Let the Weather Have Its Way With You: After the Iron, Wet the Day for a Tempest of Provocation

The Fire That Matches the Flower

[6] Dolphin Courtship: Brutal, Cunning and Complex: "Although biologists have long been impressed with the intelligence and social complexity of bottle-nose dolphins -- the type of porpoise often enlisted for marine mammal shows because they are so responsive to trainers -- they were nonethless surprised by the Machiavellian flavor of the males' stratagems. Many primates, including chimpanzees and baboons, are known to form gangs to attack rival camps, but never before had one group of animals been seen to solicit a second to go after a third. Equally impressive, the multipart alliances among dolphins seemed flexible, shifting from day to day depending on the dolphins' needs, perceptions of what they could get away with. The creatures seemed to be highly opportunistic, which meant that each animal was always computing who was friend and who was foe.

In an effort to thwart male encroachment, female dolphins likewise formed sophisticated alliances, the sisterhood sometimes chasing after an alliance of males that had stolen one of their friends from the fold. What is more, females seemed to exert choice over the males that sought to herd them, sometimes swimming alongside them in apparent contentment, at other times working furiously to escape, and often succeeding. Considered together, the demands of fluid and expedient social allegiances and counterallegiances could have been a force driving the evolution of intelligence among dolphins (33)."

Chapter 33: "I was given no time to doze off. I had not been there five minutes before I heard a rustle and, simultaneously, smelt the sandalwood perfume. I pretended to be asleep. The rustle came closer. I heard the tiny crepitation of pine-needles. Her feet were just behind my head. There was a louder rustle; she had sat down, and very close behind me. I thought she would drop a cone, tickle my nose. But in a very low voice she began to recite Shakespeare.

[SCENE V. Another part of the Park. ... FALSTAFF
My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain
potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green
Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let
there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.]

'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.'

All the time I was silent, and kept my eyes closed. She teased the words, giving them double meanings. Her dry-sweet voice, the wind in the pines above. She ended, but I kept my eyes closed.

I murmured, 'Go on.'

'A spirit of his comes to torment you.'

I opened my eyes. A fiendish green-and-black face, with protuberant fire-red eyes, glared down at me. I twisted up. She was holding a Chinese carnival mask on a stick, in her left hand. I saw the scar. She had changed into a long-sleeved white blouse and a long grey skirt and her hair was tied back by a black velvet bow. I pushed the mask aside" (203-204).

Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea: "It was dolphin weather, when I sailed into Piraeus with my comrades of the Cretan bull ring. Knossos had fallen, which time out of mind had ruled the seas. The smoking of the burning Labyrinth still clung to our clothes and hair.

I sprung ashore and grasped both hands full of Attic earth. It stuck to my palms as if it loved me. Then I saw the staring people, not greeting us, but calling each other to see the Cretan strangers.

I looked at my team, the boys and girls of Athens' tribute, carried to Crete to learn the bull-vault and dance for Minotauros on bloody sand. They showed me myself, as I must look to Attic eyes: a bull-dancer of Crete, smooth-shaven, filed down to a whiplash by the training; my waist in a guilded cinch-belt, my silk kilt stitched with peacock eyes, my lids still smudged with kohl; nothing Hellene about me but my flaxen hair. My necklace and arm-rings were not grave jewels of a kingly house, but the costly gauds of the Bull Court, the gift of sport-loving lords and man-loving ladies to a bull-boy who will go in with the music and fly up with the horns (3-4).