I come from the sea. I come from the deep tons, from the ringing bubbles, from the clicking claws and rolling tides. I come from the many winds of the sea, from the place between sky and deep where the gulls cry and the waves shift under the bright eye of the sun. On clear nights the round moon leans across the sea. Its arm stretches, scooping water. The moon paints a stripe of light. My dolphin mother swims in the path of the moon. I am not like her. I have hands at the ends of my arms, fingers at the ends of my hands. My fingers open and close. With them I do things the others cannot. I am not like the others. I have feet. I can walk on land. The dolphin moves like light. The dolphin flies through the wet breath of the sea. I cannot swim the quiet stroke of the dolphin. I cannot hear the whole sound, though it sings through me.

Each morning I swim out to them. We brush through the water, feeding, playing, singing, resting, dancing in the rolling waves, racing from storms, racing for the joy of moving with the water slipping over our backs, with the water sliding under our chins. The water opens, and we dive in through the wild paths of the sea.

In the sea there is always play. Anything and everything is to chase and catch and toss and taste and drag. There are near crashes and laughter, dolphin laughter, sparkling like a thousand drops of sunlight. My dolphin cousins play with me gently. I am so little beside them. They know me inside and out. I lick my lips as they send their humming through me. I never tire of the thrill as they slide up under my fingers or I glide down over their flukes.

At birth times, I can sense the change, the humming aimed at one, and all of us begin the wait. It is exciting, the waiting before a calf is born. The squeaks, the creaks and clickings, the chirps and whistles. Nothing is the same as we wait with the waiting mother. She bends and stretches, bends and stretches. She claps her flukes against ocean swells and the sound travels through my bones.

We wait for new life to slip, tail first, into the big sea.

I watch the others, seeing, hearing, feeling what they feel. My dolphin mother touches me, one stroke of her flipper, telling me when it is time.

Sinking below the surface, eyes open, I see there, in a cloud of pink, a tail, then a body and head, coming from the slit in the underbelly of the mother.

A quick spin and the cord snaps and slowly, what is not dolphin, what is not calf, mixes with the sea and drifts down through the deep blue. And what is left is a new cousin.

The mother guides it to the surface, but the calf knows what to do, and breaking through to the air takes a first gasp through the top of its head.

The calf is wrinkled from being folded inside its mother, its tail curls like an underwater weed, opening slowly with the gentle tug of the tide.

The calf bumps against its mother, searching.

The mother studies her calf, stroking it. They nuzzle, skin to skin. The mother hums, sounding her baby, inside and out, while the calf pokes its new self along the length of its mother, until the mother rolls on her side and the calf finds milk, a great stream of thick, sweet milk, rushing reward for the pressure of lips.

Sometimes the birth does not go right and the baby dies. And then the mother lifts her silent calf to the air, but there is no calf there, only an empty body, and the mother tells a story, about this thing that happened, and the others join in telling their parts, and the story grows for days and days until the mother is ready to let the baby go.

When I came, in a storm, my dolphin mother had given birth. Her dolphin baby did not blow and did not blow. Tenderly, she let her dead calf go, and reached for me.

She stood the storm, the sharp rain stinging her hide; she carried me, alive, through the giant swells to the cay, where I woke the next day to a calmer sea, and a warming sun, and a new life.

When I was so little and hungry, my dolphin mother stroked me and, leaving her white underside showing there above her flukes, she gave me her milk.

I gulped and choked, gulped and choked, gulped and swallowed and choked some more, but swallowed enough to grow strong and stronger and finally fat and warm on the fishy richness of dolphin milk.

Each day my dolphin family dives for fish, I stay swimming above. Sometimes I swim a little away.

When my aunt catches me, she claps her jaw, slaps water at me with her tail. But I need to always move in the deep water. I drift away from my aunt, floating between the new mothers and their calves. The tingle of their soundings passes through me.

My dolphin mother returns, a fish sideways in her mouth. She locks down with her pointed teeth and the tail and head fall away, down, down through the darkness. She flips out a fish for me to eat. I take the fish in my hands, my good hands for stroking dolphin backs, for holding, and tearing, and throwing, and pulling. I catch the fish in my good hands and tear into its sweet flesh with my teeth.

In the night, things rise from the deep. They rise with their long arms, with their sharp beaks, with their strong suckers to pull me under and hold me until I have no breath. I struggle in a blinding cave of pain. My dolphin mother hears and comes, ramming the monster that holds me, and the others ram it too. They batter and bang the beast until I am free, then carry me near shore, where I crawl onto the sand and remember to breathe.

I sleep there on the beach until I can make sea again. After that I sleep always on the rocks, alone.

In the light I am not afraid of the deep, of the darkness close beneath me, but at night the deep frightens me. My dolphin mother understands, my dolphin family understands. As the day stills and the light dims and the sun melts into a pool of spreading red, the sea quiets and we turn toward the nearest cay and I climb from the sea, trailing weeds and long ribbons of grass strung over my shoulders and through my hair. I make a nest for myself with my good hands, pulling wide leaves around me. I make a nest for my lonely sleep and wrap myself in my long, long hair, and give myself to the dark while always within reach, I hear the sound of my family breathing, blowing softly offshore, waiting for morning.

Sometimes it is good to be on land, to be alone. In the sea there is the always touching, the always talking, the always moving. Sometimes I like the quiet. I like the feel of land under my feet. But most times it is dolphin company inside and outside that feels so good.

