“Yuck,” Libia said. “That water stinks. How much pooping can one baby manatee do?”
“Lots.” Manuela laughed. “We’ll have to change his water twice a day at least, Raffy told me.”
“Why so often?” asked Libia.
“We have to keep the cut clean,” Manuela replied. “Anyway, you wouldn’t go swimming in your own poop, would you, Libia?”
“Well, we swim in the river and that’s full of poop from every village upstream,” said Libia.
Sometimes Libia said things that drove Manuela crazy, because they were right and wrong at the same time. Manuela was about to say that the biggest river in the world was quite a lot larger than a bath, but Airuwe was squirming too much. She put him back in the tank, and together the girls refilled it, bucketful by bucketful, carefully mixing in warmer water from Raffy’s stove.
It had taken more than two hours to feed the calf, clean his wound, and empty and refill the tank, so when Raffy called them to come and eat breakfast, they were ravenous.
Raffy’s fish stews were delicious. The girls piled on the farina to soak up the juices and dug in.
When they’d finished eating, Raffy sat opposite them and looked hard into their faces, her eyes glinting like sun on the water. “So, girls,” she said, “what is your plan for this manatee calf?”
Libia just opened and closed her mouth like a landed fish, but Manuela answered quietly, “I promised his mama I’d make him well and put him back in the river.”
“And what do you think Jose Gomez is going to say to that, my girl?” Raffy replied. “Or your father, for that matter?”
Manuela looked at her feet. It did sound silly when she said it aloud. But in her heart it felt right.
“And where is your manatee going to live before it goes back to the river?” added Raffy. “He can’t stay in my lavadero.”
“Maybe he could live in your old fish pond, Granny?” Manuela suggested.
“Hmm.” Raffy grunted. “You’ll have to clean it out first. But that’s not the only problem. He’ll need to be fed on milk for month, and that costs money. A lot of money. And it takes time. So you need a plan.”
Manuela studied the dirt between her toes.
“Even if you keep your promise,” Raffy went on, “and put him back in the river, what then? A fisherman could kill him a minute later.”
Manuela didn’t have any answers. This was what Granny Raffy always did: asked questions that made you realize you didn’t know what you were doing. That was why she always made Silvio and even Take-It-Easy Luis so angry.
The buzz of an outboard down on the water signaled that Raffy was about to get her first patients of the day. “I’ll be busy all this morning by the looks of things,” she said, “but you need to come up with a plan, fast. And if you can’t, I’ll take that manatee to Gomez myself.”
Manuela and Libia sat together on the veranda, watching the manatee’s nose poke through the water’s surface and disappear again. Manuela sighed. Even if Papa and Mr. Gomez backed down, and they could clean out Raffy’s pond for him to live in, where would she and Libia find money for the special milk powder? And would they be able to keep feeding him for months? Even if there were solutions to those problems, to truly keep Airuwe safe forever, she would have to ask all the fishermen in the village not to hunt him. And he could never really be safe if his friends and relatives were hunted, so they would have to stop hunting all manatees.
“Maybe my promise is too big to keep,” she whispered.
Libia looked glum and didn’t answer.
The girls sat in gloomy silence.
Tintico grew bored. He trotted around and around the bath, sniffing. Finally, he got up on his hind legs, his face reaching just over the edge to where Airuwe’s nose popped up. The two noses sniffed each other intensely. Then, the manatee poked his head right out of the water and his tiny, twinkling eyes took a good look at the little dog. Tintico wagged his tail and “uffed” a greeting, and the manatee submerged with a splash, so suddenly that Tintico got water in his nose and spent the next minute sneezing. The girls laughed.
“We can’t give up,” said Libia, “not now that Tintico likes the cria, too!”
Manuela smiled. Libia was right. They couldn’t give up yet. Even if her promise was much bigger than she had at first understood and much, much, much harder to keep.
It took the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon — through a rainstorm, two more bottles of milk for Airuwe, and another emptying of his home — but at last Manuela and Libia had a plan.
