Island of the Blue Dolphins

Karana wants to be prepared in case the Aleuts return, so she spends most of the summer repairing and refashioning the cracked canoe to make it smaller and easier to carry. Rontu naps in the shade and wanders the shore as Karana works. He also shows a mischievous side by occasionally stealing one of her fish. Now that she has a new friend to talk to, Karana realizes how lonely she truly was, and speaks to her dog “as though [she] were talking to one of [her] people” (97).

Karana tests out the canoe and discovers a system of caves under the cliff below her house. Within the caves, Karana and Rontu spy an enormous squid, which she calls a devilfish. She resolves to catch the squid because its flesh is a rare delicacy, “the best food in the seas” (100). Karana feels joy and pride as she thinks about the discovery of the devilfish; she stows the repaired canoe in a place that will protect it from the winter storms.

Karana spends the stormy winter days making a new dress for herself and crafting a special spear to hunt the giant devilfish. When flocks of blackbirds fill the morning sky, Karana knows that spring has come and takes her new spear to Coral Cove. She makes the journey alone because Rontu acted strangely the previous night and did not return. His absence spoils the joy of the devilfish hunt, as Karana worries that he might never return or that he might come back as an enemy. No matter what happens, she knows she could never hurt him “now that he had been [her] friend” (103). Karana doesn’t manage to spear a devilfish, and stows the canoe in the cave she found with Rontu.

As Karana nears her house, she hears dogs fighting. She finds Rontu surrounded by the pack; two dogs challenge him to a fight while the rest watch. Karana decides to let the battle play out because a conflict between Rontu and the pack seems inevitable, and because he currently has an advantageous location for the fight. Rontu breaks one dog’s leg in his jaws and rips out the other challenger’s throat. After claiming victory, Rontu unleashes a howl unlike anything Karana’s ever heard before and goes home to wait for her “as if he had not been away or nothing had happened” (107). From then on, the dogs stay away from the headland, and Rontu never leaves Karana’s side again for as long as he lives.

Spring blankets the island with flowers, some “the color of the sun when it rises” (108). Karana delights in these blossoms and the blue jays, crows, hummingbirds, and woodpeckers that flock to the island. Among the more familiar species are a pair of scarlet-headed yellow birds that Karana does not recognize. She leaves pieces of shellfish for the unfamiliar birds and keeps two hatchlings as friends. She names one of the birds Tainor, “after a young man [she] liked who had been killed by the Aleuts” and the other Lurai, a name she “wished [she] had been called instead of Karana” (110).

Karana crafts a skirt from yucca fibers as well as a belt and sandals from sealskin. She strolls along the cliff in her new garments with Rontu at her side and adorns both of them with flower wreaths. After the battle of Coral Cove, Karana and the other women cut their hair short to mourn the dead, but years have passed and her hair falls to her waist again. No ships appear that spring, but Karana enjoys a blissful season filled with the fragrance of flowers and the song of birds.

Karana and Rontu look for the giant devilfish every day in the spring, but fail to catch it as summer arrives. She abandons the search and focuses on gathering shellfish for winter. After a successful day collecting abalone, she sees blue dolphins and otters frolicking. Rontu spots the giant devilfish, and Karana gets close enough to see that its eyes have “black rims and gold centers and in the centers a black spot” (115). She strikes the devilfish with her spear’s barbed point and holds onto the taut string attached to the barb.

After a long struggle, Karana drags the devilfish onto a sandbar. When Rontu tries to bite the devilfish, it wraps its long arms around his neck and pulls him toward the water. Karana stabs the devilfish with a whalebone knife, and it lashes out with its suckers, which feel like “a countless number of leeches” as they latch onto her skin (119). She kills the devilfish but cannot move its heavy body. Battered and bruised, Karana and Rontu stagger home. She sees two other giant devilfish that summer, but leaves them be.

Karana gathers more abalone and recalls how children used to frighten seagulls away from the drying shellfish. Since there are no children left to do this chore, she scares the birds away with strings of shiny shells. The sight of her catches hanging along the fence makes it look “as if a whole village were living there on the headland” instead of one person and a dog (121). Karana and Rontu explore different places on and around the island each day. On a tall rock about a league from shore, she kills cormorants and gathers their feathers to make a skirt. The pair discovers a cave at the island’s south end and find a skeleton and humanoid figure crafted from reeds inside. The tide traps Karana and Rontu in the cave overnight. She names the place Black Cave and resolves never to return.

Years have passed since the Aleuts last came to the island, but Karana remains vigilant. One day, she spies a ship and wonders if it belongs to white men even though she “thought about them little and seldom looked for them” (125). From the headland, Karana sees that the ship has red sails, which confirms that it belongs to the Aleuts. She carries her things to the cave near the spring, jettisons the drying shellfish from the cliff because they are not yet edible, and makes her house look as though it was abandoned long ago. The ship drops anchor in Coral Cove, and the Aleuts come ashore. An Aleut girl cooks beside a fire while some of the men begin hunting otters. Karana hides inside the cave with Rontu and falls asleep.