean and to freedom. That’s how Flipper would have done it on TV. But Charlie Brown was not Flipper.
I looked around for him. “Hey, old buddy,” I called softly. “You’re free!” I listened. And there it was, the excited clicking, the popping and other sonar sounds. He was still in the pen. “Come on, Charlie Brown. You’re free!”
Like all dolphins, he was curious and came over to the edge of the pen to “see” what was going on, but also he was cautious and held back. One of the most difficult things I ever tried to get dolphins to do in the Flipper series was to go under something like the four-by-eight-inch beam. There was no fence below the beam now—except perhaps in Charlie Brown’s mind. I think the problem is that they don’t see an inside-outside relationship as we do. To us, Charlie Brown was inside the pen and I was trying to get him to go outside. Indeed, I was trying to get him to go outside to freedom. But to him, it was something else. Perhaps he thought he was already outside and I was trying to get him to go inside something else. Or through something. Or maybe it was simply that, after seven years, Charlie Brown thought of this grubby hole as a sanctuary. I don’t know what he was thinking.
Something had to be done. I clambered over the beam—it was a foot or so underwater—and got into the pen with him. If he wouldn’t come to my urging, I would simply lead him out. Charlie Brown came over to me, clicking, snorting, and whistling. “OK,” I told him, “now follow me.” I dog-paddled over to the beam, but Charlie Brown hung back. Dolphins are the most empathetic of creatures; at times their insight approaches genius. Some people say this is because their brains are larger than ours, which they are, and so they must be more intelligent. But there’s a semantic problem here about the word intelligence. I think it may boil down to the simple fact that they are as intelligent in their world as we are in ours.
They are also just as individualistic. Charlie Brown, for instance, was being contrary. For at least an hour, I tried to get him out of the pen. I chased him; I grabbed his flukes and tried to drag him. I would get him to follow me around, luring him on, then I’d go underwater so that he would follow me. But always at the beam, he stopped and turned back.
“Come on, Charlie Brown. We gotta get the hell outta here!” I said. I was getting tired of all this, so I went back over the beam to the boat and had a brilliant idea. I got into the boat and pulled up the anchor, got back into the water, and swam the boat over to the beam, which was about a foot underwater. If only I had brought a saw! I got out on the beam and pulled the Boston Whaler over it and into the pen with Charlie Brown.
“Now I’ll run you out,” I muttered, cranking the motor. I threw the motor in gear, and around I went. I never really knew where Charlie Brown was, though. When I went left, he went right. Or down the middle. Or someplace. Dolphins can hold their breath for as long as five minutes. It was one of those thick, velvety tropic nights where you can feel the blackness. I got the feeling that he was toying with me. If so, I would never be able to free him.
How long I chased him around the pen, I have no idea, but when I stopped in total frustration I sat stock still in the boat, exhausted. My whole body ached. The cut on my back had stopped bleeding, but it still hurt. Somehow I had also mashed a finger, and I had an unusual throbbing at the back of my head. This whole thing had become a nightmare.
Then O’Barry’s law came into operation: Just when things are at their darkest, they get darker. The tide had dropped, and now I couldn’t get the boat out of the pen. I would not be able to get the boat out of the pen till the tide came in again—hours from now. If only I had brought a saw—but of course I hadn’t, and there was no way to get one now. I could hear the lapping of the water on the hull of the boat and, at some distance, a drunk who, though I couldn’t see him in the dark, had apparently wandered down the pier and was cheering me on in soft, melodic Bahamian tones: “Everyting okay, man?”
I sat in the boat for a while, trying to figure out what I ought to be doing. But I had tried everything. When the drunk wandered off, I swam over to the dock and pulled myself up. What a fine mess I had gotten myself into. I was beginning to think I ought to cut my losses and get out while I could. The Bahamian government has a list of people who are persona non grata, unwelcome. It’s called the Stop List and is made up of criminals and other shady types. As an underwater movie stuntman, diver, and trainer of dolphins, I worked a lot in Bahamian waters. If I was put on the list and denied a work permit, my income would drop to almost nothing. I wouldn’t have minded making the list for civil disobedience. Moral convictions shouldn’t come cheap. But for cutting a fence? For not returning a rented boat? No. To be put on the list for that would be ridiculous.
I went back to my hotel room. It was sometime in the early morning, and I needed to figure this thing out. Exhausted, I lay down on the bed for a minute to think. It was fairly simple:
1. They’ll find the boat in the dolphin pen.
2. They’ll discover that the fence to the pen has been cut down.
3. Then they’ll trace the boat to me, me to the fence, and suddenly I’ll be in Fox Hill Prison, charged with criminal vandalism or something.
How could I have been so stupid?! Clearly, the key to getting out of this mess was to finish what I had started, which was to liberate Charlie Brown. If Charlie Brown were freed, my civil disobedience would be intact and everything would work. I got up and marched back to the pen.
It was almost dawn, when things take on a ghostly glow. I stood there a moment on the dock till I had spotted the dolphin in the exact center of the pen. “Now or never, Charlie Brown,” I said. He clicked and snorted. I eased into the water and dog-paddled over to him. “Please,” I said. “I’m trying to help you.” But he wanted no part of it. I hadn’t slept a wink. I had forgotten to eat. I was sick to my stomach. And I was about to be in big trouble.