“We should write it down,” said Libia. “Granny will be more impressed if we do that.”
Manuela made a face. Paper and pens were not a big part of their world, but she knew Libia was right. Granny Raffy had been educated in the city, and she was always writing things down.
“I’ll borrow Raffy’s pencil and one of her notebooks,” Manuela answered. She did so, and they set to work. The result was a bit untidy, but it did have pictures of people and manatees and drawings of leaves around the outside:
In the middle of the hot afternoon, Raffy rested in her rocking chair on the veranda and the girls stood anxiously before her. Manuela knew that if she didn’t like their plans, then she really would take the baby to Gomez.
Raffy examined their paper, smiles and frowns chasing their way across her face like clouds in a windy sky. “OK,” she said at last, “this is a plan. So I won’t take the manatee to Gomez.”
The girls grinned at each other with relief.
“But,” Raffy went on sternly, “it’s very, very short on detail and I don’t know how you’re going to make numbers three and four happen. But I can help with number two if you do some chores around here. I have to buy more milk powder for other animals anyway.”
Libia and Manuela exchanged tiny smiles while Raffy was looking down again.
“There is something you haven’t thought of that might help with numbers three and four,” Raffy went on. “You should name the manatee. People will care more if he has a name and he’ll be easier to talk about.”
“Manuela’s already done that,” said Libia, hopping around with excitement. “Remember what Grandpa used to call manatees, in Ticuna?”
“Airuwe!” Raffy exclaimed. “You named him Airuwe?”
As Manuela nodded, she saw tears in Raffy’s eyes — even though Raffy said it was just dust.
Raffy crossed out Manatee and wrote Airuwe at the top of the action plan and pinned it to the wall by the front door. The next morning, the girls made a start on number one.
Clearing out the old fish pond for Airuwe to live in was harder than they expected. Raffy hadn’t used the pool since Mauricio had died, and it was choked with weeds and full of green water. It took the girls all day to pull out the weeds and scrub the pond clean, in between feeding Airuwe and cleaning his tank.
Refilling the pond was a problem, too. Raffy had an old hand pump, so they could pump water from the river, but it was really slow and hard to use. The pond was still only half full by the end of the afternoon. Then Raffy suggested that they set up two huge tarpaulins to run rainwater into it and help to fill it up.
Overnight, rain hammered on the veranda roof and cascaded out of the gutters. By morning, Airuwe’s new home was full enough to put him in, as soon as the sun had warmed the water a little.
The sun was out as they carried Airuwe down to the pool. He had been much more wriggly when they’d taken him from the bath, and Manuela didn’t want to risk him falling from her arms, so they carried him in a wet sheet, holding it like a sling between them. Tintico gamboled alongside, sniffing at Airuwe through the fabric and “uffing” encouragingly. When they got to the pool, they lowered the sling in and waited for the manatee to swim out into his new home. But he didn’t move.
“What’s the matter with him?” said Libia. “Doesn’t he like the pool?”
Manuela looked down at the calf and saw, instead, herself as a baby: alone in he
r crib and longing for the comfort of her mother. Without another word or thought, she slipped into the pool and eased Airuwe out of the sheet and into the water. She floated beside him and he cuddled in close.
“I know how it feels,” she whispered to him. “I know.”
“You really are a manatee mama,” said Libia. “Here, give him his bottle.”
The water came up to Manuela’s shoulders. She put one arm around Airuwe and held the bottle to feed him with the other hand. His face was out of the water and close to hers. He looked at her carefully. This time, he didn’t fall asleep once and finished a whole bottle in half an hour.
Airuwe got more used to being fed from a bottle. He would accept it from Libia and Raffy, but it was only Manuela he liked having in the water with him. He grew stronger as his wound started to heal, and he began to explore his pond. He made use of different parts of it at different times of day, depending on whether he wanted the warming power of the sun or the cool of shade.