Sometimes, in the day, sharks will come. They are simple, those sharks. They are simple as rocks. When they come, my family knows what to do. They take turns swimming very fast, and one by one, bang, they smash into the shark, catching it on the side. And after a crash or two or three the shark will swim slowly away, no fights, no bites. But sometimes the shark drops down, down, out of sight, through the gloom where a thousand blind eyes, where a thousand hungry mouths, wait below in the dark for supper to drift past.

But the orca is not simple like the shark. The orca is quick like a stick of lightning. Sometimes the orca can be near and it is safe. I will watch him, beautiful black and white, bold swimmer, big, brave brother, but sometimes the orca will come thinking to eat dolphins, and when he comes thinking that, he always does. And then the ocean has a different feel, and there is fear, and flight and struggle, and in the end sadness, and there is a new song to sing about the dolphin who was and is no more, about the orca who came hungry and ate a brother. And for a while everything is different in the sea. The sound is different, the taste is different. Until the difference becomes part of the long song.

The old ones, they can tell when the orca is hungry, when it is not. They know the blow of a whale, miles at sea, and the beat of a ship cutting through the open waves. They know the sound of the sun rising out of the sea and setting again back into it.

The sea is a living music, it is the whisper of fish, the roar of wind, the chatter of stones and sand, of weeds and reefs in the wave-churned surf. It is all music.

My cousins call to each other and run over the waves, curving out, dropping back, a fast and springing dance. They rise, gleaming, the sun leaping off their shining skin, and they stand on their tails, all together, moving with one mind, with one song, with one motion. At night, from the rocks, I watch them at their feeding. I watch them at their play. They are lit by a shining glow, everything washed in green light against the dark. My dolphin family in their night-fire clothes, their mouths glowing as they open into the shining tide. All the time talking inside each other, outside each other.

I understand, though I cannot say all; still, I understand everything when I look in their eyes, when I feel the stroke of their ripe skin against mine. I understand in their speed or their slowness, in their leaping or their diving, in their roughness or their calm.

I cannot swim as fast, I cannot swim as smooth. My cousins know I am different. The water knows I am different. Always the water asks if I would like to come deep and deeper. But once I went too deep, and it hurt in my ears and my eyes and my nose, and my throat shut and my chest burst and my skin broke with needles of pain while my head exploded. And my dolphin mother knew that if I lived, I must not go deep again, and so I run beside her, or atop her or between her and an aunt. I ride with a cousin or a sister and I am never left behind. This is how my dolphin family cares for me. If they are eating, if they are playing, they look inside each other and know what is needed and together what they must do.

Things float by. Things from the human world. Bottles and jars and plastic jugs. Sometimes a cousin swallows a glass ball or gets tied up in line. And then there is sadness and the dolphin mothers carry the young ones, holding their soft gray bodies up to the air to blow. Sometimes with my fingers I can do what must be done and pull the ball from the throat of my cousin so he can eat again or untangle the line from his tail so he can swim, and then my cousin lives. But sometimes he dies, and we wait for the mother to let go, to give her baby to the deep, where it drifts down into the blue below and drops away forever.

The old ones do not eat such dangerous things, but young ones do not know. I have eaten fish dead too long, fish dying, filled with poison, sick fish slow enough to be caught by me.

On the cays, too, I have eaten things that made my stomach wild with pain, I have eaten things that come leaping back up, rushing past my burning throat, out through my open mouth. When I do this, I am not strong enough to swim, and my dolphin mother and my dolphin aunt carry me. The sea makes a soft bed to rest my hurting stomach in, but sometimes the smallest movement makes me sick and I am too weak even to be in the sea, and then my mother and my aunt and my cousins and the old ones wait for me.

Sometimes on the big cay, men come. They have machines. They have guns. They frighten me. My dolphin family stays far from shore when men are there, and I sleep on a different cay where no plane can land and no man can find a place of comfort.

The men who come to the big cay sometimes leave food and water and things I like. But I stay there only when the men are away. Once the cay was quiet and I came on the land, but one man was left. He slept in a pool of his own blood and did not breathe and it frightened me. I ran back into the sea and we swam to the north and I slept on the rocks and we did not go back to the big cay for a very long time. Instead I stayed on the bits of land too small for a man to camp and sleep but bursting with life and big enough for me.

We travel from cay to cay. And on each I find a different comfort. On one is a trickle of fresh water flowing, on another are pools in the pockets of rocks; a third has grasses and roots sweet and filling, and pools of salt water, with food left by the tide.

Some times are quiet. We leave the group, old ones come, some aunts and cousins. The pace is slower, calmer. But sometimes our group joins with other groups, and then there is great leaping, squeaking, clicking, tail dancing, wave driving, bubble churning, mounds of us, different colors, different sizes, different shapes, but all one family in the big sea, the big sea big enough for all the chirping, laughing, fast, and humming dolphins. Then it is so good to watch, to feel the strong singing inside me.

When the dolphin groups gather, there are stories, there is joy. We jump the waves, and race, and chase the darting fish. And sometimes the boys fight or chase a girl and then the sea churns and inside my stomach twists like a tight net biting into the tender parts of me, but the next day all is good again and the dolphins are friends, and if that cannot be, then the angry ones go and the rest play on.

There is never a time when my ears want for song or sound, when inside or out, along my skin, or inside my bones, I want for anything. And although I cannot stand on my tail or jump the waves, although I cannot catch the fish or slide in silence through the sea, although I cannot understand the fast voice or the deep stories, I am a part of the long song. I sing my own funny clicking, chirping, squeaking story, and the story is good.