Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  I finally made it to the top of the rope—up high enough to catch the scent of tiny white epiphytic orchids. They smelled like vanilla.

  Now I looked down at the water. It was still and impenetrable as night.

  Rain dripped from the trees as we set out for the lake in the morning, to search for dolphins as before. The high water had created new waterways, and with Moises at the bow and Mario at the stern, they threaded our canoe between the tops of low-growing trees. We traveled at eye level to birds’ nests and bromeliads, and we could peer into the holes where toucans and parrots were nesting.

  Strange lives clung to every tree. White-lined sac-winged bats perched in the lee of leaning snags, angled like tiny bracket fungi. To attract females, the males deposit saliva in special sacs in their armpits and then, once it ferments, they wave their wings to waft the scent toward prospective mates. Fist-sized, hairy megalomorph spiders (which we commonly call tarantulas) hunt for nestling birds in tree holes. In the way of all spiders, they envenom their prey, liquefying the flesh and then sucking it dry into the stomach, which is located in the head. Every bough, every trunk, every vine around us swelled with life: conical-billed oropendolas flew from grassy, purselike nests hanging from the tips of branches; ants boiled out of huge black excrescences on trunks; brown centipedes curled in the crevices of bark. Vines coiled up trees into minarets, bowers, crenellated chimneys, and then trailed languidly back into the water.

  Every day, we went out to watch the dolphins from our canoe. Each day, we visited a different body of water, even when we returned to the same one: one day we would find Charro Lake had turned as purple as an amethyst; another day it would shine silver. One day at Tibe Lake, where we watched a mother dolphin and calf, the giant lily pads, big as throw rugs, were full of lurid, white, butterscotch-scented blooms crawling with shining beetles; the next time we came, the flowers were gone. On a misty morning at Domingo Lake, a nine-foot-deep seasonal pool that goes dry in the summer, where the dolphins were hunting catfish, we saw a baby perform an unusual, spectacular leap, showing us its whole body. And as we returned to camp, we spotted a spider web that stretched fifteen feet long, perhaps four feet high, draped across the lower branches of several waterlogged aguabiche trees. Moises said that perhaps ten fishing spiders had worked together to create it. We had passed this way several mornings before and never saw it; the mist had made it visible. The only things that seemed relatively static were the sloths. On the way to Domingo Lake, we passed three of them in a mimosa tree, their shaggy fur green with algae that grows in their hair. When Moises whistled, they turned in slow motion to reward him with imperial stares. Dianne wanted a photo of one, and hoped that it might move into a better position; but Moises told us, utterly deadpan, “That sloth, she gonna move tomorrow.” The next day, there she was with her companions, still in the same tree.

  To get to the lakes, Moises took us on shortcuts through the looking-glass world of the flooded forest. We often squeezed between partially submerged trunks of thorn-fringed Astrocaryum palms. Even though it was our boat that was moving, the spines seemed to lunge at us. When we saw them coming, Dianne or I would call out, “Spines!” and pull our arms and legs close to the center of the boat. Often just as we were retreating from the spines, one of us would notice that a low branch was also looming at face height and cry, “Branch!” warning the other to duck. Sometimes, our canoe bumped the trunks of the spindly little cecropia trees, which grow like weeds in the high water. Small, aggressive ants rained down on us, into our hair, down our shirts, into our gear, and we would cry, “Ants!” Ants live at the hollow base where the nine-lobed cecropia leaves attach to the stem, and feed on nectar-producing organs on the leaf blades; in exchange for this favor, they protect their host by attacking and biting anything that touches it, as we soon discovered. But Moises was unmoved by our dismay. “But they are not poisonous,” he would say, paddling demurely ahead while we picked ants off our skin and threw them overboard, only to find that they could swim and often crawled back into the boat.

