Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  In the forest, there grows a vine called tumbo that we had seen on our walk. Twisted, ribbonlike, it reminded me of an umbilical cord. From this vine, women make a potion to induce abortion. Cecelia took the potion, and was delivered of the fetus. “It had a hole in the top of its head,” Juan told me through Moises, “the blowhole of a dolphin.”

  I had been looking for facts about an animal, and found instead stories of a phantasm. I had tried to see beneath the water, and had instead climbed into a plant world in the air. Though still I could not chart their courses through the water, I had followed the dolphins into realms I had never before imagined they might take me—into treetops, inside black waters, through the looking-glass world of the forest’s powers. And now, they had led again to new territory: to the people’s understanding of the world beneath the river; to the edge of that thin line between animal and human, water and land, fear and desire.

  Again, I felt as if I were back up the machimango tree: hanging in midair, staring blindly into the polished surface of some impenetrable mystery. As in Charro Lake, the mystery was still elusive: only now I was surrounded with it, in far deeper than I thought I would go.

  Death in the Rain Forest

  By now, we had established a morning routine: After shaking our shoes out, evicting giant cockroaches, Dianne and I would wander into the dining hall to check on the movements of the creatures in camp. “Where is the tarantula?” Last night, it had been observed crawling along the porch toward our room, to Dianne’s immense dismay. (“What’s worse than finding a tarantula in your room?” I had asked her. “Nothing in this universe,” she had replied. “Nope,” I said. “It’s losing a tarantula in your room.”) Later, it had retreated to a corner in the kitchen.

  “Where is the vampire bat?” Steve had caught it, with his quick, ungloved hands, in Jerry’s room, and now it was flying around in the dining hall. “Where is the whip scorpion?” This animal is actually not a scorpion at all but a spider, half again as big as a tarantula, with nine-inch antennae, and folded, hairy front arms to seize insects. “I do not like this whip scorpion at all,” Dianne had commented. But Steve had released it in the dining hall, and now, he said, “it could be anywhere.”

  “Where is the poisonous caterpillar?” Steve had collected it from a tree, brushing it with a stick off the leaf it had been eating into one of the plastic containers he always carried for such occasions. The caterpillar has long yellow hairs and white stripes; its venom, Steve said, is as toxic as a coral snake’s. He had confined it in a can marked PELIGROSO but now it was inexplicably gone.

  So many creatures here seem armed for Armageddon: They must contend with the fact that at any moment something may be trying to eat you, to strangle you, to sting you or bite you, to suck your blood or lay its eggs in your flesh. Even the great bird-hunting tarantulas had something to fear—the female tarantula wasp. Fully five inches long and purple-black, she flies in search of these huge hairy spiders, in order to sting her victim into paralysis and lay her eggs in its flesh. When the larvae hatch, they feed upon the body of the still-living spider, and when they are old enough, chew their way out of the body.

  And yet, there is a strange and exciting beauty to this orgy of hunting and feeding. Each night, in our canoe, we visited a hollow snag that poked up out of the water quite near the lodge like the chimney of a drowned house. We usually came to check on the tarantula who lived there, and we could almost always count on seeing him hunting outside the rim of the hollow. But now, suddenly, he grabbed at something with his forelegs. What was it? The creature raced around the other side of the trunk, like a squirrel. Moises swung the boat around to see. The spider’s intended victim was an inch-long orange assassin bug, named for its deadly hunting weapon—a hypodermic proboscis with which it injects its prey with venom. The assassin had just speared a large beetle, but in its haste to escape the tarantula, it scurried away with the beetle impaled on its poisonous spear.

