Angelique was a beautiful and graceful buffeo dolphin. She lived about 200 miles upstream from the Amazon delta, where the mighty river meets the sea. She was about one and a half meters long and she was five years old, which in human years would be about 11 or 12.

Angelique was a curious young dolphin, and her curiosity often got her into trouble.

Angelique often learned the hard way to avoid the many dangerous creatures that lived in the river, from electric eels to huge Anaconda snakes, from crocodiles to the occasional jaguar that jumped into the river to fish or just swim. Of course, Angelique knew that she was much faster than any of these animals in the water, and she usually could avoid them easily.

When she was younger, one of Angelique's favorite games would be to tease some dangerous creature. She most often played the game by pretending not to notice them as they were stalking her.

Occasionally, she would even let the crocodile, or whatever it was, think it was just about close enough to strike. Then, she would dart away so quickly that sometimes the crocodile was left wondering if she had simply been a mirage.

Sometimes Angelique would play near a village and notice the human children playing, just as dolphins love to do. Often she was so fascinated by their games that she would watch them for hours, trying to learn how to play the game so that she could teach it to her dolphin brothers, sisters and friends.

One of Angelique's favorite human games was stickball. Stickball was a game that she had a hard time adapting to being played underwater.

Fortunately, the rubber ball floated, and when it was hit into the slow-moving river, it almost seemed to lay motionless. When somebody hit a ball far out into the river, she would try to go after it and use the wake from her head to push the ball back towards the shore.

It was one day when she was returning a ball, which had been hit particularly hard, that she first noticed Pedro.

The children had never quite figured out why, no matter how many times they hit the ball in the river, it always returned. That day, Pedro had hit the ball harder than anyone he remembered had ever hit it. After he ran around the bases, he went with the other children to the shore of the river to see where the ball had landed. The ball seemed to be moving right towards them completely on its own when Pedro rolled up his pant legs and waded out into the water to get the ball.