Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  Images of feral dogs begin to crowd in. I hear a swish of brush and am certain the noise is behind me. Then the ticking of claws again. I leave the light on now and begin to trot, looking back over my shoulder and up ahead into the beam of light, eager now to reach the streets ahead. When I see the silhouette of the first house against the starry sky I realize I was much closer to the village than I’d thought, and slow to a walk. The dogs overtake me before I can react—four of them, calico-patterned, race by on the left. Ten yards ahead they break sideways into thick brush. I stand stock-still until I hear nothing again.

  What was I thinking, running like that? That I could outrun what I imagined was there?

  They were toying with me.

  Two pariah dogs asleep at the edge of the village do not lift their heads from the dirt as I pass. Back in the room, sitting in a wicker chair, I try to separate the world of threat the hatchling faced from the world of vulnerability I had just reacquainted myself with.

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  A FEW DAYS AFTER my encounter with the dogs, I have lunch at the Hotel Galápagos with Bruce Barnett, a biologist studying feral dogs in Galápagos at that time. Many types of dogs go feral in the islands—terriers, spaniels, German shepherds, bulldogs, retrievers, Great Danes. All are phenotypic expressions of the same genotype—Canis familiaris. In the wild, most of these phenotypes disappear. The range of canid expression, in other words, shrinks. Depending on where and how they live in the islands, feral dogs occupying the same area begin to resemble one another after only a few generations. In a region of lava flows and sparse vegetation—above Bahía Isabel on Isla Isabela, for example—where feral dogs hunt mostly marine iguanas, Barnett found that the dogs have the same look despite their different ancestries: long-legged, bat-eared, short-furred, bare-bellied animals, adapted to the hot, sun-blasted lava fields over which they travel.

  Barnett’s research appealed to me. It had none of the cachet that attaches to studying the systematics of Galapagean finches. It was, instead, focused on the morphology and social behavior of an animal that, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong here, and it was research related to the everyday lives of human beings, from whom the dogs had fled or who had abandoned them.

  In addition to studying feral dogs, Barnett was involved in a more contentious issue, the eradication of populations of feral goats, pigs, cattle, rabbits, cats, and donkeys, each of which has had a major ecological impact on every island on which they’ve been found. (Feral dogs, pigs, goats, and cats were already established in the islands by the time Darwin arrived in 1835, though their populations were relatively small. Exotic plants, too, had already established themselves, from seeds inadvertently brought ashore on the shoes and clothing of ships’ crews. And by then, too, upwards of 10,000 tortoises had probably been taken off the islands to provision sailing ships. Later, scientists would continue removing even more of them for their collections. [I saw the hollow carapace of the only giant tortoise ever found alive on Isla Fernandina on a research shelf alongside the carapaces of other Galapagean tortoises at the California Academy of Sciences museum, in San Francisco, in 1994. It had been collected in 1905–1906. Along with the other carapaces neatly arrayed around it, the carapace from Fernandina had the appearance of a book from which all the pages had been torn, leaving only the covers.])

  Over the years, in an effort to preserve the general outline of the flora and fauna of the ecosystems Darwin and other scientists first described, multiple eradication campaigns have been mounted, some of which were large-scale military-style operations. Professional hunters from New Zealand, for example, using helicopter gun platforms and coordinating their attack plan with sharpshooters on the ground using Judas goats as lures, removed nearly 100,000 goats from a single island in one year.

  While the effort to maintain a “pristine” Galapagean ecosystem is in one sense worth praising—left unchecked, sizable populations of exotic plants and animals can radically upset an ecosystem comprised of species that have been evolving alongside only one another for thousands of years—attempts to distinguish between “indigenous” and “exotic” species are problematic. One view holds that ancestors of the finches, the tortoises, and other iconic Galapagean creatures were themselves “colonists,” while the Norway rats, the pigs, and the rest who arrived with the sailors were merely “invasives.” But drawing the line today between those that belong and those that should be exterminated is tricky, politically as well as biologically.