  No one appreciated these dramas more than Steve. His stories often began with sentences like, “One day I was out harvesting ants for my scorpion, when . . .” or “The only time I was bitten by a poisonous snake, I’d got this call from my boss at Snake Control. . . .” Outside of Orlando, where he had a home much like our lodge, built over a swamp, Steve had amassed an impressive collection of stinging, biting, poisonous predators. As well as snakes and scorpions, he had a two-foot tegu lizard with a blue tongue, who, he realized, “would love to kill me.” The only animal in his menagerie he truly adored was his skunk (“One time when my skunk was combing through my hair, looking for something to eat . . . ,” began one of his stories). He had bought her because he was afraid of spiders, and skunks love to eat spiders. But, with the same great mental discipline required of a student of the martial arts, Steve had taught himself to enjoy and admire spiders for the very violence he had originally feared.

  As he had taught himself the graceful moves of tai chi chuan and karate kata, he taught himself to see the grace in the violence of nature. And this was why he loved the Amazon. It was part of why Dianne and I loved it, too: this vast operatic drama of life and death, where beauty and cruelty twine tight. There is a wholeness to the spider’s bite, the assassin bug’s poison, the tarantula wasp’s sting. None are evil or pointless; rather, the opposite is true. All are fulfilling roles that evolution had taken millions of years to perfect.

  But we, of course, were spectators in that drama. For all the biting, stinging creatures here, for all the spines and branches, for all the unseen fish with sharp teeth and poisonous spines, Dianne and I felt comfortable and safe. True, my pale skin had burned badly in the sun; even Dianne’s nut-brown California tan was now peeling off her nose like shoe leather. True, we had so many insect bites that scratching them became a form of passive entertainment, like watching TV. I woke up sometimes in bloody sheets from scratching bites in my sleep. But nothing worse had befallen us.

  And although we still couldn’t identify individuals, we were making some progress in our dolphin observations. One spectacular morning, we had found Charro Lake alive with dolphins—perhaps a dozen bufeos and perhaps as many tucuxis—and recorded 160 surfacings in a single hour. Two bufeos even swam into the shallows, in order to get closer to us. Later we discovered they were swimming in only four feet of water, jammed with submerged branches. Though we’d read bufeos generally ignore tucuxis, that morning the two species were clearly interacting. Fifteen times in one half-hour period, we saw tucuxis and bufeos in very close proximity, and four times we saw a baby tucuxi surface next to an adult bufeo, the sleek little gray head beside the large, pink, bulbous one.

  At one point that day, a pink face erupted from the water bearing a fish sideways in the jaws. The dolphin shook the fish like a dog shaking a sock. In dogs, this is a kill gesture, meant to break the neck of a small prey item; so for the dolphin, the shake may have broken the bones in the fish’s body so it could not struggle. The dolphin then repositioned the fish in its jaws so it slid down the throat headfirst.

  By timing and numbering our observations, we were able to see some patterns. The bufeos were generally most active for periods that averaged half an hour (although sometimes they stretched to forty-one minutes), followed by periods of rest of roughly the same time. They were most active in the morning; by noon, we often found, they moved away, perhaps to the rivers.

  Once, we thought we saw a dolphin sleeping. For eight minutes, between 11:29 and 11:37 one morning, in a shallow spot along a grassy bank, we saw an individual rise, slow and low, almost once a minute at the exact same spot. Later we learned that bufeos prefer to sleep in shallow waters, often (disconcertingly, for aquarium patrons) upside down. It is thought, in fact, one reason most of the hundred or so bufeos that had been imported to aquaria between 1950 and 1976 quickly died is that they had no access to shallow waters where they could rise to the surface easily.

  We made this observation at a village named Huasi, the busy crossroads of tw
o waterways where bufeos, tucuxis, and people often met. Along with Charro Lake, this was one of our most productive observation areas. We could count on seeing dolphins there almost every day, and here we clearly observed how the hunting techniques of tucuxis and bufeos differ: the tucuxis always hunted in groups, seeming to herd schools of fish toward one another, while the bufeos pursued fish singly.

