The people set their nets for turtles along their migratory routes. The turtles behave like manatees, Miriam translated, and leave the lakes when the water drops; Podocnemis males prefer the shallow waters, where nets are easiest to set, so mostly males are caught in this way. But the females are even more easily captured on the sandbars of their nesting beaches. And their eggs are taken, too: of seven nests Augusto recently found, two had been destroyed by lizards and five by people.
Even worse, the eggs that would normally hatch into females are especially vulnerable. Like many other species of reptiles, the sex of an individual is determined by the temperature at which its egg incubates; the hotter eggs hatch into females. Because these eggs are easier to dig up, Augusto said that in his counts, male turtles now outnumber females six to one.
As we were talking, a fisherman came into the office, carrying a large, thrashing tracajá. Augusto’s eyes lit up. He measured the animal’s dark shell at 17.94 inches, and it weighed in at 30.8 pounds—the largest of the species he had ever seen, a female.
How old was she to have grown to this size? She could have been thirty-five or forty, Augusto answered—about my age, I realized. Augusto laid her on her back, her gray eyes staring upside down, and he spread her scaly back legs apart to feel the soft area at the inside of her thighs. (”Poor thing!” said Miriam—who hadn’t evinced sympathy for this turtle’s fate in the stewpot, but pitied her gynecological exam.) Were there eggs inside her? Tracajás can lay more than forty-five eggs at a time, Augusto said, and produce up to three clutches a season. But she was empty now.
I imagined how she might have heaved her body from the water onto the sandbar on some recent, full-moon night: driven by millennia of turtle-knowledge, she would have crawled perhaps a quarter mile along the sand before selecting the right spot. Then she would have begun to dig. Her strong, horny rear legs and her curved, scaly feet would have sent sand flying, its grains glistening like dew in the moonlight, until the hole was two feet deep. As her gray eyes flowed with tears—the turtle’s way of protecting the cornea from flying sand—she would have birthed dozens of perfect, leathery round eggs into that cool hole, and then, again with her back feet, covered them with sand; and finally, her momentous job complete, she would have dragged her tile-smooth plastron back over the beach, the toenails of her back feet carving S ’s into the sand. Finally, the water would have risen to reclaim her body, weightless and free—only to be caught in someone’s net, and to lie here upside down, awaiting her fate with turtle-patience.
Augusto was now speaking earnestly to Miriam in Portuguese. I guessed correctly what he was saying: he wanted to buy this turtle from the fisherman to set her free. Of course, he couldn’t start buying turtles from people, or soon he would set up an industry—he knew that as well as Miriam did. But nonetheless, Augusto longed for her life.
I did, too. Mamirauá doesn’t get enough visitors to make selling turtles to tourists an industry. Perhaps, I suggested, I could buy the turtle for him?
“It’s only one individual,” Miriam said. “It wouldn’t make any difference—it wouldn’t do any good.”
“It would do a lot of good for this one,” I answered. “But I don’t mean to undermine the Project, or the management plan, or to do anything that could endanger other turtles. Could you ask Augusto if he thinks this would work?”
Miriam translated. “He thinks it’s a good idea,” she said.
“And you, Miriam? What do you think?”
“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe it would set a good conservation example, for the people to see a turtle set free.”
I asked her to find out how much it would cost.
“He thinks it’s worth fifty reals.” Roughly fifty dollars.
I was stunned. Gary and I had bought the Podocnemis from Don Jorge for well under the equivalent of $5. Were the fishermen ripping me off because I was American? No, said Miriam; the people here so prize turtle meat that Augusto had once seen a man trade a turtle for a propane tank.
I had 74 reals left, plus a $100 bill. If I bought the turtle, I would have to borrow money later from Dianne to pay for the rest of our stay in Brazil—including the petrol for our speedboats here, taxi fare for the airports at Tefé and Manaus, departure tax, and anything I ate from the day we left Tefé to the day I returned to the States. Buying any souvenirs from this trip would be out of the question, and I would arrive home in worse debt than I already was.