Like the parents of small babies, Manuela and Libia fell into a routine of feeding times and sleep. Granny Raffy helped out when she didn’t have patients to see and sometimes did the nighttime feedings so the girls could get a proper sleep. In return, they helped with Raffy’s chores, feeding the macaw chicks and the sloth, cooking, and cleaning. Neither Manuela nor Libia had ever spent so much time with Granny Raffy, away from the village. Libia missed her brothers and sisters and the bustle of her busy home, but Manuela felt she now understood why Raffy liked living at Riverbend, where every day began with a storm of little green parrots in the treetops and ended with Granny Raffy’s gramophone music drifting over the dark river.
Angelina came to visit. She didn’t tell Libia off at all for disappearing in the middle of the night. In fact, in her dreamy way, she seemed to have forgotten altogether about how the manatee had come to be at Granny Raffy’s. She was quite happy for Libia to live at her granny’s house for a while, at least until the boat to school started running again.
Uncle Luis visited, too, with Gonzaga and Jorge. They brought a share of their fish catch and the supplies that Granny Raffy had ordered from Puerto Dorado, including big bags of milk powder for the hungry manatee.
Luis said that Gomez was trying to pretend he’d sold the calf in Puerto Dorado, but that everyone in San Larenzo knew what had really happened. People were thoroughly enjoying the fact that Clink-Clink had been outwitted by a couple of kids.
Manuela worried that Gomez would try to take the calf back.
“He’d have to get past Raffy first!” Luis laughed. “Anyway, he wants to save face. My guess is that he’ll get his money back from Silvio and forget the whole thing.”
“Is Papa still angry?” Manuela asked.
Luis nodded.
“Are you angry, Uncle Luis?”
“Me?” Luis grinned. “You know me, Frog. Me and my boys, we take life as it comes. Silvio’s a hothead, but he’ll cool down. You’ll see.”
But Silvio never showed his face nor sent any message, and Manuela wondered if her father would be angry with her forever. Had he really meant it when he’d said that he didn’t want her?
Libia decided that Airuwe needed to go to school. “He needs to learn about all the other creatures he’ll be sharing the river with, like fish and caiman and dolphins,” she told Manuela one morning while her cousin was in the pool with the little manatee.
This was a typical piece of right-but-wrong Libia-ness. Manuela raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
The next morning when Manuela came to feed Airuwe, there was a long pole leaning over the pool with several models made of sticks and plastic packaging dangling from it.
“That’s a gamitana, that’s a pacu,1 and that’s an electric eel,” Libia said.
They looked a little like fish, Manuela thought, if you looked with your eyes half closed and your head on one side, but not enough like the real thing to teach Airuwe anything.
All the same, Libia added to Airuwe’s “school” every day: more fish, a turtle, and even a pink dolphin, although that was made from chicken wire and cardboard, so it could not be left out in the rain. Tintico growled at the models, and Airuwe took no notice of them at all.
“He doesn’t even look at them!” Libia said, disappointed.
“Never mind, Libia,” said Manuela. “I like them.”
Libia smiled. “You know what, Frog?” she said. “You’re much nicer now that you’re a manatee mama.”
Even though Airuwe didn’t look at Libia’s school, Raffy’s patients did. The dangling models attracted their attention, and pretty soon the pool had become Raffy’s waiting room. Airuwe and his school prompted people to talk about their lives beside the river: the biggest fish their father caught when they were little, or the time they found a huge nest of turtle eggs, or when a hoatzin2 landed in the canoe. They told stories, too, about tapirs3 turning into manatees and dolphins coming out of the river to take human wives. But most of all they talked about Airuwe, about what a fine creature he was and what a shame it was that there were so few manatees nowadays. Perhaps, one old fisherman suggested, it was because there was no longer the right sort of ceiba tree for manatee caterpillars to eat.
“I think we’ve made a start on number three on the action plan!” Manuela whispered to Libia.
“Yes.” Libia smiled. “This is a school for humans, not manatees, after all.”
