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.
“First of all, you must get four frozen chickens,” Andrea announced. Of course.
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.”
We would have to get a new boat tomorrow, she said. Dianne and I could sleep at the Project office. We stowed our groceries, in flimsy plastic bags that were already splitting, at the boathouse, where I was sure they would be eaten by rats. We carried the four precious frozen chickens back with us to the Project office, which had a freezer, and got ready for bed.
Dianne took a sleeping pill. But before falling asleep, she had, as usual, spread much of the voluminous contents of her bags over our small room for a final inspection. This is why my 11 P.M. rat report so roused her: the rat might run over her clothes.
She launched out of bed to help herd the animal into the bathroom. Unfortunately, the door wouldn’t close, a fact we had earlier noticed as clouds of mosquitoes rose from the shower drain and poured into our sleeping quarters. Maybe the rat would vanish down the drain. We waited a minute, and then Dianne allowed the door to spring open a crack. The rat saw its chance to rush out. With admirable speed and force, Dianne pulled the door shut. When the door sprang open again, the rat lay motionless on its side. Blood oozed from its snout.
“You killed it!” I shrieked, horrified.
“I killed the bastard!” she exulted.
“You fucking killed it!” I cried ungratefully.
“I killed it! I killed it!” she shouted in glee, and then loosed a laugh like a pirate.
We went back to bed, leaving the rat dead in the bathroom.
Five minutes later, the scuttling began.
“He’s not dead,” came Dianne’s voice, disappointed, in the dark.
But when I turned on my flashlight, I saw this was a different rat: a much bigger rat, with prominent testicles. It was peering at me from the foot of my bunk.
We herded this one, too, into the bathroom. This time we tied the door shut with a bandanna stretching to the knob of a nearby dresser. I took one of Dianne’s sleeping pills. If more rats came into my bed that night, at least they didn’t wake me.
The next day, equipped with a new speedboat, we arrived within the hour at a little village, Vila Alencar, to pick up the second Antonio at his wooden, tin-roofed house there. Next we stopped at the floating house at the intersection of two rivers, a place called Boca, which means “mouth,” to say hello to the gray-haired watchman, Joaquim. Miriam and the Antonios chatted with him perhaps forty-five minutes as the skies grew darker and darker.
“Chovendo?” I asked. (“Rain?”)
“Não, não, ” chorused the Antonios.
“Should we leave early and avoid the rain?” I asked Miriam, unconvinced.
“No—they say it’s not going to rain.”
“My poncho is in your boat somewhere—should I dig it out?” Dianne asked me.
“No,” I assured her. “They say it’s not going to rain.”
We got in our boats and pulled away from Boca. Almost immediately, the downpour began.
Rain pounded all around us—big opalescent drops, heavy as stones. Thunder and lightning exploded everywhere, a battle of water and fire. I remembered something Vera had said the night we’d dined at the open-air restaurant, as lightning crashed all around: “In my whole life before coming to the Amazon, no one died of lightning. But here it is not rare. I know of three at INPA who have died.”
The rain stung my skin like buckshot. I averted my face and stared at the floor of the boat. Helplessly, I watched it fill with a shallow lake of rainwater—disintegrating the flimsy plastic grocery bags, reducing our bread to sodden Kleenex, turning our crackers to paste, thawing the frozen chickens, and drowning our luggage—luggage in which Dianne’s poncho was irretrievably embedded.
Twenty minutes later, we staggered soddenly into our floating house. The chickens, completely thawed, dripped blood over everything. Dianne’s lips were blue. Miriam looked miserable. The Antonios seemed frozen. I had one thought: get hot drinks into them, now. I raced into the little kitchen to light the gas stove. My hair, hands, and clothing dripped water onto the matches, extinguishing one after another. Finally, one stayed lit long enough for me to turn on the burner. The gas blew the match out.
“You go through a box of matches every time you light it,” said a voice with a British accent behind me. I turned around and noticed for the first time, and to my horror, that our floating house was already inhabited.
Paul Sterry, forty-three, a renowned nature photographer, gallantly lit the stove for me. Young Lee Morgan was a student at Royal Holloway College, University of London, studying the behavior of ringed kingfishers. Andrew Cleve, elegant and graying, was the warden of the Bramley Frith Study Centre near Basingstoke in the U.K. and the author of more than twenty-five books on natural history and biology; for his service to the environment, he had been given a medal by the queen. Peter Henderson, forty-four, a professor of evolutionary biology at the Animal Behavior Research Group of University of Oxford, had been studying the fishes here since the reserve’s inception seven years ago; he probably knew more about the dolphins’ underwater environment than anyone alive.