  What most angers ardent conservationists on Galápagos is the imprint of mankind here—the palm trees, the mosquitoes, the havoc wreaked on the islands’ vegetation by goats, the carcasses of sharks washed up on island beaches, their fins cut off by commercial hunters to supply Asian markets. As far as practical, conservationists would like to see all the feral animal populations removed. No more pigs rooting out green turtle eggs, no more cats plundering Hawaiian petrel nesting burrows, and no more indigenous mammals—five species of rice rat, for example—lost to the black rats that came ashore from ships.

  No one would argue—probably—that people abandon the islands; nor does anyone—probably—want to accommodate the wild pigs and goats. It’s the middle ground that no one can seem to find. Moving darkly through the discussion of what belongs here and what doesn’t—for example, which are the preferred plants and which should be eradicated?—is the age-old disagreement in human societies concerning human immigrants. The echoes of racist rhetoric, nativist prejudice, and economic self-interest in these sometimes volatile conversations on Galápagos are unmistakable.

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  MY WEEK AT Hotel Galápagos is nearly at an end. The people I’m scheduled to travel with for the next ten days aboard the Beagle III will arrive tomorrow at Baltra. I’ll be over there to meet them at the airport and to board our motor yacht. I’m packing my bags and dive gear and making some notes—Barnett has given me copies of some of his technical papers—when I hear a distinctive rap on my door. Jack, the proprietor. He’s come to say that there are two men in the lobby who wish to see me. They’re local residents and want to know whether I’m available to write up the story of their many trips to Thailand together.

  I meet the men in the hotel lobby. I’m uncertain about their reasons for wanting to meet but want to do Jack a favor, as he has done many for me. We shake hands and move to seats in the restaurant. No one here at midmorning. Jack serves us coffee—on the house—and they launch into their proposal.

  The men are about twenty years older than I am, two bumptious, overweight Americans, very enthusiastic about Thailand as a tourist destination. I’m not the person for their project, I tell them right away, but to be polite I ask about Bangkok. Have they seen its floating market, the Wat Phra Kaew complex? Have they visited Chiang Mai? It’s quickly apparent that none of this is of interest to them. Their interest is in sex, especially with adolescent girls.

  I push back from the table, say politely that I am not able to accommodate them, and leave the table without shaking hands.

  As I walk out of the restaurant I catch Jack’s eye in the kitchen, cutting up tomatoes for lunch. To be civil, I gesture back with a shrug, when what I want to do is confront him.

  The darker part of the real world is always just around the corner.

  Back in my cabana, trying to defuse my anger and refute what I’d witnessed, I remembered a story that put me back on track.

  A friend of mine, an ethnomusicologist, had gotten funding to study percussion ensembles in West Africa. After a week in one village, when he felt comfortable enough with his host family to ask the question, he inquired about ritual scarring. He wanted to know in particular about a man whose scars were in the shape of crescent moons, randomly spaced on his arms and back. His host said the man had molested a girl, and all the men in the village had bitten him.

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  WHEN I FIRST CAME face-to-face with extensive schools of brilliantly colored tropical fish in Galápagos, in shallow water at Gordon Rocks near the Plaza islets, I shouted so forcefully with excitement that I spit out my snorkel and choked. The fish that caused this outburst were blue-eyed damsels, dozens of them moving through the gin-clear water, together with schools of dusky sergeant majors and yellowtail surgeonfish. Blue-eyed damsels are darkish fish with yellow lips and tails and bright blue eye rings, about five inches long and compressed vertically. What made me shout was more than the vividness of their colors, though these hues were intensified in the sun-shot water by a glycerin-like mucus that covers their scales. It was the sheer number of them, all turning away from me in unison, as though they comprised a single organism. And it was how perfectly placed they seemed to be in the world, in that particular spot, in the moment that I found them.