  The only ants that really commanded Moises’ attention were those who injected venom strong enough to disable a person for a minimum of several hours. One of these species inhabits the hollow tangaranga tree, and we quickly learned to identify their host’s elongate oval leaves. The giant Paraponera ant also garnered Moises’ respect: with a glistening black body over an inch long, it possesses a hypodermic-like stinger with such a large venom reserve that it can sting over and over again. The venom is potent enough to incapacitate even a strong man for a day. Then there are ants who bite and sting, such as the Odontomachus ants. They lurk under every log and when disturbed, gush out like blood from a wound, making the sound of crumpling paper when their feet hit dry leaf litter. “This guy,” Moises told us, pointing to one of them, “he grab you with his front, then he sting with the back.”

  Despite the spines, spiders, and ants, the waterways through which Moises threaded us seemed far safer than the land. One afternoon, Moises took the four of us, Dianne, Jerry, Steve, and me, for a hike through the rain forest. At first, every step seemed booby-trapped: we suspected that each log concealed biting ants arid poisonous snakes, that trees would drip upon us toxic sap and venomous caterpillars, that vines would trip us and send us stumbling into palms that would stab us with stinging spines. “Be careful,” warned Dianne, as we started our walk in the sweltering heat, “especially everywhere.”

  Stephen was the best prepared of us four, for he had visited the Amazon the year before with his mother. Sliding down a stream bed, his mother had broken her leg. He was stung by fire ants. A river of army ants invaded their camp and occupied it for three days. Fortunately, Steve likes ants, so this was actually a highlight.

  So was the time when a column of army ants hunted him. He had been out in the forest, watching a line of leaf-cutter ants stream by, each holding aloft in its jaws a swatch of leaf like a little flag. These ants comprise thirty-nine species and two genera—all of them gardeners. They harvest small pieces of leaves in order to create giant underground gardens of a fungus found nowhere else on earth—their only food. The amount of vegetation cut from tropical forests by one genus of these ants alone, the Atta ants, has been estimated at 12 to 17 percent of all leaf production in the South American tropics where they are found.

  Steve had stood transfixed by the flow of these tiny workers, taking photos with his macro lens. “Then out of the corner of my eye, I noticed ants on the left side of the trail, and decided to take a photo of them, too,” he said. “And suddenly, the column of them breaks off and heads directly for my feet!

  “I turned around and the entire path was closed off with a sheet of army ants,” he told us. “I had no choice but to run right through them at full speed. But I was taking pictures the whole time. I kind of figured if I was going to die, someone would find my camera and they’d know what got me.” Fortunately, though they did bite him, they never made it up his pants.

  Steve had been attacked by another kind of ant, with mandibles as long as its head. It first bit, then stuck its stinger in the wound pierced by the jaws, and vigorously pumped venom from its abdomen into the wound. Chiggers also crawled under his skin. He had even been stung by a tree.

  Because Steve admires weapons, it didn’t surprise me he collected spines. He had found one trunk covered with spines shaped like Life in the Rain Forest Hershey’s Kisses, and reached for it. Moises had tried to grab his hand, but it was too late: the tree stung him. “It injected some toxin that made my hand throb for hours,” he said. “I later dissected the spine, and I could never see a mechanism by which it could do this,” he said.

  “The Amazon is like some nightmare,” he said, “where nothing behaves the way it’s supposed to.” He saw birds fly out of nowhere, perch in front of him, stare him in the face, and fly off. A toad ran—not hopped, he stressed, but ran—away from him faster than he could keep up with it. In the Amazon, he found, one is constantly confronted
with realities that simply can’t be. Just that morning, canoeing with Graciella, his Spanish tutor, and Juan Salas, the camp handyman, Juan had tried to knock a tarantula off a tree for Steve to collect. It had fallen out of sight, and Steve remembers telling Graciella not to worry: “The spider can’t be in the boat.” But no sooner had he spoken than he saw the giant, hairy legs of the spider crawling up over the gunwales. Steve kept a journal recording his experiences, and toward the end of his first expedition he wrote: “This was a great trip, but now I need a vacation.”

