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eyes staring straight at her, waiting impatiently for her to do what it assumed she had come to do—feed it.
    She had fed it often before. There was no mistaking this grouper: It was the only one of its size on this seamount, and it had prominent scars behind one of its gills, mementos of long-ago narrow escapes from larger predators. Sometimes she brought it bread, which it ate contemptuously, as if doing her a favor; sometimes bits of meat or fish scraps from the dock, which it gobbled up. And sometimes she forgot to bring it anything.
    She had resisted giving it a human name, but she could not resist thinking of it in human terms, so she thought of it as Bully, which was apt.
    If she had food, she would hold up her fingertips with the food dangling in them; the grouper would charge and shewould drop the food into its mouth. It had no desire to bite her fingers, but it was a clumsy eater, consuming anything in its path, and though its teeth were small its jaws were extremely powerful, and a minor slip could result in crushed or shredded fingertips.
    Today she had nothing for the grouper, so she held up a closed fist. The animal seemed to understand the gesture, for it made a halfhearted grab for her fist, then turned, flapped its tail in her face and moved off a few yards, there to hover in case she should, after all, produce something edible.
    A shadow above crossed one of the chutes of yellow light, and Paloma looked up. One behind another, a procession of hammerhead sharks passed overhead in parade. Their silver-gray bodies were as sleek as bullets, and the sunlight touched the ripples of moving muscle and made them sparkle.
    Paloma loved the hammerheads, for they seemed somehow to focus her inchoate thoughts about God and nature. They were a weird and implausible-looking animal—sinuous sledgehammers, with an eye on each end of the hammer’s head and a mouthful of teeth beneath—and since once in a great while they had attacked a human and otherwise accomplished absolutely nothing good for man or beast, they must definitely be bad: That, at least, was how Viejo had rated them as living creatures.
    And yet, if ever there was an animal that seemed to Paloma peculiarly blessed, it was the hammerhead. Sharks had for so long been so critical to the island’s survival that over the generations facts about them—salted here and there with myths—had been assimilated by most islanders. It was common knowledge, for example, that hammerheads like these had survived, unchanged, for about thirty million years. Except when they were injured or ill, they had no enemies on earth, save man. They had ample food, complete freedom,and sufficient company and kin for whatever their needs might be.
    It was Jobim, however, who had given Paloma perspective to add to the facts, who had shown her how perfectly the hammerheads were suited to their lives. They were simple and speedy and efficient, and, he reminded her, unlike man they made neither waste nor war.
    So to Paloma, the hammerheads were perfect, and she saw nothing in them but beauty. She wished Viejo could see them from down here, from where they lived in nature. From where he saw them—writhing in agony in a boat or clubbed to death and stinking on a broiling beach—they could only appear grotesque.
    Paloma pushed off the rock and swam down a few more feet, into a thin valley between two big boulders. There, in the sand, a triggerfish was darting back and forth, frantic, its tail quivering, its gill flaps fluttering. At first, Paloma thought the triggerfish was wounded, for its movements were erratic and it was encircled by three, then five, then nine or ten other fish, all of which seemed determined to attack it.
    A Scotch parrot fish—with tartanlike scales and beaked mouth—charged the smaller triggerfish, which parried with a flurry of twisting bites. The parrot fish retreated.
    Immediately an angelfish dashed forward, feinted at the triggerfish, then banked and tried to