As we sipped hot coffee around the big dining table of the spacious central room, Peter told us about his early days here. “When I first saw this place, I thought, How on earth can I possibly work here?” Though blond and blue-eyed, he reminded me of Gary, with his encyclopedic knowledge and gift for storytelling. “It seemed like hell at the time.”
He had lived with Márcio Ayres, the uakari researcher. They had felt marooned, living on houseboats and an abandoned floating house, spending weeks without setting foot on land. Márcio could hardly find his uakaris; Peter had no idea how to sample the fishes. The place swarmed with mosquitoes and biting horseflies called mutucas. The only diversion was to visit Tefé, back then (before the government stationed 5,000 soldiers there, to guard against the dreaded “internationalization of the Amazon”) a fishing town with only four cars and no restaurants, where dogs slept in the streets and people slept on their porches. “We wondered,” Peter said, “whether we’d made the biggest mistakes of our lives.”
Twice, Peter was nearly killed while working here—both times by creatures he never thought to fear. One day a sloth fell out of a tree and nearly hit him. It looked him in the eye, rolled over, and died. Another time, a plant or insect poisoned him. To this day, he doesn’t know what touched or stung him—only that his eyes swelled shut, his hands were paralyzed, his scalp went stiff, and finally, while vomiting, he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he found himself in a clinic in Tefé, breathing oxygen from a tank marked “for industrial use only.”
Yet he comes back every year, often with eager colleagues. For him, the place exerts the primal pull of a sea. In fact, many of the creatures here would seem more at home in an ocean than a lake: There are spotted freshwater stingrays with poisonous tails, oceanic fishes like sole, goby, and herring, four species of crab, and of course, dolphins. “It’s as if the scale of the freshwater is so great it almost becomes like an ocean,” Peter said, his blue eyes shining.
Mamirauá is a place of oceanic scale. It is half the size of the country of Belize, and possibly the world’s richest aquatic system, with 499 lakes in the central study area alone. Besides the largest protected flooded forest on earth, Mamirauá is also Brazil’s largest conservation experiment: in 1996, six years after the state governor created the Mamirauá Ecological Station at Márcio Ayres’s urging, the area was proclaimed the nation’s first sustainable development reserve. Instead of being evicted, the 2,500 people who live in and around the reserve were not only permitted to stay and use its resources, but to serve as its guardians—a bold attempt at protecting wild land and helping people at the same time. It was an experiment so novel that the creation of the reserve forced Brazil to alter national conservation legislation: never before were local residents allowed to fish and hunt in areas declared reserves.
Mamirauá is a huge natural experiment as well. In the sealike lakes and along the snaking rivers, forest and water merge, giving birth to hybrid creatures that seem to defy possibility. There are fish that nest in trees, fish that hunt in air, and fish that incubate as eggs inside the father’s mouth. Sloths swim like athletes, their long, claw-tipped arms crawling through the rivers. Whole meadows of grasses flower, floating, atop the water; and 150 shape-shifting pink dolphins cast nets of sonar as they hunt in submerged treetops.
Peter has found at Mamirauá an unrivaled laboratory of evolution. In a place like this, where the world as we know it was born, the world still re-creates itself anew. “These flooded forests are the habitat from which terrestrial groups evolved,” he explained, “yet, though this habitat has been around for millions of years, nothing here is very permanent.” The water rises and falls, carves new channels, builds new islands. Half the floodplain here has been entirely resculpted in the past millennium. The lakes are actually only a few hundred years old. Dredges have unearthed shards of Indian pottery from the lake bottoms, remnants of a thriving Omagua civilization whose language, now gone, gave this place its name: “Mamirauá” means “Calf of the Manatee.” Everything here is in transition, in the process of becoming something else. Trees evolve into weeds, like the cecropias, and weeds into trees: the ephemeral herb along the banks, Acoitis aequatorialis, belongs to the plant family Melastomaceae, almost all members of which are trees. Creatures assume an astonishing spectrum of forms to exploit new niches: Lily pads grow into three-foot-round giants as well as miniatures just .04 inch long, only root and leaf. The fishes have evolved in staggering array. Peter and his colleagues have catalogued 312 species here, 80 species of which they have caught from the front porch of this house. By comparison, all the species of fish in Peter’s native England number only 30.
Even now, as we watched the rain clear as we sat around the dining table of the floating house’s spacious central room, the land was changing almost before our eyes. No longer was this the luxuriant, brimming wet season, as we had witnessed at the Meeting of the Waters and along the Tahuayo. The water here had dropped twelve feet in the three months since May, Peter told us. Along the riverbank across from our front door, we could see where the ebbing river revealed holes the size of croquet balls—dens excavated by catfish in the wet season. Several species of fish here dig dens: the giant pirarucu, ancient fish whose bony tongues are covered with teeth, use their chins, fins, and mouths to gouge nest holes in the mud of shallow waters, and male and female together guard the hole, like birds. Another fish, the goby, nests in sponges that grow in the curved leaves of submerged trees.
But the season of nesting was long over. The dry season is the killing season. “Everything that’s in the water here very quickly goes into a body,” Peter said. “Here is a sort of killing zone, where the feeding is going on intensively.” Piranhas evolved in the Amazon’s flooded forests, Peter told us. “They are a great innovation,” he said. They are mainly scavengers, like hyenas, he told us, and generally don’t attack healthy animals. Like hyenas, piranhas are social animals, traveling together in groups of individuals who are probably related, and vocalizing all the time to stay in contact. “Piranhas have a stinking reputation in Brazil,” he said. “Prostitutes are called piranhas of the land. But I think we should make the piranha the symbol of the Amazon, for they are one of the fish that truly molds the ecosystem. As an animal, I find them very elegant and very impressive indeed,” he said—although, he confessed, “I don’t like handling them.”
At the moment, the piranhas were having a field day. At high water, they have to hunt mainly at river edges, where fish may have become stranded, while in low water, the fish are so concentrated they can attack anything that moves. For the dolphins, too, this was a time of ease and plenty. At the edges of open water like that in front of our house, fish were as densely packed as five per cubic meter, as measured by Peter’s sonar. “Every cast of the line, you bring up something,” Peter told us—although often it was only a head, the rest of the body devoured by piranhas. Later, when we would throw our dinner scraps overboard, the waters would boil with piranhas.
Every five or six seconds, we would hear a splash. Often it was a kingfisher plunging, spear-billed, into the water. No fewer than nineteen ringed kingfishers have established territories along the 1,600 feet of bank directly across from our front door, Lee had found. Fish are so concentrated that the birds were probably not defending the fishing rights to their territories, but instead, he suspected, defending the rarer, shady perches on which they remove the spines and scales of their prey.
The splashes signaled not only birds plunging into the water; as we watched, we realized fish were also leaping out of it. Sometimes they leap to escape underwater predators, Peter explained. Others skim the surface like stones. Many other fish come to the surface to breathe. Some can breathe no other way. The giant electric eel, the pirambóia, or lungfish, and the giant pirarucu must surface every ten minutes to gulp air, for long ago in their evolution their gills ceased to function as organs of inspiration. Still other fish leap into the air to hunt. The lithe, smooth aruana swims near the surface with chin whiskers forward, the tops of its eyes projecting out of the water or just near the surface; the eye is divided horizontally, so it can see above and below the water at once. When it spots its prey, it erupts from the water, sometimes launching more than six feet into the air to seize beetles, spiders, and other creatures from branches, vines, and trunks. Occasionally, an aruana will take a small bird or bat perched on a limb above the water. Michael Goulding reported a case in which a large aruana, over three feet long, took two newborn sloths from their mother’s arms.
Later, on the water, we would see fish surface and leap into the air beside our boat. Their scaly, prehistoric faces leered up at us, unblinking, like images from the subconscious surface in dreams. At the water’s edge, we would see aruana hunting. The fish seemed to hang in the air, a long silver ribbon, before falling back into the water. And almost daily, to our amazement, dolphins would surround our boat. It seemed, at last, that the waters would finally open for us. And they did. But, as we were to find, it was not in the way we expected.
By midmorning, the skies had completely cleared, but one of our boat motors had died. Miriam needed one boat to return to Tefé in the morning, and Dianne and I needed the other. What to do? Miriam suggested we try to borrow a boat from her colleague Ronis, the way one might ask to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor. Ronis da Silveira, the caiman researcher, lived with his wife, Barbara, at the four-room floating house nearest to ours, ten minutes away.
Ronis had married his slender, smooth-browed sweetheart, an agronomy student, just one year before. They were wed in a ceremony at the Manaus opera house. Then they had come here, to drink rainwater collected in a barrel, shower in water pumped from the river, and fall asleep to the weird, wet calls of birds and frogs that Barbara had never before heard. It was her first time in the Amazon jungle.
A recent issue of the international Crocodile Specialist Group newsletter reported on the couple’s honeymoon: Ronis, his new bride, and his assistant Edejalma had tackled a fifteen-foot black caiman. After wrestling with them for forty minutes, the giant reptile had tired sufficiently to allow the trio to drag it beside the aluminum canoe back to the floating house at Boca. While they were affixing the transmitter to its scutes, the caiman saw an opportunity to escape. It hoisted its tail six feet out of the water, grazing Barbara’s face with its horny scales. The bride’s tender face, however, deflected the tail sufficiently to cause it to miss the boat when it came down. Were it not for Barbara’s face, the boat almost certainly would have overturned.
A giant black caiman skull, its jaws propped open by a blue and red basketball, greeted us at their door. It had belonged to an animal thirteen feet long. “Killed by jaguar,” Ronis told us; it had been one of his radio-tagged study animals. A jaguar, I thought, was probably the only other creature besides Ronis who could have subdued a caiman that size. Muscled and macho, with dark Latin eyes, the torso of a bodybuilder, thick black hair tied back in a ponytail, and a heavy beard evident even when he shaves, Ronis reminded me of the comic-book hero Conan the Barbarian. (Lee had said he looked exactly like the star of a British strip called The Slayer.) In fact, Ronis does read Conan the Barbarian comic books, and jokes that he does so to psyche himself up to go catch black caiman—the largest predator in the Amazon, which grows to sixteen feet, and is more numerous in Mamirauá than anywhere else in the Amazon. But in reading the comics, Ronis also pursues a more scholarly goal. Once, at a time when a visit from important American researchers was pending, Peter found Ronis poring over his comic books with great concentration. Ronis looked up from the pages at Peter. “English,” Ronis said earnestly. “Must learn!”
“That’s the kind of guy Ronis is,” Peter had told us earlier; “he looks macho, but he’s a true gentleman.”
And this he proved to be: Not only did he loan us a boat, but he also promised, to our delight, to take us out one night with him looking for caimans.
But our days belonged to the dolphins, and we wanted to make the most of the telemetry equipment. We realized, to our horror, that the equipment alone wasn’t enough. We did not know the dolphins’ radio frequencies. Each animal has its own; to search for any tagged individual, you essentially “dial up” your dolphin by plugging its three-digit number into a receiver box, attached with a cable to an antenna. You hold the antenna vertically, moving it in an arc, to scan for that particular signal. A kissing sound on the earphones indicates the dolphin is within range, and the sound grows louder the closer you approach.
Happily, Miriam told us, Vera’s dolphin frequencies were recorded here at Mamirauá. They were marked, she said, on the receiver box at the top of the telemetry platform at the entrance to Lake Mamirauá—ninety feet up the apuí tree with the giant, biting ants.
The apuí was a stout, welcoming creature, with wide-open arms like an apple tree. Red and green painted boards nailed to its trunk provided sturdy hand- and footholds. As we climbed, following Miriam, we watched carefully for the biting ants. We saw them almost immediately: inch-long black and gray insects with prominent mandibles. “Ants!” we chorused. There were seven to ten of them every square foot or so. They did not march in columns, along a scent trail, but patrolled as if at random, which made them more difficult to avoid. If we crushed one, it would release a chemical siren summoning the rest of its clan, who would rush in bravely to attack us. This fact of ant behavior, and not the basic reverence for life, we now realized, was the reason that Vera made a point of never killing them.
Carefully, we climbed, each step choreographed not to anger the tiny beings of which we were, I realized, rather absurdly afraid. (“But they are not poisonous!” Moises would have reminded us.) Actually, I was less worried about being bitten than about my reaction to them if I were; if I let go my handholds, it would be a long, swift trip down. Of this, Dianne was acutely aware. Her other fear, besides spiders, turns out to be heights. Neither of us had suspected that our dolphin expedition would feature so many fist-sized spiders and vertical ascents. “I know, I know,” I said to her below me, “this wasn’t in the brochure.”
“We’re almost there,” Miriam said encouragingly. She had climbed this tower many times, to download data from her manatees’ telemetry. On rare occasions, she has stood on the platform and watched manatees pass into the lake, their blunt, cloud-shaped forms floating up through the dim waters to nibble water hyacinth. “There’s something about their gentleness,” Miriam had said to us when we’d asked her what drew her to these unlikely creatures, “being so big and so gentle.” In English, these huge, placid grazers are often called sea cows; in Portuguese, they are similarly perceived, and called peixe-boi, which means “fish- bull.” The word is pronounced “peshy- boy,” a trusting, childlike sound we loved. Certainly, it had fit the manatees we had met back at the Project office. We had watched a staffer feeding one of them, a two-year-old orphan named Boinha, a process both man and manatee obviously enjoyed. Wearing a red cap, the staffer lay on his belly on a board over the tank house, holding the outsized baby bottle for the outsized, six-foot baby. Idiosyncratically, she had nursed upside down, her square, gray tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth over the nipple. She had let him cradle her stubbly snout in his hand. As she sucked, her slitlike nostrils opened and closed, and she had shut her small eyes in total trust, as if in ecstasy.
That trust was heartbreaking. All three species of the world’s manatees have been ruthlessly hunted for meat, oil, and pelts. As recently as 1950, over 38,000 Amazonian manatees, the smallest of the world’s three species and the only completely vegetarian aquatic mammal in the Amazon, were hunted commercially in the state of Amazonas alone. And in Mamirauá, despite federal protection outlawing their slaughter since 1967, the killing of manatees is still sanctioned here in accordance with the reserve’s unusual management plan.
We were glad the manatees had Miriam in their corner—and ours. If we had to be climbing a tree full of biting ants, we were glad to be following in the footsteps of this strong, beautiful, competent woman. Miriam had the muscled physique of an athlete, which she maintained with a regular training program at the local gym. With beautiful light brown eyes and glossy black hair, and a ring or two or even three on every finger—mostly in the shape of dolphins (few rings were available in the shape of manatees, she explained)—she was the sort of woman men literally fought over. We later heard rumors about Miriam’s jealous suitors that sounded like Wild West stories, involving knives and guns.
But Miriam had other loves. “I was always in love with the sea,” she had told us back at the floating house. Growing up in the town of Pôrto Alegre, she had read about a profession called oceanography, and had gone to the University of Rio Grande in southern Brazil, 250 miles from home, to study it. Few people from Pôrto Alegre ever leave their hometown, she said, least of all young women; but Miriam is a maverick, like Vera.
There was no program of study for marine mammals at the time. But Miriam heard about these creatures from Argentinian researchers visiting her school. “I just couldn’t believe such things existed here,” she had told us earlier at the floating house. “Manatees! And a pink dolphin—that was just unimaginable. I knew then what I wanted to study: aquatic mammals in the Amazon, that’s got to be it.”
Miriam had traveled further, earning a Ph.D. at the University of Florida at Gainesville, studying Florida’s manatees. She saw her first whales— humpbacks—on a trip to Cape Cod. She had loved America and Americans, and treated us as if we had been personally responsible for all she had loved and learned in our country. Perhaps this was why she was so patient and encouraging with us; and also, she knew what it was like to be a woman traveling in a strange land.
“Look— we’re here,” she announced. But as my head cleared the top of the platform, I froze. I felt eyes on me. I turned my head slowly and stared into the red eyes of two hoatzins sitting on a nest perhaps ten yards away. They erected their strange orange crests and hissed at us like lizards.
Finally, we stood atop the telemetry platform in the treetop and gazed over Lake Mamirauá. From this height, the radio antenna can pick up radio signals from three miles away, Miriam explained. Every twenty seconds, the receiver scans a different VHF frequency; if it receives three signals in a row, it stays with that transmission and records it, tracking the animal’s path. A solar-battery-powered microprocessor records the strength of each radio signal (giving an idea of how far away the animal is) and its direction. The black box next to it, about the size of a tool chest, was the receiver.
Gleefully, we lifted the lid on its hinges, like pirates opening a treasure chest. Inside, we saw two sets of frequencies listed: one for Vera’s dolphins, one for Miriam’s manatees. Eight of the nine dolphin frequencies were clearly marked. I copied them carefully: 272, 424, 439, 575, 726, 769, 871, 891. These were the combinations that would unlock the secrets that I had sought for so long. Finally—having combed rain forests and rivers, having climbed up trees and plunged into lakes, after consulting biologists and shamans—now we would be able to accomplish what we had come for. Finally, we could follow the dolphins.
Or so I thought.