  On subsequent dives on that trip—growing accustomed now to the use of the snorkel, diving deeper, learning how to stay down longer—I could not turn away from the marvel of these fish—wrasses, parrot fishes, Moorish idols, butterfly fish, the damsels, triggerfishes, needlefishes, stargazers, halfbeaks. Back on the boat I pored over Godfrey Merlen’s A Field Guide to the Fishes of Galápagos, the fish chapters in Roger Perry’s Galapagos: Key Environments, and dive notes and drawings that the guides gave me. The popular names for the fishes—grunts, sleepers, knifejaws, boxfishes, triggerfishes, and the rest—were captivating: guineafowl puffer, tinsel squirrelfish, clown razorfish, rainbow scorpionfish, Sheepshead mickey.

  It was some years after that first exposure to Galapagean fish that I returned to the islands as a scuba diver with the equipment and skills needed to descend into deeper waters and to stay down longer. It meant having a better opportunity to see whitetip reef sharks and Galápagos sharks, and being able to inspect reef life in a more leisurely way. One day on this trip six of us dove on a small seamount called Roca Redonda, hoping to find moving “walls” of hammerhead sharks there, not an uncommon sight in water to the north of Isla Isabela. When I rolled backward off the gunnel of the panga in my scuba gear and stabilized myself in the water, I saw several scalloped hammerheads about fifty feet below me, moving slowly past the vertical wall of Roca Redonda in water through which I could see no bottom. As we descended, the hammerheads drifted off into the gloom. When our group leveled out at about eighty feet and looked straight up, we saw the sharks gathered together again about thirty feet above us. Sixty or seventy of them, some close to twelve feet long. They moved lugubriously in an open pattern, suggesting a lattice, backlit by the sky.

  The French use a phrase to describe the scuba diver, l’homme sans poids, a weightless person, a play on the alliterative French expression poissons sans poids, the beguiling weightlessness of a fish in water. Weightlessness allows us to ascend the walls of Roca Redonda slowly, inch by inch, inspecting tiny stone ledges on which small animals and plants play out their lives in shadows thrown by the passing sharks. Suspended as each of us is, we can swim along the wall “upside down” and study the underside of the surface water above, see bursts of wind hitting it, wavelets forming and collapsing on it. Somewhere shallower than here you could watch the bottom passing below you and see on the sand there the movement of clouds overhead. To possess this ability to go left or right, forward or backward, up or down, all at the same time, to be released from the constraints of gravity, gives you a frame of reference like a tethered astronaut’s. This is what Icarus wanted. With this perspective, the third dimension that birds and fish move through effortlessly is yours for a few moments. And then the nature of their lives opens up more fully for you. The hammerheads move past us like swans milling on a city park pond. When we lose sight of them again, they’ve formed up in a shape like a leaning wall, a kind of close vertical stacking that birds don’t readily employ because it would compromise the lift they need to fly.

  The wall of them slides into the distance like a shoji screen.

  I could be wrong, but the hammerheads seem hardly to have noticed us. At the time I encountered them, years ago now, they had yet to be harvested in great numbers by Galapagean fishermen, solely for the commercial value of their fins. The upwelling of nutrients around Roca Redonda maintains schools of medium-size fish feeding in the area—jacks, basses, and groupers—which in turn (once) fed the numerous hammerheads.

  Back on the boat that day, we were toweling off when someone spotted a school of common bottlenose dolphins about half a mile away. It had been only a few days since fifteen of us had been in near-shore waters with masks, fins, and snorkels cavorting (as we imagined it) with this same species of dolphin. They’d breach all around us, bolt off, then come racing back. Trying to engage with them quickly wore most of us out. The dolphins approached closely but never close enough to be touched. When we saw dolphins again, only a couple of people expressed an interest in getting back in the water with them.

  I left our yacht with two others and a boat driver in a panga.

