If he hits, lower your rod and reel in till the slack’s gone, and then strike once by raising the tip—’

‘How do they know it’s a dolphin?’ she asked, watching me with that intent expression on her face.

‘They don’t actually,’ I said. ‘It’s just an educated guess. Dolphin like to lie under anything floating on the surface.’

We came abeam of the plank and then it began to drop astern. I stood up to watch. Her bait fluttered past it, started to draw away.

‘Here he comes!’ Holt said tersely.

It was one of those moments that’d still give you a thrill if you fished for a hundred years. I saw the blue bolt of flame under the surface, and then he came clear, quartering and behind the bait, a bull of eighteen or twenty pounds flashing green and gold and blue in the sunlight, and took the bait going down. Her line snapped off the outrigger. I hoped he wouldn’t take mine too. Sometimes they will—take both baits in one blinding strike so fast you think you’ve hooked two separate dolphin all at the same instant.

He didn’t. He took only hers, set the hook himself when she forgot to hit him, leaped, made one fast, slashing run, leaped three more times, and was gone. She reeled in. Sam looked at the leader. ‘Kink,’ he said.

‘What did I do wrong?’ she asked, casually taking cigarettes from the breast pocket of her blouse.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘But he got away.’

I was beginning to get it now, though it made no sense at all. The whole thing had bored her profoundly and she didn’t mind in the slightest that she’d lost the fish, but she wanted me to explain why.

I explained. ‘When he was jumping, he threw a kink in the leader. Wire’ll always break if it kinks. It happens to everybody.’

‘Oh,’ she said thoughtfully.

She wasn’t interested in fishing, and never had been. She was listening to my voice.

There was no possible explanation for it, but I knew I was right. I watched her closely the rest of the day, checking it, and found that whenever I was talking, no matter what the subject, she listened in that same way. She said nothing about herself except that she was the private secretary to a businessman in a small town named Thomaston in central Louisiana. It might even be true, I thought, in spite of the expensive watch. She could have presents like that any time she wanted them. There was no longer any doubt that fishing bored her. She raised a sail, and lost it, with no more interest than she’d shown in the dolphin. I hooked up with a six-foot sail, and landed it; it wasn’t badly hurt and there was little blood, so we released it. That was it for the day, except for two or three small dolphin and another bonito. We were back at the dock at four forty-five.

We paid Holt, and I drove her car back to the motel. Outside No. 17, she held out her hand and smiled. ‘It’s been wonderful.