Dolphin Child Read Free Page A

channel
and disappeared around a bend, shouting as they went. Lucy had a
feeling that the boy with curly hair might have slipped away up the
smaller stream to shake them off. She decided to give it a
go.
    The stone walls built up on each side of the smaller channel
got very narrow really quickly, barely wider than her shoulders.
The stones Lucy was walking over were also very slippery, with
green algae and slime growing over them. Fortunately the stream
here was barely a trickle and so her feet did not get wet. She
glanced up. There were no buildings above them now and grass was
growing over the edge of each side of the walls. The stream and
walls curved round to the left and Lucy thought she could hear the
boy ahead of her, though she wasn’t sure. Suddenly a stone hurtled
past her head, banging noisily into the water at her
feet.
    ‘ Go away and leave me alone!’ the boy shouted down at her. Lucy
looked up and could see him standing on the edge of the walled
stream above her, with another stone held threateningly in his
clenched fist.
    ‘ It’s all right’ called Lucy quickly. ‘I’m not with them.’ The
boy lowered his fist and let the stone drop. She could see that he
had recognised her.
    ‘ What are you doing here?’ he asked warily.
    ‘ I didn’t want those kids to get you’ Lucy replied. ‘What was
that all about anyway?’ She could see now where a stone wall on the
left had tumbled down and she clambered up a steep grass bank to
where the boy was standing. She was out of breath and sat down on
the edge of the wall next to him, panting slightly.
    The boy didn’t answer but stared at her directly.
    ‘ You’re a Dolphin-Child’ he said after a long pause. It was
more a statement than a question. Lucy was nonplussed. She hadn’t
expected him to say that. She’d never heard the term before and she
could only guess what he meant by it.
    ‘ What’s it to you anyway?’ she replied guardedly.
    ‘ I saw you this morning. You were swimming with two dolphins.
Only a Dolphin-Child can swim with them the way you
did.’
    ‘ What about you then? Are you one too?’ Lucy half hoped he was,
but she didn’t even know what a Dolphin-Child was supposed to be
though, not really.
    ‘ No, well, I mean….’ He became unsure of himself. ‘I don’t
know.’
    ‘ Do you dream about them?’ Lucy asked.
    ‘ Yes, yes I do’ he replied hesitantly.

Chapter Two
    It was a bright calm day. Sunlight sparkled on the surface of
the windless sea. Spirit broke the surface of the water to breath
through his air hole and could see that the sun had almost reached
its highest point in the sky. He sliced back through the low waves
and continued to swim just below the surface.
    He was alone, returning from a pod of dolphins that lived
beyond the islands to the south. Spirit felt a sense of
independence and freedom at being away from the other members of
his own pod for a while. A few moons ago, he had left the pod for
his own coming of age swim in the same way that his best friend
Dancer had a year before that. Unlike Dancer though, he had stolen
away in the middle of the night because Storm, the oldest dolphin
in their pod, had forbidden him from going. He’d got into trouble
and he knew that he was lucky to be alive and well today. Spirit
had got trapped in a loop of steel cable from a discarded sea buoy
and had thought that he was going to die there. He could never have
imagined how he would end up being saved. The wounds where the
steel cable had cut into his tail had healed now, but he would
carry the scars for the rest of his life.
    Spirit used the be the smallest dolphin in the pod, but he was
growing fast and soon he’d be bigger than Dancer he reckoned,
though she joked that he’d have to catch himself a few more herring
before that happened. Spirit had a small star-like mark on his
chest and it was that identifying sign which Storm had said first
hinted to them that he was in some way special and out of