  But Moises saw a forest in an utterly different way. He had grown up with the Indians along the Napo River, one of the Amazon’s tributaries arising from Ecuador and flowing into Peru. He pointed to a vine with reddish bark, as thick around as an anaconda. “This guy,” he said, “he give you good survival water when you are lost in the jungle.” He whacked it with his machete, and hoisted the severed stem over our heads so its cool, fresh water poured into our mouths. He shoved the severed vine back into the ground, where he told us it would grow.

  A few steps later, he sliced a great gray-green tree trunk with his machete. First it oozed red, like blood. But then white sap welled up and dripped like cream down the smooth bark. “This guy,” he said, “we call árbol de leche —milk tree. He give you strength in the jungle for two days.” The river people, he explained, also use its milk to treat anemia, and the sap can also be boiled to yield a glue to smear on perches to catch birds. On the trunk of another tree grew a little black swelling, like a gall; this Moises lit with a match, and it burned like an oil lantern. A little beetle lives inside the gall, he explained. “This guy,” he said, referring to the beetle, causes the tree to make a tar, which the people use to seal their blowguns and burn for light in their houses.

  Moises referred to every plant and animal in the forest as “this guy.” Where we saw bewildering, erratic growth, Moises saw a forest full of characters. Like people, some of these characters—the tang-aranga ant, or the poisonous bushmaster snake—could harm you. But others, like the red water vine, the milk tree, the copal gall—offer cool water when you are thirsty, food when you are hungry, and light in the darkness.

  I remembered what my friend the ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin had lectured to a New York audience years before: “A Westerner looks at the jungle and sees green.” But after his first contact with the Indians of the northwest Amazon, he realized, “an Indian looks at the jungle and sees a grocery, a hardware store, a repair shop, and a pharmacy.” Mark has spent decades recording the extensive plant knowledge of tribal people like the Tirios, Wayanás, Akuriyos, Waiwais, and Yanomami, and still is learning more.

  The people in the villages we passed each day were not Indians, though they had Indian ancestry as well as Portuguese, and sometimes African, blood; but they, too, used many of these plants in their everyday life. From the fronds of the yarina palm, they made their beautiful roofs, which cost them nothing and would last ten years. In minutes, they could weave a backpack out of the fronds of chambira, strong enough to carry home a hundred-pound peccary. They grate their manioc, the tuberous staple of the diet, with the spiny stilt roots of raffia. From a buttress of the great remo caspi, they could slice a canoe paddle—without killing the tree. By twisting the fibers of the leaves of the young Maximiliana palm, they could instantly create fishing line. They weave bark cloth from the fiber beneath the bark of the machimango tree.

  But perhaps most astonishing, the people also understood the chemical properties of these plants. Tropical plant species, I had learned from Mark, are twice as likely to contain alkaloids as temperate plants. Alkaloids, which often taste bitter, are a product of eons of chemical warfare waged between these plants and their insect predators. But these chemical compounds, Mark writes in his wonderful book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, also “have had a major impact on every culture—if not every person—on the planet.” Alkaloid compounds are responsible for the zing of caffeine, the numbing of painkillers, the toxicity of deadly poisons, and the transporting powers of hallucinogens.

  The curative powers in these plants sometimes exceed anything medical laboratories can synthesize, Mark says, for their efficacy has already been proven: first by the plants themselves, and then by the people who have used them for millennia. In fact, he points out, tropical plants have already provided some of our most important medicines: the first effective antimalarial drug, quinine, is an alkaloid from the bark of the cinchona tree, first discovered thousands of years ago by Peruvian Indians. Mark firmly believes that the plant knowledge of Amazonian people represents our greatest hope for finding cures to currently incurable diseases, such as AIDS and cancer.

  From the yellow-flowering retama, Moises told us, the people here make a tea that cures yellow fever; from the bark of the amasisa tree comes a potion that cleanses the kidneys. The indano, or iodine, tree’s orange bark would cure ringworm and heal rashes, and the elephant ear philodendron contains an anesthetic for toothache. The bark of the root of the motello sanango restores male fertility.