We waited for Dianne and Andrea to get back from the village.
“I’m spending my last big bill on a turtle,” I announced when the speedboat returned, “if you can loan me money for gas.”
Dianne did not approve. “It’s trade in wildlife, and I don’t like it,” she said sharply. That was an understatement. Dianne had personally witnessed the suffering caused by the burgeoning trade in wild animals. She had once been summoned to Thailand, and later to Borneo, by the International Primate Protection League to care for six baby orangutans confiscated from an illegal animal dealer; two of them had died in her arms. With Shirley McGreal, the director of the League, Dianne had bravely testified in court, despite phoned death threats, to land that dealer, Matthew Block, in jail. Dianne did not want to see this rare turtle eaten any more than I did; but trade in wildlife was, to her, an intrinsic evil, far worse. She wanted no part in stimulating further trade.
But would it? Or would my purchasing the turtle have some other ill effect that I, an outsider, could not foresee? Surely the aid workers who taught caboclos to grow cattle and corn all over the Amazon believed they were doing a great service, as did the Christians who robbed the Indians of their gods and their languages. In the Amazon, it seemed that nothing—the biological world, the political world, the very laws of the universe—operated under the rules I had learned in the States.
I wanted to know what Andrea thought. Not only was she one of our hosts, she was also the expert on local resource use. We decided to discuss it onboard the Uakari, leaving the gray-eyed turtle on her back in Augusto’s laboratory. But before we left, Augusto tied her to a table leg with a string threaded through the hole in the back of her shell. “She’s worth fifty dollars,” he said in Portuguese, “and I can’t have her escape now!”
Andrea felt we should not interfere. “We should let them eat it,” she said solemnly. “It’s a different way to conservation. They can use this resource according to their needs.” Mamirauá’s Management Plan, she reiterated, states clearly that local people should be able to continue to hunt food animals in the reserve—even though it allows killing of animals whose slaughter is outlawed by federal decree.
“But what about setting a conservation example?” I asked.
“They will only think we are funny,” she said.
Our discussion continued for perhaps half an hour. We spoke in English, so the fishermen would not know what we were saying; we did not want to give them the idea that a lucrative market might exist selling these turtles to foreigners. But Augusto, even though he speaks no English, was well aware of the turn the conversation was taking as he read our faces and voices. I could see his distress as the fire in his eyes began to die. Years ago, I had read an article by a prominent conservation biologist with New York’s Wildlife Conservation Society, which today funds much of the work at Mamirauá. “Individuals,” the author wrote, “cannot mean that much when you have to do large-scale manipulations of populations, as a conservationist sometimes must.” But this turtle’s individual life was far from meaningless: in deciding her fate, we grappled with the promise and the plight of the Amazon.
“Once I had this happen with a manatee,” Miriam told us. “It had been harpooned. It would have survived fine if we had released it. I had to watch them kill it in front of me.”
My father was an Army general; and I knew, with heaviness in his heart, he would have made the same decision—to sacrifice the individual to the hope of a greater good.
“The management fact is, this a
nimal has already reproduced,” said Andrea.
“But doesn’t she have value as a study animal? As the largest Augusto has ever seen?”
“Not really.”
“But she could lay eggs again—maybe even this season,” I said desperately.
“Maybe she’s even past reproduction age,” said Miriam.
“A menopausal turtle?” I asked. Andrea and Miriam thought this was hilarious, and deemed it worth translating for Augusto. But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he mumbled something in Portuguese, as if talking to himself. I asked for the translation. “He says maybe she can still teach the others,” Miriam relayed.
But the issue had already been decided. I felt utterly defeated. Miriam had been right: this was just one turtle. In the forty-five minutes that I had spent worrying about her fate, if the scientists’ calculations are correct, a tract of Brazilian rain forest the size of 315 football fields had been destroyed—a rate of 5 million acres a year. Most of it would go for particle board to customers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and most of the profit would benefit executives in Malaysia, Indonesia, China, South Korea, and Singapore. What I had set out to do—to save one turtle from the pot—would do nothing to quell these huge foreign appetites. But perhaps Mamirauá’s management plan might.