The rainy season continued, and the river rose toward its highest level. One evening, Raffy sat with the girls beside the manatee pool. Towering clouds reflected the setting sun onto the surface of Airuwe’s watery home. His wound had healed into a white flash over his back, like a streak of lightning, which showed clearly when he was close to the surface.
“Will the scar fade?” Manuela asked her granny anxiously.
“I’m not an expert in manatee scars, china!” Raffy replied. “But I don’t think so.”
“It’ll make him so easy to hunt!” Manuela almost wailed.
“But it’ll make him really easy to tell from other manatees!” said Libia.
“Either way,” Raffy said, “if you want to keep your promise, you’ll have to work more on number four of the action plan. I think you should start by inviting everyone in San Larenzo to come and see Airuwe and his school. Who knows? Silvio might even come.”
1 pacu: a species of large fish, similar to the gamitana
2 hoatzin: a big bird with a crest on its head
3 tapirs: pig-like forest mammals with a long snout
Manuela was amazed that Granny Raffy, who didn’t really like lots of people all together, was prepared to have the whole of San Larenzo tramping over her property. But she kept her astonishment politely to herself. The next day, Raffy gave the girls paper and crayons, and they set about making posters to advertise “Meet-the-Manatee Day,” which would happen on the following Sunday. They decided that Libia should catch a ride back to San Larenzo in Uncle Luis’s boat, so she could pin up the posters all over the village and tell everyone about it.
Luis came by in the afternoon and dropped off Raffy’s supplies. He was in a big hurry and ran up and down the steps with the bags and boxes.
“What’s the rush?” Raffy asked.
“Don’t you ever look at the sky, Mama?” Luis laughed and pointed at the black clouds. “I don’t want to be bailing rainwater all the way home!” He hustled Libia and the bag of posters into the boat.
After so long in Libia’s company, Manuela felt lost at the thought of being without her cousin. They waved and smiled at each other as the boat pulled away. Tintico ran to the stern to keep Manuela in sight for as long as possible.
As Manuela and Raffy walked back up to the house, giant raindrops began to fall.
“I think Luis is still going to be bailing, for all his hurrying!” Raffy said.
Rain in the Amazon is not like rain anywhere else on earth. Raindrops are fatter and wetter, they fall faster, and they are more tightly packed into the space between
clouds and earth. By the time Raffy and Manuela reached the house, they were drenched and gasping for breath. Water had taken over the space where air normally was. They stood on the veranda, their voices drowned out by the deluge hammering on the roof, smacking into the ground, and slapping onto the millions of leaves in the forest.
Raffy had to put her mouth right next to Manuela’s ear in order to be heard. “Wait for the rain to ease off before you feed Airuwe.”
Manuela nodded and sat down under the cover of the veranda to wait, while Raffy went for a siesta.
But the rain did not ease off. After an hour, Manuela decided that she couldn’t make Airuwe wait any longer for his food. She made up a bottle and yelled to Raffy that she was going, forgetting that Raffy would not hear her above the noise of the rain.
The jungle, the river, everything, had disappeared in a sheet of gray, so it took Manuela a moment to see what had happened to the pool. The floodwaters, which had been thirteen feet or more away from Airuwe’s pond, had risen so suddenly that they had engulfed it. The pond was no longer an island of water in dry land, but simply another part of the river, only visible as a square of deeper water at the edge of the flood. And there was no sign of Airuwe.
Manuela immediately plunged into the flooded pool to look for him.
The rainwater was cold, and Manuela gasped as it hit her skin. She dived again and again, searching the pool by touch. But there was no rubbery skin, no bristly nose. If Airuwe had swum out to join the river, he could be swept away. Without a mother to feed and protect him, he would die.
Manuela struggled back to the shore, picked up Airuwe’s bottle, and waded back into the water, as deep as she could, while still keeping her feet on the bottom. Then she tapped the bottle with a stick — she did this every time she came to feed Airuwe, and he had learned to associate the sound with food. She tapped the bottle repeatedly, pushing back the tears that started to squeeze into her eyes.
Manatee Rescue Page 3