  In addition to the dolphins, children were always coming and going in canoes to the noisy, stilted school. One day, at recess, we saw two little girls holding baby caimans in their hands like Barbie dolls. Bored with their reptilian toys, the bolder girl suggested, “Vamanos a ver los gringos!” (“Let’s go watch the gringos!”) and paddled over to stare at us intently for half an hour as we recorded data on our check sheets. Opposite the school, adults gathered on an island bus stop, awaiting the collectivo, the “water bus,” to Iquitos. When the boat arrived, again we saw a marked difference in the behavior of bufeos and tucuxis: several bufeos came close to investigate, though the tucuxis stayed away. When the water bus pulled away, the bufeos frolicked in the wake and blew air noisily.

  With a thick sheaf of observation sheets recording everything we saw, we would return from each outing to Paul’s immaculate lodge and feel as if we were coming home. With its good food, cozy beds, cold-water showers pumped from the river, and his attentive staff who had become our friends, the lodge was a cocoon of comfort and safety. We began to feel that nothing bad, nothing pointless or terrible, could ever happen here.

  But on the day of our week’s anniversary in camp, we saw that we were wrong.

  We were headed to Charro Lake that dripping morning. On the way, we passed the Francis Antonio, the thrice-weekly collectivo from San Pedro to Iquitos. By 6:15, the boat’s thatched roof was already piled high with logs, bundles of yarina fronds, and twelve lumpy burlap sacks of charcoal. A slaughtered peccary was slung, hammock like, in the rear of the boat, while most of the passengers sat forward, gazing out the windows. Three roosters perched there, their gold and green tail feathers streaming like wet ribbons in the drizzling rain. The roosters would be roasting by day’s end, I thought. I felt sorry for the caimans, sorry for the peccary, sorry for the roosters; but the people, too, of course, are players in the drama of hunting and killing here, and for this they are no more guilty than tarantulas or jaguars.

  Next we passed through a canal. Vultures, with their black lizard heads and naked necks, perched watching from the tops of drowning trees, waiting for death to feed them. Moises said dead animals float by this corridor, strangled by vegetation. All life, I began to think, is savage here.

  But soon, one of Moises’ shortcuts brought us face-to-face with innocents. In the thorny crown of a mimosa protruding two feet above the water’s surface, Moises spotted a cup-shaped nest only slightly larger than a hummingbird’s. Our canoe sideswiped the tree at the very moment he spotted the nest, and its single, speckled, half-inch egg popped out into our canoe.

  Had we broken the tiny egg?

  We heard anguished calls from the edge of the drowning bushes. We couldn’t see them, but we knew the callers were the parents of that egg. They had seen what had happened. They knew what was at stake: their entire universe was, at that moment, at risk of flying apart.

  Suddenly, the vulnerability and perfection of that egg nearly made me weep. Frances Hodgson Burnett has written of the “immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs.” In The Secret Garden, Burnett wrote: “If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end—if there had been even one who did not feel it and act accordingly there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air.”

  Surely the egg was life’s first love: Mates come and go, but to the egg, life has remained steadfast. Love, I thought, may have originated with the nest—one built perhaps a quarter-billion years ago by one of the reptilian ancestors of birds and crocodiles, the thecodonts, who may have guarded eggs and fed their nestlings 185 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex. Surely, I thought, that reptile brain had known to fear the destruction of her eggs. Love’s twin is fear, fear that the loved one might be hurt, or taken away. And like love, it is ancient and abiding: it is the architect of the nest, built to protect the beloved. So this ancient fear is with us still, so old it is inseparable from the most profound and lasting of loves. In this Amazon world where everything seems at once to be gorging and mating and hunting, where life feeds routinely on death, still, the parents of eggs and nestlings, parents of babies and children, feel their anguish no less. A savage world, I realized, is no less loving, no less anguished.

  Dianne lifted the egg. Miraculously, it was unbroken. As we replaced the egg in its perfect cradle, we saw the parents: two white-banded antbirds, fat as juncos, with dark feathers pin-striped with white lines. They were hopping anxiously, calling back and forth to one another amid the dense foliage twenty yards from the tree, to which they had fled upon our approach.

  Later we passed the large, leaf-lined communal nest of the greater ani, a black, thick-billed bird with prominent white eyes. The nest had been built with the efforts of five or six adults, much like the homes of the people who live here. Several females laid and incubated their eggs together. Surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, the babies screamed and the males flicked their paddle tails and growled at us bravely.

  The day proved too rainy to observe dolphins, so we retreated to the lodge. We were waiting for Mario’s mother to come. When we had met at their spacious thatched home in San Pedro, Ilda had generously promised to show us weaving one day, and she was scheduled to come right after lunch. Dianne and Steve and Jerry and I passed the time pleasantly, leafing by lamplight through the eclectic library of field guides and novels and handbooks. In Where There Is No Doctor, a guide written by a health worker in rural Mexico, I read under the heading “Foul or Disgusting Remedies Are Not Likely to Help” that leprosy cannot be cured by a drink made of rotting snakes, nor syphilis cured by eating a vulture. Further, it advised, to cure goiter, don’t tie a crab to the lump; don’t smear it with the brains of a vulture; do not apply human feces; and do not try to cure it by rubbing it with the hand of a dead child.

  By noon, the sky was still fat with rain. The air hung thick as a wet flannel sheet. Mario’s mother was late, but we assumed that, in the manner of people who don’t live by the clock, she would eventually arrive. Moises and Mario took the canoe to San Pedro to see what was keeping her.

  Meanwhile, Jerry showed us exercises to enhance our chi, or life-energy. One has to squat, with the back very straight, knees straight out front—much more difficult than it sounds. With Rudy and Moises, with Steve and Jerry, we debated questions like: what percentage of the time do you think an ant is crawling on you? Our estimates ranged from 100 percent (Jerry) to 10 percent (Steve).

  At 2:30, Moises returned, without Ilda. With a nervous smile, he announced softly: “Some bad luck today.” We expected to hear that Mario’s mother had confused the date, or had some urgent errand. But no: Mario’s three-year-old son, who had been playing so tenderly with the woolly monkey in San Pedro just days before, who had given us the gorgeous smile in return for a handful of candies, had, this morning, fallen into the river and drowned.

  He had fallen off the raft docked just outside the house where he had been playing, and was swept away by the current.

  Mario, Moises told us, was out in his canoe right now, working with the men of the village in a search party to try to recover the body. Some bodies of drowned people are never found; it is said the bufeo steals them away to the Encante. Actually, the dolphins may eat corpses, for their diet is varied. At high water, chances are better that bodies can be recovered, Moises told us; during this time of plenty, it is less likely that the corpses will be scavenged.

  The moment Moises stopped speaking, the rain swep
t down with renewed force. A woman rain, we thought, that could cry all day.

  Steve and I sat stunned. Dianne went outside and cried, then came back and stared vacantly while smoking a cigarette. I sat stupidly repeating, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” We did not know what to do with the grief, or with the horror, or with the guilt. We had reveled in the danger of the Amazon, thinking we were remote from it. We had observed it like a work of art, like a drama on a stage, not thinking the river, the mother of this place, could swallow one of us whole.

  A few minutes later, Moises sat down and in his soft, dreamy voice, announced he had a story for us. Its name, he said, was “Cuento del Delfin y el Yacuruna.” Like a father calming frightened children, he began:

  “I remember when I was younger, there was only one village every two or three miles, even, near Iquitos,” he said. “The tributaries were more quiet. Many different animals lived in the area. But the motors in the Amazon scared the animals. And I think this is the reason many of the phantasms have disappeared.” He began to draw, and a face appeared on the piece of paper.

  Moises’ voice is very low, and he often draws as he talks—often maps of the waterways, to show us exactly where something happened. His words came as softly as the lead strokes of his pencil, the picture and the story taking shape at once.

  “This guy here,” he said, pointing to his drawing, “he sees the phantasm.

  “My grandmother lived in a village in Brazil, which is now a big town. Only two families lived in this town. The nights were quiet. She heard big crocodiles in the night, and dolphins in the river.” The nights were more silent then, and darker. The family had no flashlights. For lamp oil, they burned manatee fat in a big bucket.