Every one of us—Miriam, Andrea, Dianne, Augusto, and I—wanted the same thing: to save this toweringly cruel and nourishing dawn world from fading to twilight. “In my opinion, you can preserve biodiversity only if the people want it,” Márcio Ayres once said. “If the president says, ‘ I’m going to preserve’, that won’t mean much if the government changes in four years. But conservation by the wish of the local people cannot be changed. Then it is a political movement among the local people, a way to get their rights. If the movement comes from the people, it will be very hard to stop.”
Later, back at the floating house, we told Peter about our discussion about the turtle. “That’s why I work on this project and not others,” Peter told us. “The correct premise to start conservation projects is that people are important. I wholeheartedly embrace Mamirauá, as I think this is a conservation project of importance on a world scale, of global importance. I’d like to think of my children and grandchildren knowing that I was a part of this thing. I’d like to think that Project Mamirauá will be that successful.”
The issue was decided. Dianne saw that further discussion was futile. “She’s menopausal!” she said. “Whack her, I say! I’m hungry.” And then she let loose her pirate’s laugh and lit another Newport.
The following night, Dianne and I sat in the anteroom of Ronis and Barbara’s floating house, eyes glued to the television. It was playing a Japanese video of Ronis making a caiman vomit.
On the screen, with a PVC pipe lodged between the caiman’s jaws, Ronis inserts a tube into the reptile’s stomach to flush it with water and dislodge what it has been eating. Its favorite food seemed to be the same as the dolphins’: a member of the fish family Loricaridae, a bottom-feeder. The caiman’s jaws are taped shut for the procedure, “to restore more calm,” Ronis explained to us as we watched. But the caiman on the screen is not calm. The five-foot reptile suddenly leaps off the table, dislodging the pipe, and thrashes on the floor, snapping. “Some problems,” Ronis said matter-of-factly, again narrating the film to us. Onscreen, Ronis picks up the thrashing reptile firmly but gently. His greatest fear about these powerful, prehistoric animals seems to be that he will unduly alarm them; this strong, outwardly macho man seems humbled and honored that he is a traveler in their universe. On this night, after watching the film, we visited that universe with him.
We embarked in Ronis’s motorized canoe. It is painted green, he explained, because white alarms the caimans, as bright light alarms the fish. On our way to the caiman lake, we turned off our headlamps, for we had already discovered this on the boat ride from our floating house to Ronis’s. Fish had leapt out of the water thick as bow spray—an upside-down waterfall of fish, spewing skyward as if leaping for the moon. For this reason, Ronis keeps an array of goggles at the house; people are not uncommonly injured when leaping fish smack them in the eye. “The first time I was here,” Ronis said, “it was impossible to see the caiman because so many fish!”
We entered the lake. “In this lake, wet season, can see twenty-six hundred caiman!” Ronis told us. Mamirauá boasts thirty-nine caimans per square mile—the highest density in the Amazon. Sixty percent of them are the largest species, the black. Around us, a great wall of red eyes stared into the darkness, glowing balls of blood, a meniscus of eyes. In our spotlights, we saw the great armored heads. They seemed immobile, waiting with an elegance no mammal knows.
They have seen so much time. They each own a part of an ancient knowing; a timeless fire glows in their eyes, patient as a volcano—and when necessary, as sudden. The spectacled caimans sink from sight like submarines, but the black caimans vanish in a flash of water-shudder, as if they somehow call the water up to surround them rather than sink beneath it, the way a magician might disappear into a puff of smoke.
Ronis uses a 400,000-candlepower searchlight, powerful enough to show us that both the shores and the shallows are covered with caimans. “With common species on land, and black in water, the area can support great density,” he said. Next month, they will be nesting. “It’s a marvelous species,” he said, “eight million years old.”