  This pod of dolphins was less interested in us than the other dolphins had been, but when we got close, we rolled out of the panga anyway. Maybe they would come to us. The water was very deep, water open-ocean sailors call blue water, because of its cobalt hues. What appeared beneath me was not dolphins but something I would not ever have expected to see. Thirty feet below was a female sei whale, a dark steel-gray form about forty-five feet long, nursing a single calf. In a moment like this, the mind recovers equilibrium before the heart can reclaim its normal rhythm. It pieces together the light and the shade, the lines of the forms in the water, to make a coherent image.

  I breathed slowly through my snorkel, floating motionless, watching the creatures until their undulations took them into indistinction. I hoped my two companions, who had dropped off the opposite side of the boat, had seen the whales. It turned out they hadn’t. Underneath them when they first looked down had been a young sperm whale.

  Back on the boat, how could we relate the details of what had happened without distressing those who’d chosen not to go?

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  A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, the Beagle III was motoring southwest across Bahía Isabel, an embayment on the west coast of Isabela. I went to the bow after supper to watch the overcast night. The western headland of Punta Cristóbal ahead was barely readable, an opaque black inseparable from the opaque black of the sea, but distinct against the slate black of the sky. A light breeze crossed the bow.

  To the southwest, toward the open Pacific, I saw something in the blackness I could not immediately understand, a straight whitish-turquoise line aimed at the starboard bow and continuing to extend toward it as I watched. The line widened as it drew closer and then suddenly hooked at the bow like the letter j. A dolphin, now riding the pressure wave just ahead of the boat. He or she was the first of six, all arriving within minutes of each other—from behind us, from up ahead, from the port side—each trailing a pale turquoise line: bioluminescence, from plankton excited by the dolphin’s movement through the water. With the six of them riding the boat’s pressure wave in parallel, they lit up an oval of water in which each animal was a distinct ghostly silhouette. I could hear their plosive breathing and smell their rank breath.

  The most intense illumination, a radiant creamy white, surrounded the dolphins’ heads and the leading edges of their pectoral fins when they extended them slightly to steer. The light was less intense along their flanks but didn’t start to fade until it was fifteen or twenty feet behind their dorsal fins and flukes (the dolphins were seven or eight feet long). They rose in curvets from the water, streaked ahead, crossed beneath one another and veered away from the boat, constantly changing their alignment. Fish burst away from them, triggering additional blooms of bioluminescence. From moment to moment I couldn’t tell whether the original six were still with us or whether some had gone and others had arrived. The air thickened with their mewling sque
aks. By my watch, the dolphins were on the bow for an hour and a half.

  When the last one departed, the sea went dark again until, minutes later, a patch of bioluminescence more than fifty feet across suddenly opened in front of the boat. I fully expected the Beagle III to plunge in. I gripped the boat’s steel railing and fought off feelings of vertigo. We crossed through the light and the moment of panic faded. I set my eyes again on Punta Cristóbal, which, despite the long interlude with the dolphins, did not appear to be any closer.

  Even with nothing to be seen, I continued to stand on the bow, waiting to see anything I could. Eventually I saw a flock of swallow-tailed gulls, the night hunters, passing to the west with the slow wingbeats of egrets. They are a kind of bird the Hōkūle‘a navigators look for just before dawn, when they are reliably headed back to land and to their nests.

  When I left the bow to go below, it occurred to me that the large patch of bioluminescence could have been caused by a whale suddenly halting its effort to surface until we’d passed.

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  EVERY COMMERCIAL AND PRIVATE boat tour in the Galápagos—some commercial tours are only a few days long, others last a couple of weeks—must follow the itinerary given to them by national park officials. This ensures that no tour group shows up at the same place, at the same time, as another. (Passengers may go ashore only at one of the park’s approved landing sites, of which there are about sixty. In order for visitors to see as much of the variety of Galápagos as possible, the itinerary assumes that most tour boats will be in transit during the night, while passengers sleep. That way, visitors often awaken to find themselves already anchored at the place they’ll disembark to after breakfast.)