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get at the sand beneath the triggerfish, but it, too, was driven off.
    Now Paloma realized what was happening. The triggerfish’s egg deposit had been discovered by the other fish in the little valley, and they were ganging up on the triggerfish, trying to divert it long enough for one or another of them to dash in and root out and eat the cache of eggs.
    Paloma felt instinctively parental toward the eggs, and so she swam into the midst of the flurry and flashed her handsaround; the invaders dispersed. But the triggerfish’s natural assumption was that Paloma was another thief, albeit a larger one, and its response was to bite her earlobe.
    Paloma moved away, smiling inside but sad because she knew that before long the triggerfish would lose out to the odds. Once an egg deposit was discovered, it was as good as gone. Still, she told herself, that was the way it was supposed to be, an example of nature in balance. If all the eggs of every triggerfish hatched, and all the hatchlings grew to maturity, the sea would be choked with triggerfish.
    Now she began to feel the telltale ache in her lungs, the hollow sensation that she imagined as the lungs themselves searching for more bits of air to consume. Her temples began to pound, not painfully but noisily. She pushed off the bottom and kicked easily toward the surface, trailing a stream of bubbles behind.
    Her rule was to rest for five or ten minutes between dives, for then she could dive again and again without pain or fatigue. If she did not rest, she found that each successive dive would have to be shorter and the ache in her lungs would be sharper.
    So she hung on the anchor line and drew deep breaths of the warm, moist air and occasionally looked underwater through her mask to see if anything new or special had arrived in the neighborhood of the seamount.
    Perhaps today she would see a golden cabrío , the rare, solitary grouper of a yellow so rich and unblemished that when it hung motionless in the water it appeared to be cast of solid gold. Or perhaps there would be a pulsing cloud of barracudas, whose silver backs caught the sunlight and were transformed into a shower of needles.
    Once she had even seen a whale shark, but that was an encounter no reasonable person could hope to have again.
    Her first reaction had been shock, and then, for a fragment of a second, terror, and then, when she realized exactly what it was, a shiver and tingle and flood of warmth through her stomach.
    The whale shark had risen from the bottom, gliding so slowly that it seemed almost to be floating, an animal so huge that in the cloudy water Paloma could not see its head and tail at the same time. But she could determine its color—a speckled, mustardy yellow—and that told her there was no danger. The whale shark ate plankton and tiny shrimps and other minute life.
    Jobim had cautioned her that she might see a whale shark out here, had tried to prepare her for the shock she would feel at her first sight of the leviathan.
    “There is one way he can hurt you,” Jobim had said without a hint of jest.
    “Tell me.” Paloma imagined stinging spines or molarlike teeth that could crush her bones.
    “If you see his mouth open, and you swim to it and you pry open his jaws and you squeeze yourself inside and force the jaws closed behind you.”
    “Papa!”
    “Even then, I don’t think he’d like you very much. He’d shake his head and spit you out.”
    Paloma had jumped on her father and wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to bite his neck.
    When she had positively identified the whale shark, she had swum down to meet this largest of all fish, and just then it had slowed its ambling pace enough so that she could touch the head and run her hand down the endless ridges of the back. It did not show any signs of acknowledging her presence, but continued its lazy cruise, propelled by gentle sweeps of its tail. And when finally Paloma’s hand reached the tail,she had hiccoughed in awe,