Only eight million? Ronis and I had hit a numbers glitch before. He had told me the mother caiman stays with her young eight years, and I had been astonished. I had known that some crocodilians care for their young, but eight years! The figure rivaled orangutans, who nurse their babies for that long. When I mentioned this to Peter, he assured me Ronis must have meant eight months—still impressive. Once, he told me, Ronis had asked to borrow his speedboat for a year. He had meant a day. I asked Ronis to write the age of the caiman tribe, and he wrote, “80,000,000.” Eighty million.
At that moment, a four-inch fish with silvery eyes flipped into the boat and flopped around our legs. I gently pinned it with the toe of my shoe. “Poisonous spine,” said Ronis, lifting it gently by a fin, revealing the needlelike projection from the pectoral. “Can be very dangerous.” He tossed it overboard. Later, a dogfish with inch-long daggers for teeth flew into the boat. In the morning, my sneakers would be covered with the silvery scales of other fishes, whose entry into our craft we had failed to even notice.
Ronis was eager to catch a black caiman, his favorite of the three species here. He had his eye on several larger animals, over ten feet long. “This species so calm,” he said. “The other, no. This lucky, because this is bigger.” He lunged with his loop, but the caiman winked away into the water. Lightning flashed, the sky throbbing white-hot, answering the reptiles’ eyes. Fish leapt to join the lightning. The world was remaking itself, its plan a complete mystery.
We slipped along the margin of the lake to watch the spectacled caimans slither into the forest. They are more graceful on land than I thought possible, moving snakelike until they are swallowed by the grass. The spectacled are so called because their eyes are raised, Ronis explained, while the blacks are named for the four black spots on the lower jaw. And with this, he looped the noose around the neck of a four-foot black caiman and hauled it squirming from the water. Its long tail flapped vigorously until Ronis held it against his pole and muzzled the jaws shut with masking tape. He held the creature out to us to let us touch it. Its belly felt like the tile on the bottom of a swimming pool—cool, clean, impenetrable, permanent—like the look in the caiman’s eyes.
What goes on inside a caiman’s head? Earlier, I had spoken of this sort of thing with a friend, David Carroll, who has made a life studying turtles in New Hampshire. “You can’t speculate what goes on in their brains too much,” he had said to me as he released a five-inch wood turtle back into the alder thicket where he’d found it. Humans, we agreed, are unduly impressed with the fact that we think; but animals know. “But they have s
uch a history, and they’re united to it in a way we are not. Whatever he knows,” David had said of the turtle, “goes back to two hundred million years ago, to the first turtle. A lot of his messages, I think, are from that reserve, and beyond.”
Ronis caught many more caimans that night. We didn’t count them, for we had left time and sequence behind. Each moment was a fresh wonder, new, from the timeless water-womb of all beginnings. We felt like space travelers to another universe that night, with the bowl of the stars reflected in the water below, and the caimans’ eyes glowing on the horizon like a thousand red suns. I thought of the verse from Psalm 8: “When I look at Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him?” And I remembered something Andrea had said the night before we visited Jarauá. We had watched the darkness rise on the river, as if the night itself were rising magically out of the Encante. “Everything here is big, and we feel like a mosquito,” Andrea had said. “In town, we feel we are so important—and here, we realize we are nothing.”
Dianne and I both held a lovely two-year-old black caiman Ronis captured from the bank. Its jaws did not need to be taped shut; the creature rested placidly in our hands. Our flashlights had caused the caiman’s eyes to glow red, reflecting from the tapetum lucidum, a light gathering mirror in the eyes; but actually, we now saw, the animal’s eyes are golden, full of the light from a thousand stars. I released the tiny caiman into heaven’s waters, and asked it silently to carry my blessings with it to the Encante, back to the beginning of time.
We never did get a signal from the telemetry. Miriam assured us this was no fault of ours; she often searched for days without finding her manatees, and Vera had, after all, just spent eight days the month before searching unsuccessfully. Possibly the transmitters on the last three botos had now gone dead, too.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 22