  If the people here knew the secrets of the local plants better than the chemists at home, surely they must know also the secrets of the dolphins. They were obviously excellent observers of natural history. Perhaps they knew where the dolphins went on their travels; whether they lived in family groups; if they hunted cooperatively; how they cared for their young. I asked Moises and Mario if it was possible for us to visit one of the villages, to learn from the people what they knew about the pink dolphins.

  Of course, they told me. In fact, Mario’s father and mother lived in San Pedro, only minutes from the lodge. His father, Mario told me through Moises, could certainly tell me about the dolphins, for he knew them well.

  San Pedro on the whitewater Quebrada Blanco is a neat thatched village of 300 people. Most of its residents came here from Chino village, five or six miles downstream, which began to flood about ten years ago when the river, as is often its wont, changed its course and began to swallow the town. Now more and more people move here each year, as Chino is almost entirely underwater. Piles of yarina fronds lie drying in yards and on roofs, evidence of new construction.

  Mario’s handsome, graying father, Juan, and his lively mother, Ilda, were among the first settlers to build their house on stilts high above the river. They built the house entirely from the forest: the springy, two-inch-wide slats of the floor made of cashapona palm, its wide beams from the red-barked capirona. The house is spacious, and feels even more so because items not in use are tucked into the rafters: blowguns and hunting spears; some tin cooking pots; a big drum made of peccary hide for dances and celebrations; the skin of an ocelot Juan killed last year because it was raiding his chickens. In one corner, a three-year-old was quietly playing with a pet woolly monkey. “My son,” said Mario, in a burst of unexpected English, and with a broad smile. We gave the boy a handful of hard candy we had purchased in Iquitos. The charming smile he visited on us in return was so like Mario’s I nearly broke out laughing.

  I shook hands with Juan. “Please tell him I want to learn about the bufeo colorado,” I asked Moises, using the name by which Inia is known here, which means “the ruddy dolphin.” Juan responded in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua, and Moises translated:

  “The people here have a belief that is true,” he said. Five or six years ago, he said, the waters came very high, and dolphins swam beneath the houses. The parents of young girls told their children not to wash their clothes in the river in the rainy season. For the male dolphin, he likes the girls, and this can be dangerous. The male dolphins want to take the girls away to the Encante; and the female dolphins can come for the boys.

  Last year, Juan said, a dolphin had come for his wife. She had been menstruating (quite a feat for a woman in her sixties, I thought) and left her soiled underclothes on the raft with the washing, which had attracted a dolphin. The next day, she felt a pain in her stomach. The pain, he explained, was the result of an invisible dart, shot from the blowhol
e of the dolphin. So you must be careful when you hear the breath of the dolphin, he warned; with its loud exhalations, the bufeo can send forth darts more powerful than those shot from a blowgun. You need a particular type of shaman, called a curandeiro, to remove them. As part of an elaborate ceremony he must suck the dart from the flesh with his mouth, and then vomit it out. Some of the dolphins here embody the spirits of witch doctors, he said, and only a shaman can counteract their powers.

  “What are some of those powers?” I asked. When he was ten years old, Juan said, he lived in the nearby village of Esperanza. There a dolphin visited his powers on his godmother, Cecelia. Her husband went into the jungle to work, he explained, and sometimes husbands are gone for years. But he came back earlier than Cecelia expected. Every day, he brought her delicious fish to eat; and every night he made passionate love to her. But oddly, he was always gone by the time she woke in the morning.

  A year passed. Then one day her husband came home, but did not bring her any fish; he brought meat instead. Why? Because he had never brought her any fish—he had been away for a year!

  Learning this, Cecelia became pale and sick. No longer did she want to warm their bed with lovemaking. She grew sicker every day, and wandered about as if in a trance. Her husband could not understand what was wrong. Finally, he sought the help of a shaman.

  In a trance, the shaman visited the Encante. Now he saw what had happened: after her husband had left for the forest, a dolphin had fallen in love with Cecelia. But knowing that she would never take a lover, the bufeo had transformed himself into the very likeness of her husband. In his guise, the dolphin had enjoyed Cecelia’s favors every night. But there was more to the story, Mario’s father said: the dolphin had fathered a baby that was growing in her womb.