Grahm noticed Jake’s puzzlement. “Dolphins have no prehensile extremities for manipulating their environment, and contrary to the human preoccupation with controlling the world around us, the dolphin’s intelligence, it seems, has gone in a direction counter to ours. Their thoughts are quite different from ours and have been left to develop inwardly over more than fifty million years of evolution. Compare this to the paltry two million years during which the hominid mind has grown outward. Overall, dolphins appear to display an emotional stability that easily surpasses that of humans, and unlike us, rely heavily on one another for their survival. That their culture is totally different from our own cannot be denied. But I am even more convinced that they have an intelligence at least equal to our own, if not greater. As I’ve already indicated, Natalie is very unusual for a bottlenose dolphin. Among other things, her skin tone is albino, completely white over her entire body, a rare occurrence among her kind. She also had a long scarification along her left flank. But her most distinguishing feature…” Grahm hesitated and watched Jake closely. “Her most distinguishing feature was the prehensile extensions that jutted from beneath her pectoral fins.”
At first Jake thought the doctor was putting him on, but something subliminal stirred in a back corner of his mind, and a troubling memory suddenly came to life.
“Hands!” The word leapt from Jake’s mouth in a flash, and a sense of hopeful relief began to circulate within his brain. “You’re telling me she had hands?” he pressed.
The doctor let out a small laugh, amused by Jake’s enthusiastic outburst. “Oh, yes. Natalie had the equivalent of hands. The amazing thing was she could actually grasp and manipulate objects with them.”
“A mutation?” Jake asked, finding it difficult to restrain his interest.
“I would call it more of an evolutionary jump,” Grahm surmised. “What I didn’t tell you earlier was that all of the other beached dolphins we found near Natalie exhibited the same set of appendages. Natalie, however, was the only albino among them.”