Then in 1993 came another astonishing discovery. From riverbed sediments near where Pakicetus was found, but perhaps a million years younger, a team led by Hans Thewissen of Northeastern Ohio Universities unearthed the impossible: a whale with hooves. The finding was so astonishing that it prompted Annalisa Berta, a San Diego biologist, to ask, in an article in the journal Science, “What Is a Whale?” Gingerich and Thewissen’s discoveries, she argued, challenged the very definition of the mammalian order Cetacea, to which the whales and dolphins belong.
Thewissen named his fossil Ambulocetus natans —the Walking Whale That Swims. Its bones were discovered among beds of fossil mollusks, showing it had lived in a shallow sea. The size of the vertebrae, ribs, and limbs shows it was probably as big as a male sea lion, weighing perhaps 660 pounds. Its front legs had become flippers. But the four-toed back feet were definitely hoofed, almost like a pig’s.
What had it looked like? How had it moved? What did it eat? “Ambulocetus looks like a mammal version of a crocodile,” Gary said, flying instantly back to the early Eocene. “It would lie in wait in the shallow water for something to eat. It would have lurked in the mouths of rivers. In addition to fish, it may have eaten other mammals when they would come to the riverbank to drink.”
What would the Walking Whale have seen as it looked up out of the water? What victims might it have grabbed? “Indo-Pakistan was a separate continent at the time, not yet having crunched into the underside of Asia to throw up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. There were various hoofed mammals, scarcely larger than a terrier,” Gary answered. “And there were doglike flesh-eaters, and the meat-eating ungulates called mesonychids, and early rodents and primates. . . .” There were fantastic creatures, whose names sound like the poetry of another planet: hyaenodontids, anthra- cobunids, tillodonts. The plant-eating tillodonts looked like large rodents, and as for the anthracobunids—“we don’t know what the damn things looked like,” said Gary, “almost all we know are teeth and little pieces of jaws.” Fossils of short-legged, hoofed animals called anthracotheres, with low-crowned chewing teeth, appear in Asian sediments shortly thereafter; their living descendants are the hippos, explained Gary, and molecular evidence now shows that whales are more closely related to hippos than to the extinct meat-eaters with hooves (evidence with which Gingerich now agrees). “So perhaps,” Gary suggested, “early whales were munching their own more terrestrial relatives.”
But soon the picture fades. Whales evolved in the Eocene, but they looked nothing like the whales and dolphins of today. What came next? No one knows. For there is a gap in the fossil record of good whale specimens for more than 10 million years. That gap lasted for most of the Oligocene epoch. Only at the very end of the epoch do whales again surface from the sediments of ancient seabeds. And when they do, they are again transformed. These new whales looked much like the pink dolphins of the Amazon today: creatures completely lacking hind limbs and with broad, flippered hands; perfectly adapted to life in the water.
Long after we had returned home, I asked Gary if he saw any similarity between his stories of the bufeo’s ancient ancestors and Don Jorge’s stories of how bufeos behave today. He laughed. “Scientists like to believe they live a wholly different world than storytelling,” he said. “When we tell a story we like to call it hypothesis formation.” Unlike the storyteller, the scientist is ethically bound to try to disprove his hypothesis—an important distinction, Gary stressed. But yes, he conceded; there were similarities, too.
“As a child, I used to think of the curious juxtaposition of dragons versus dinosaurs,” Gary told me. “Neither is part of modern existence. Both are made of fragments. We are both filling in. In science, we have the fossils we are fleshing out; and the people are still fleshing out their stories, too.”
In science, as in mythology, humans seek the connections in the world—the links between reptiles and birds, between land-dwelling mammals and water-dwelling dolphins—and, for that matter, between a prayerful planting and a plentiful harvest, between acts of good and evil and rewards and punishments. Archaeopteryx supplies a link around which paleontologists have built a story; Basilosaurus supplies another.
