We didn’t have much time. We had only three days to try to locate three radio-tagged dolphins among a population of 150. They could be anywhere in waterways that coiled and threaded for uncounted thousands of miles through forests that stretched over 2.5 million acres.
Dianne and I set out anxiously the next morning. As I plugged in the earphones and cables and erected the antenna, an Antonio steered us toward Boca. We knew we would find dolphins there, at the intersection of two waterways; and besides, over the following two days, when we joined Andrea and Miriam again, we would be heading in the opposite direction. We wanted to cover as much ground as possible.
Almost immediately, long before we even approached Boca, our boat was surrounded. Antonio cut the motor so we could watch them. The waters here were murky, and we could not see below the surface. But this time, the pink dolphins almost seemed to be showing us their bodies: we could see the dorsals clearly, as well as the tops of their heads. And unlike at the Tahuayo and at the Meeting of the Waters, here the botos often surfaced side by side, as do tucuxis, which made them easier to count.
There were eight, Antonio confirmed. It seemed, for the first time, that each one was distinctive. One of them was very large and pink. Two were gray youngsters, and another, despite the fact that all babies are supposed to be gray, was, like one we had seen in Peru, a very bright pink. One of the adult dolphins had an L-shaped scar on the dorsal ridge—one of fourteen dolphins that Vera had come to recognize by natural marks, a male named Scar to whom she had assigned the momentous Number 1. On the paper where Vera had drawn pictures of those with natural markings, the scars and blotches had looked obvious: Number 8, Meia-lua, had a half-moon-shaped chunk missing from the dorsal; Number 3, Ruffles, was marked by a series of frilled scars on the back side of his; Number 13, Riscos, had two deep notches in the skin behind the head. But Vera had told us she had spent entire afternoons among groups of dolphins that never gave her a good look at their dorsals. We were extremely lucky. Another dolphin, we noticed, had a hole in the fin—likely where the metal pin holding a transmitter or a plastic tag had fallen out. And another, Antonio recognized as Shika: she had an X on her dorsal, the first female Vera had freeze-branded. She blew at us loudly.
They approached us closely, some within ten yards of the boat. It was as if they had rushed to greet us—and perhaps they had. They surely recognized project boats. Dogs and owls, with hearing far less exquisite than that of the boto, know the sound of individual automobile engines on suburban streets. Perhaps the dolphins also knew the boats by sight, and even recognized the people normally in these boats; perhaps they realized we were strangers. We saw several of them spy-hopping to get a better look.
Their boldness amazed us, given their experience. To freeze-brand or equip a dolphin with a transmitter, the animal must be subdued with nets, hauled from the water for perhaps twenty-five minutes, and subjected to minor surgery. No dolphin has ever died from these procedures, Vera had told us, but it is surely painful and terrifying. It is frightening and dangerous for the researchers, too. The dolphins are easier to catch in the dry season, when the water is low, but this is also when the piranhas are most concentrated. “Nobody wants to jump in that water!” Vera had told us.
Besides, the big male dolphins—the only ones whose dorsal ridges are big enough to support a transmitter—will readily bite in self-defense, and, with 130 teeth strong enough to crush an armored catfish, are capable of inflicting wounds as bloody as a shark’s. “The males, it’s amazing the power in the jaws— plash! —like two boards crashing together,” Vera had told us in Manaus. She has learned—at the suggestion of her mother-in-law, whose husband was director of the Vancouver Zoo—to bind the jaws with nylon stockings. But even with jaws bound, botos are formidably strong. Thrashing his flexible neck, once a captured male hit Vera in the head with his beak and flung her across the boat. She felt lucky the animal had not cracked her skull. Her face was badly bruised for weeks.
After tagging and freeze-branding a dolphin, Vera waits two or three weeks without attempting to follow it. But at the end of that period, when she seeks out the marked animal, she finds it is just as eager to approach her as before—just as she has never hesitated, even after her injury, to approach them. Vera had told us that sometimes she attracts botos by circling the boat in a figure eight. “They come very close, and will follow you and play for half an hour. It’s a game, a game inside the lake,” she’d said.
Why would the dolphins risk playing a game with our dangerous species? They already have plenty to play with. Like the Duisburg Zoo dolphins, who grabbed scrub brushes as toys and constructed bubble rings, wild dolphins also play with toys: At least one observer has reported seeing a river dolphin tossing a river turtle in the air, like a ball. Why bother playing with people? Perhaps because, unlike a toy, or a turtle hiding in its shell, people will play with them, and in unexpected ways; in this game, the players interact, one species’s curiosity answering the other’s.
The botos surrounding our boat clearly wondered about us, as we wondered about them. Could they know the curiosity was mutual? I’d thought so with Atlantic bottlenose dolphins I’d met years earlier. On a magazine assignment, I visited the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, where researchers were testing the dolphins’ ability to manipulate objects in response to an artificial language of symbols and sounds, to test whether they can understand both vocabulary and syntax (which the research now clearly affirms). I’d unthinkingly greeted the first dolphin I met as I would have a person: I waved my right hand at the fourteen-year-old female dolphin named Akeakamai, “Lover of Wisdom” in Hawaiian. To my surprise, she had waved back at me with her mirroring flipper. I held my leg up to the aquarium glass, and she had kicked her tail fluke in response. And when I would stand tankside, she and her female companion, Phoenix, would often rest their chins on the rail, out of the water, standing erect as I was, their tails on the floor of the tank. This was, I realized, a sort of conversation. It may have been a simple one: “Here I am!” and “Here, I am!” But the nature of their response—to mimic my movements—implied the possibility of a deeper understanding. Despite our enormous physical differences, perhaps they recognized the sameness that we shared, a cognitive kinship spanning 90 million years of divergent ancestries. Inside their flippers, dolphins and whales have five fingers, as we do; and inside their heads, they may suspect that we and they understand the world, and delight in it, in a similar way.
The botos surrounded us for forty-five minutes. We made 135 observations of them—and they, perhaps, as many of us—before we went our separate ways. We continued toward Boca, hoping to locate the radio-tagged dolphins. Already, though it was still early morning, the sun felt white-hot on our skins, the air a pounding haze. As Dianne rolled up her shorts and sleeves to enhance her California tan, I could feel my skin burning beneath my long-sleeved shirt. My ears clogged with sweat welling beneath the rubber earphones. I swung the antenna slowly, its arc my question mark, and strained to hear the answer. Still no signal.
But within ten minutes, we were surrounded by a new group: an adult mottled gray with pink, a dark gray youngster, a dark gray adult, one with a pink stripe on the back, a very large, very pink adult, and several smaller grays. “Mais que dez! ” exclaimed Antonio. (“More than ten!”) We couldn’t believe it; never before had we found two large groups in such a short span of time. Seldom had published researchers, either. The literature reports that river dolphins are usually seen alone, or just one mother with her child; only one study reported seeing groups of dolphins more often than solitary individuals—researchers studying botos at the Río Apure of Venezuela, who most frequently encountered botos in aggregations of two to seven.
Within the next half hour, more dolphins came to us—there were now at least fifteen. We felt nearly certain they included members of the first group we had encountered. We had set out to follow them; and now they, instead, were following us.
Did they understand that we had come to see them? I wished I knew a gesture with which to greet them, as I had with Akeakamai. To wave seemed inappropriate. Instead, I knocked on the sides of the boat. I thought perhaps they’d simply rise in response: “What’s that? Let’s see.” But to my surprise, one chose to answer my sound with a sound: a loud, big bubble, a spoken explosion. I knocked again, and our conversation continued. We received six loud bursts of bubbles at lengthening intervals, all within five minutes. We named these “bubble bombs”; they were quite different from the champagnelike effusion of airy pearls the dolphins had cast around our boat that moonlit night in Peru. Much later, in a clear-water tank with glass sides, we would observe North America’s only living captive boto, an elderly male named Chuckles, producing similar bubble bombs at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Unlike the delicate bubble rings Wolfgang Gewalt had observed at the Duisburg Zoo, which were released from the side of the mouth, Chuckles’s bubble bombs were like giant burps expelled vehemently from the center of his gaping beak. And while the Duisburg dolphins made their bubble rings as toys, Chuckles’s bubble burps were clearly produced for a different purpose—to evoke a response, perhaps to instigate a conversation. Visitors always reacted. