Electric eels are astonishingly common. One survey, of a whitewater-flooded forest, found electric eels constituted 70 percent of the fish biomass. This one was a small specimen. They can grow to nine feet.
Every few minutes, the sinuous creature beneath us surfaced to gulp air. The mouth is so rich with blood vessels that the eel uses it as a lung; its gills are vestigial, used only to release carbon dioxide. Protecting the sensitive mouth may be one reason the electric eel shocks its prey: stunning prevents the prey fish from struggling. But often the eel doesn’t bother, and instead, like a vacuum cleaner, simply sucks the prey through the mouth directly into the stomach.
Greg and photographer Jim Rowan decreed the eel must be caught and photographed. Rudy and Juan Salas descended to the pool to urge it into a net. Soon the two men were leaping about as the fearful eel tried to hold them at bay. Greg told me that up the Quebrada Blanco last year he and Don Jorge had caught an electric eel. Jorge had touched his machete to its head, enduring shock after shock in an attempt to cure his rheumatism.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“It might have.” Greg laughed. “Or maybe he just felt better when it was over, because then he didn’t have an electric eel shocking him anymore.”
I grew increasingly eager to speak privately with Don Jorge—this man who treated his ailments with electric eels, who could speak without using his voice, and whom dolphins tried to seduce. Later, I asked Jim to arrange a visit to Jorge’s house, and to translate an interview so I could talk to him about the magical powers of bufeo. To my surprise, Gary offered to come with us. A more unlikely pairing of minds I could not imagine: Gary, whose truths were fossils, literally set in stone, and Jorge, to whom truth appeared as the wishes of plants and the vaporous spoutings of dolphins. Would Gary, a talented teacher, feel the need to “educate” Don Jorge? Would Don Jorge sense Gary’s disbelief and feel insulted? Neither would believe the other’s stories. Gary no more believed in Curupira than Don Jorge would believe in dinosaurs. But both men, as I was to learn, told mirroring truths. Their stories spoke of time and transformation, understandings that reflected each other the way the waters of the Encante mirror the stars in the sky.
We visited with Don Jorge one afternoon at the slat-floored, stilted house in Chino he shares with his smiling, wrinkled wife, Isabella. But before we sat down, Don Jorge had something to show us. He led Jim, Gary, and me to the small kitchen of the house. He lifted up the large wooden bowl in which Isabella makes masato. Beneath it was a foot-and-a-half-long, smooth-shelled turtle with dark eyes and a pointy snout. Its neck was tucked to the side like a bird with its head under its wing. Gary gasped. “It’s a Podocnemis!” he exclaimed. “I’ve read about them, but I never thought I’d see one.”
Podocnemis is the name of a group of large South American freshwater turtles with necks that do not retract. Instead, these turtles tuck the head to the side to protect it beneath the shell. They are the most primitive turtles in the world. They may be among the few survivors from the time of Pangaea, the great global supercontinent, whose U-shaped landmass lay on its side with the ancient sea named after Tethys, the Greek Titaness and sea goddess, in the middle. As continental drift began to break Pangaea apart, its bottom half became the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland, which contained the landmasses that would form South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica. Ninety million years ago, just before the Mesozoic dinosaurs went extinct and as the flowering plants were evolving, Gondwanaland began to split, and South America became a giant island floating west. By then, however, the side-necked turtles had already appeared, accounting for their distribution today: Seven species of these turtles live in the freshwater rivers and lakes of the Amazon and Orinoco basins; an eighth species survives on the African island of Madagascar. All of them are increasingly rare.
Don Jorge recognized the turtle’s rarity. He hadn’t meant to catch it; it had just come up on his fishing line. What would they do with it? He and Isabella would eat it that night, he supposed. Gary and I offered to buy it. The scientists and photographers back at camp would be thrilled to see this rare creature, we explained, and after photographing it, we would let it go. Five dollars purchased its freedom. Then Don Jorge led us to the open porch, the room nearest the river, where we perched on odd-sized chairs and stools and Jim patiently translated our conversation about dolphins.
“Oh, I know everything there is to know about bufeos,” Don Jorge said matter-of-factly. “When the bufeo wants to steal you away, it transforms itself. Yes, the dolphin has the ability to stand, out of the water, and appear as anyone—even as your best friend: ‘ Hey, Jorge,’ he’ll call, ‘ come for a swim!’ And the two of you will be swimming together, and then the dolphin is a dolphin again. And now, you are one of him. You don’t even feel it, but it takes you in its canoe, and goes beneath the water.” Oh yes, I thought, Gary will recognize that: you slip away, without even feeling it—to the Cretaceous, to the Jurassic, to the Encante. And in fact, Gary now listened intently, suspending his disbelief.
“The dolphins come out of the water and stand on their tails and have the most enticing female figure you’ve ever seen,” Don Jorge continued. “And this I have seen—a woman once came out of the water in front of me. She was naked. I was attracted to her, but didn’t follow. I knew it was a dolphin, and that she would take me underwater. You stay there, as an element of the water, in the city there.” The Encante, he explained, is complete with cars, banks—“everything you have in Iquitos.” In fact, canoeing on the river at night, sometimes he can hear the church bells toll from the Encante. “
It is a beautiful city, but you can never return,” he said. “Once they take you, there’s no hope. It’s forever. So when I saw that dolphin, I turned around and left.”
Don Jorge paused to pour beer—the custom, Jim explained, is one pours the bottle into the single glass for the other, who then drinks and then pours more beer into the same glass and passes it to another—an opportunity to share grace and hospitality when there is only one glass. “One time, at the mouth of the Quebrada Blanco and the Tahuayo, I ran into two bufeos,” Jorge continued. “One was a female who lay on her back, showing me her breasts. I kept going, but then the head of a woman popped out of the water and seductively licked her lips and flicked her tongue at me. She wanted to make love with me. But the problem is, it’s so fantastic, the lovemaking, that you will die of pleasure. If you’re alone with that dolphin, you’ll end up a dead man.”
There are other dangers to encounters with bufeos, he told us. “One night recently on the Tahuayo, I was paddling in my canoe—and going nowhere! Usually, when you hit a log, you can hear it scrape,” he said—and in fact we remembered that sound from our adventure on Caiman Lake. But this time, he said, he heard no such sound, and was puzzled. “What’s going on?” he asked himself. “And then I knew: it must be a bufeo! Fortunately, I had a cigarette behind my ear. I smoked it, and the canoe broke loose.”
“It’s witchcraft!” Jorge and Isabella exclaimed in unison. The bufeo can be downright devilish. You must be careful not to offend bufeos. These dolphins also shoot invisible darts, they said, which can go into your heart and kill you. They blow the dart from the blowhole, and it can cause incredible pain. Once, Don Jorge said, a dolphin shot a dart up at him just as he was squatting to relieve himself in the latrine over the river. The dart went right up his anus! The next day, it hurt very badly. But a medicine man was able to help: he blew tobacco smoke into the orifice, and then Don Jorge was cured.
Happily, Don Jorge explained, bufeos normally seem to like him, perhaps because he plays guitar. Dolphins like music. And he knows how to repel the bufeo when necessary. You can blow smoke, or throw the tobacco directly into the water. When a woman has her period, Isabella told me through Jim, she must carry tobacco with her at all times. Otherwise, the bufeo will smell her menstrual blood and come after her. But Don Jorge is the one in more danger, she said, as he spends so muc
h of his life on the water.
Don Jorge has seen the dolphin in many forms. “One day,” he related, “I went with my parents and a few neighbors to a large lake. It was brownish water, black and white water mixed. We had decided to go fishing for paiche [pirarucu] with barbasco root.” The shallow root of the barbasco vine contains a fish poison that causes the animals to float to the surface where they are easily captured. “We had two hundred kilos of barbasco root. We were well prepared to fish for two to three weeks. At midday, we were smashing roots to prepare them for the next day. We were scouting the lake when two botos appeared. And the people were saying, “These dolphins will die when we throw the poison in.’
“We had fifty kilos of root prepared just then, at one o’clock, and two guys with nice shoes and big sombreros were walking along the side of the lake. ‘ Hello, how are you doing?’ we greeted each other, and we told them what we were doing. Then they walked away.
“Then we went back to the lake—and the dolphins weren’t there anymore. They knew that they would die if they stayed there. And the reason they knew about the barbasco was those men were the dolphins. I was ten years old then and knew what I was about. It is certain bufeos transform into people. This isn’t a story. I saw this myself. It really happened.
“And another time: I was in Rio Haya at Carnival. It was February. That’s a big party, a festival, and people are playing flutes. At about midnight, one of the flutists says, ‘Let’s eat!’ A big table was laid. A young man appeared at that time, very well dressed. So the young, good-looking guy says, ‘While you eat, may I try out your flutes?’ And he began to play—old songs, new songs, traditional songs—and he blew them away, he was so good.
“Upon hearing him play, the band was very embarrassed, because this guy was better than them. And all the young women were totally in love with him. So the head musician says, ‘ Now let me play, so you can dance.’ Now the people preferred listening to the young man play, but he wanted to dance. The women stuck to him like glue—but finally he had to stop dancing because the people insisted that he play again. Finally, it was three o’clock in the morning, and he said he had to stop playing to take a leak. So he went out to the docks, where the canoes were tied, and— voom!—he dove into the water!
“As this happened, the people noticed that all these dolphins were coming near: the flutist’s brother and sisters and family! Then they realized that he wasn’t just a good-looking guy, but an element of the water. At that time, I was twenty-two years old, and I realized, too, that he was a bufeo.”
So why is it, I asked, that bufeos transform themselves into people? Are they not content to live in the beautiful Encante? Why do they try to take people away? Don Jorge thought for a moment—he hadn’t considered this question before. Jim translated his conjecture: “He imagines it may be because the waters are so extensive, they need to make their populations grow,” he said. “Maybe taking people beneath gives their cities more population.”
Gary and I are going to look for bufeos tomorrow, I told Don Jorge through Jim. Should we take any special precautions? Should we be afraid?
“It is good to fear it,” Don Jorge replies. “It is always good to fear it.”
We went out with Moises the following morning to look for bufeos. Earlier, our group had visited Charro Lake; there we had seen tucuxis, but no pink dolphins. In our trips to the villages and into the reserve, we hadn’t seen any, either. Unlike the month before, when Dianne and I were here, watching dolphins was not the focus of my second trip; plus, the water had dropped significantly, and the bufeos, said Moises, were following the water as it drained to the Amazon.
Moises had taken the motorized canoe out earlier to see if he could find dolphins for us. There were two, he said, a male and a female, in a deep channel leading to the Amazon. He had raced back to get us, and by the time we returned, at least one of them was still there. But all we saw was a pinkish shiver on the water’s surface.
“This is what I’m trying to follow,” I said to Gary sheepishly as we motored back to the lodge. “I’m sorry this is so disappointing.”
But Gary understood. This was like working with fossils, he said: one glimpse, so many gaps. “There are entire organisms we know only from a single tooth.”
For many years, in fact, such was the case for many species of prehistoric whales, Gary told me, the ancestors of the bufeo. Fully aquatic whales existed by the middle Eocene, 45 million years ago or so, as we know from fossil skeletons discovered in marine sediments in Texas, Egypt, and Nigeria. But how did a mammal, whose ancestors had lived for millions of years on the land, transform itself to live, like a fish, in the water? For many years, the links between the land mammal and the water creature were missing, and its millions of years of evolution were an utter blank. The origin of the whales was one of the deepest mysteries of mammalian evolution.
The answer, Gary told me, has only recently been revealed. It is a story so fantastic that, if its truth were not set in stone, no one would believe it.
“Nothing less resembles a mammal than a whale or a dolphin,” wrote Giorgio Pilleri, the director of the Berne University of Brain Anatomy, in Secrets of the Blind Dolphins, an account of his journey to Pakistan in 1969 to collect Gangetic river dolphins there. “Nowhere is the impact of ecological factors on body shape so apparent as in whales and dolphins. Nowhere has an organism undergone such complete transformation,” Pilleri wrote.
No other animals have undergone such far-reaching anatomical changes in the course of their evolution: the pelvis shrank, the hind limbs vanished, the forelimbs became flippers, tail flukes appeared without bones, the nostrils united and moved to the top of the head. The skull was reorganized completely in order to hear underwater and to withstand the pressure of deep dives. “One look at the animals is enough to show what a fantastic process it was,” wrote Pilleri, “more of a revolution than an evolution.”
A month after we returned from Peru, I visited Chicago’s Field Museum with Gary to examine the skulls of Inia and Sotalia. Gary had once been in charge of reorganizing the museum’s research collection of more than 40,000 mammal fossils; yet his reverence for bones is untarnished. With infinite gentleness, he lifted the yellowed skull of the Sotalia out of its long white cardboard storage box. A deep quiet settled over him, as if he were listening to the bones speak. When Gary finally spoke, his voice dropped low, an aural kneeling, like a pilgrim before a great mystery: “It doesn’t look like a mammal skull,” he said softly. The yellowing tag says this specimen is from Venezuela, Lake Maracaibo, 1912; the bones are still greasy from blubber. The eighteen-inch-long skull looks like a mammal skull that was made of Silly Putty, pushed and pulled all out of shape. “You look at a bear or a weasel, you’re looking at the same basic parts. But here, the skull is telescoped.” In front is a long, tooth-filled jaw, like a beak. The foramen magnum, the hole where the neck bones and spinal cord enter the skull, is not at the bottom, but at the back. Almost everything is out of place: “The underside of the skull has moved up, the nasal has moved back and squashed the parietals. . . .” Gary said. “It’s like going back to square one for figuring out the basic parts.” He picked up the Inia specimen—the skull of an animal who had lived in the Rio Apure in Venezuela in 1968—and though agnostic, invoked the deity. “God,” he said softly. “Look at this weird animal. . . .” The top of the skull is crunched together like a knob, and the jaw is fused, forming a Y, with pointed, single-cusped teeth along the stem and complex crunching teeth arrayed in two rows along each branch.
The story that shaped these skulls lay embedded for millennia in the shallow sediments of extinct rivers and inland seas in Pakistan and Egypt. In 1978 in Pakistan, University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich found, in sediments of a vanished river that had once emptied into a shallow sea, the 48-million-year-old skull of the oldest known whale—Pakicetus. The skull had the long jaws of later whales, but its teeth were distinctive: its massive, triangular, multicus
ped molars were like those of a group of now-extinct mammals called mesonychids.
The mesonychids, as Gary explained, were what today is considered an oxymoron. They were flesh-eating ungulates, carnivores with hooves. They arose more than 60 million years ago, just after the dinosaurs disappeared, branching off from the animals who would later become modern cattle, pigs, and deer. About 35 million years ago, the mesonychids vanished from land. But Gingerich believed that their living descendants swim in the world’s seas and rivers, as whales and dolphins.
In the Eocene, Pakicetus was still a changeling—a creature not fully terrestrial, nor fully aquatic, either. It had to keep its head above the water to hear well. Directional hearing in water requires that the left and right bones known as tympanic bullae be isolated in separate, foam-filled sinuses. These structures are found in the skulls of modern whales and dolphins but were absent in Pakicetus. And the structure of the bones of the ear suggests the animal could not dive to great depths—the eardrums would have popped. Pakicetus may have still spent much time on land, like otters or seals; like them, it may well have mated and given birth on land.
Judging from the size of the skull, Pakicetus may have been about the size of a wolf, though perhaps shaped more like an otter; Gingerich wasn’t sure. The rest of the skeleton hadn’t been found.
But in December of 1989, Gingerich and his team made the discovery that paleontologists had awaited for a century. In the trackless desert of Egypt’s Zeuglodon Valley, his team found a whale with legs.
The creature, Basilosaurus isis, had been known since 1835 (when it was taxonomically misclassed and named “King of Reptiles”). Dozens of incomplete skeletons of this fifty-foot, eel-shaped creature had been unearthed from this valley, which 37 million years earlier had been a shallow bay. Gingerich hadn’t been looking for legs, but here they were: not only the thighbone, or femur, but also the knee joint, and finally, the ankles, feet, and four toes. The shape of the thighbone showed flat areas, where large muscles attached at both ends. Here was proof: whales had once walked.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 17