But the Cobra Grande, the Mapinguary, the water jaguar, are also links. Whether or not these creatures now dwell among us in flesh and blood, or whether they dwell in our memories or imaginations, they provide connections, too: our behavior has consequences. To risk enraging these ancient monsters invites grave danger, so people avoid areas where they have reportedly been seen. The stories, in effect, create moving “reserves” where people do not hunt or fish. Such fears, in fact, protect the bufeo, which is not hunted. I remembered what Don Jorge had told us before Gary and I set out to look for bufeos: “It is good to fear it. It is always good to fear it. ”
“Much of the lore surrounding Amazonian waters serves to conserve resources,” Smith points out in The Enchanted Amazon Rain Forest. “I do not wish to imply that indigenous peoples are always in harmony with nature”—archeological records show that certain areas of the American tropics suffered severe soil erosion many hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, because of indigenous peoples’ unwise farming practices. At one time, the Amazon floodplain was densely settled: some chiefdoms extended more than sixty miles inland. Estimates of human populations in Amazonia around 1500 range from 1 million to 6 million people—the latter figure approaching the density of today. “But the fact remains,” Smith points out, “although pre-contact aboriginal populations were dense, they did not trigger massive destruction of natural resources. Cultural checks were evidently in play to prevent abuse of fish, game and other natural resources.”
But are the stories the people tell today of these fantastic creatures really true?
As Gary would argue, the stories do not conform to scientific facts the way that fossils do. The truth of scientific stories can be tested, he points out. But so can the people’s stories about the Cobra Grande, about Curupira, about dancing dolphins. “Veracity,” said the British biologist Thomas Huxley, who bravely championed Darwin’s theory of evolution, “is the heart of morality.” The word “truth” comes from the Old English treowth, which means “loyalty.” Perhaps these stories persist because they honor a loyalty, a morality, that dictates how we should behave toward other creatures.Curupira yokes us to this truth: killing too many peccaries is a sin against the human community, which depends on a regular supply of peccaries for food. But Curupira’s story also reminds us of a deeper truth: greed, he tells us, can suck the very humanity from our souls.
The river people’s stories tell us a truth as real as buried fossils. Don Jorge’s story and Gary’s were, in fact, mirror images: The shape-shifting dolphins come to us from different ends of the spectrum of time. One story tells the whales lived on land, transformed, and slipped into the water; in the other, the whales arise from the water, transform, and walk on the land. The stories are equally fantastic. And both storytellers assure you: This isn’t just a story. It’s really true.
There was a time when whales walked. There was a time when they may have made love on the land. And even today, when the Amazon’s waters drain low, sometimes the bufeos, the most primitive of the living whales, are left in the shallows at the water’s edge. At times, on their great winglike flippers, each with five fingers inside like ours, they reenact the turning point of their evolution, perhaps 50 million years ago: still, they can crawl upon the land, sometimes for many dozens of yards, to find their way back to the water once again.
PART FOUR
DROWNING
“The dolphins do many things in the jungle,” Moises began one afternoon. He told us the story of the Vasquez family.
They had a beautiful daughter, Doselina. One day fourteen years ago she was sitting on the porch of the house when a man greeted her—a man she didn’t know. He said he was from a neighboring village. “Where’s your canoe?” she asked. He said he had walked to the house.
“What
did he look like?” I asked.
“His face was light, pink like American people,” Moises said, “and he had black shoes, a beautiful watch, and a very good flashlight.”
Naturally, the girl fell in love with him. The couple planned to marry in three months. But she was afraid to tell her father, who was very protective of his girl. The couple met only at night, when her lover would come to the house and slip into her bed. But early one morning, as the young man was sneaking away, the father woke up and shot him.
No one ever found a body. But the next day the father found a pink dolphin dead on the beach. The girl never saw her suitor again.
A year later, though, she was out on the river when a strange wind came out of nowhere and capsized her canoe. Her body, too, was lost. But the father had a dream that night: “I wanted to marry your daughter,” a pale man told him in the dream, “but you killed me. And now your daughter and I are finally together.”
Mamirauá Reserve
Mamirauá: Calf of the Manatee
I woke Dianne at 11 P.M. with a line from a nursery rhyme:
“Hickory, dickory dock,” I recited into the darkness.
“A mouse ran up the clock,” Dianne answered sleepily.
“A rat, actually,” I said. “And no clock—my legs.”
For the third time in five minutes, as I lay in the top bunk bed at the Projecto Mamirauá office, the animal had scampered over the sheets covering my feet, ankles, and shins, and would have continued north had I not knocked it off the bed. But despite my efforts, it seemed determined to return.
I’d noticed the rat in the room when I’d piled our gear in there earlier, but had decided not to mention it to Dianne. The facility in which we found ourselves sleeping that night also hosted three manatees, a giant Amazon river otter, and a white uakari monkey—all orphans rescued by Project staff. Where there is animal feed, I knew, there are usually rats. But I like rats. I had assumed it wouldn’t bother us. I certainly did not expect to find it in my bed.
Minutes before, I’d lain thinking that this day, nearly over, at least could not get worse. Wrong again.
Dianne and I had flown to Manaus several days earlier. Now it was the end of August, and I was still obsessed with the idea of following the dolphins. It seemed there was only one way to do this: to follow Vera’s radio-tagged animals at Mamirauá, four hundred miles to the west. Mamirauá is the largest flooded forest reserve in the world, 2.7 million acres, at the junction of the black-water Japurá River and the white-water section of the upper Amazon, the Solimões.
We’d been unable to forewarn Vera of our coming. For weeks, we couldn’t raise her by fax, phone, or e-mail. It was the beginning of the dry season—a good time for tracking dolphins because they are not so spread out. But this was also an El Niño year—a periodic warming of the ocean surface off the western coast of South America, with widespread weather effects—and now it was so dry that hydropower was limited and power outages common. No wonder we couldn’t reach Vera. We’d decided to go to Brazil anyway. “At least we have a better chance of following dolphins in Brazil than in the States,” I’d said to Dianne.
We arrived at INPA to find Vera beset by a conference. Not only couldn’t she accompany us to Mamirauá; she didn’t even know for sure where her telemetry receiver was, she had packed in such a hurry. She’d been in Mamirauá just the week before, unsuccessfully hunting for her radio-tagged dolphins. Only three of the nine transmitters she had originally affixed to dolphins, attaching them by nylon pins through the dorsal ridge, seemed to be working. The others’ batteries had died or the transmitters had fallen off. But in eight days of searching, Vera hadn’t been able to pick up a signal. She wasn’t even sure these three were still working. The seven months they had so far functioned was already a record for a transmitter attached to a dolphin.
In addition to the data she takes from her boat, three ninety-six-foot telemetry towers, strategically placed at the entrances to big lakes, automatically record any “hits” from the radio-tagged dolphins who pass by them. Though she had not analyzed all the data from her seven months of tracking, so far it strongly suggested that although the dolphins can swim nearly nine miles in an hour, they usually travel only about six miles a day, and they remain all year in the Mamirauá system—except for one case, which I wasn’t sure Vera believed. At the conference we had attended in Florida, a German researcher, Thomas Henningsen, had reported seeing a dolphin with a radio transmitter on its dorsal ridge a thousand miles away from Mamirauá at Pacaya-Samiria reserve in Peru.
The tower-tracking made Vera’s job easier, but not effortless. “You will see the towers I have to climb,” she said, laughing. “To be a biologist, you do crazy things. You have to fix engines, you have to climb thirty meters, only to study the animals.” One of the towers, Vera said, had been colonized by Africanized bees. Nonetheless, dressed in a beekeeper’s outfit (an expense she knew would raise eyebrows at INPA—a beekeeper’s suit for a dolphin project?) Vera had climbed up the tower in June to download the data from the receiver—which, she found, was full of honey. Another of the towers was actually a platform atop a tree inhabited by hundreds of large, biting ants. “The ants, when you go up, are not so angry,” she said. “But when you come down, they try to bite. I just push them off. I do not kill.” Vera mentioned the tree offered a good vantage point from which to observe dolphins who passed by. “Maybe you should go up there,” she suggested. Dianne and I looked at each other and thought, Maybe not.
Vera gave us a phone number for Márcio Ayres, the Brazilian scientist whose studies of the rare white uakari, a white-coated version of the red uakaris we had met at Roxanne’s camp, had convinced Brazil to establish the reserve, since the white uakari lives nowhere else in the world. Back at our room at the Hotel Monaco, I tried to phone him. Seven times I tried the number with the same result: I would dial 9 for reception, ask for the operator (who always answered with great surprise), and give her the phone number in Portuguese and hang up. She would ring our room, I would pick up the telephone—and hear no sound whatsoever.
I walked down to the desk to report the problem to the English-speaking receptionist.
“Why no sound?” I asked.
“There is a problem,” he answered.
“What is the problem?” I asked.
“I think,” he replied, “that it is the telephone.”
On the eighth try, we reached a voice: “Oi,” I said, the Brazilian greeting, and was cut off. On the ninth attempt, I tried English: “Hello.” Cut off. Tenth try: I reached Dr. Ayres, introduced myself and Dianne, and told him what we were doing. “Is it possible,” I began to ask—and we were cut off. On the eleventh try, the biologist answered without wasting time on a greeting: “Yes, yes, you can come.” We booked our flight to Tefé, a river town of 35,000 people, twenty-five miles from the reserve.
———
Our luck seemed to change when we arrived in Tefé. At the Projecto Mamirauá office, two friendly, dark-haired women in their early thirties, Miriam Marmontel and Andrea Piris, a manatee researcher and forester, respectively, welcomed us in perfect English and generously made all the arrangements: a Project speedboat would take us to the largest of the six floating houses in the reserve. We would have two boatman-guides to help us—both strong, knowledgeable local men, and both named Antonio. In a second speedboat, Miriam would accompany us to the reserve. And, to my astonished delight, she agreed to loan us the telemetry she uses for her manatees for our first three days to try to track the dolphins.
Everyone at the Project office seemed to know about our expedition. Right before we left, the office manager, a handsome Brazilian named Luciano, winked at us and said with a sly smile, “Cuidado com o boto .” (“Be careful with those botos.”) “He’s warning you not to let them take you away,” Miriam said.
Andrea accompanied us to the supermercado to buy provisions for ourselves and for the Antonios. What would the men like to eat? I asked.
We also bought huge sacks of farina, rice, and dried beans, fresh potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and eggs, tins of beef and sardines and tuna, cooking oil, salt, coffee, cheese, bread, crackers, powdered milk, spaghetti, tomato sauce, oranges, limes, apples, and a powdered-drink mix (which proved loathsome) to supplement the supplies of powdered Gatorade and freeze-dried food we had brought from the States.
We loaded our gear into the two 24-horsepower speedboats at Tefé Lake that afternoon and set off for the two-story floating house that would be our base.
Within minutes, we saw our first boto: a huge pink fin rose and fell, rose and fell, before us just as we were turning left from Tefé Lake into the channel that leads to the Solimões. Here, as at the Meeting of the Waters, white and black waters meet, and the dolphins, Miriam told us, love to hunt here.
And then, another fin—a dark one—and another, a gray. Our hearts leapt. At least three, perhaps five, dolphins surfaced around us, blowing. Miriam said she thought some of them had respiratory problems, they breathed so loud.
Just after these sightings, however, one of the boats— mine—abruptly stopped. Antonio tried to fix it, but soon announced it was “avariou-se ”—broken-down. We would have to be towed back to the Mamirauá Project boathouse. The Project, explained Miriam, was impressively equipped with five houseboats, for remote and overnight trips, and twelve speedboats. “But of course,” she said, “they don’t all work.”
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 18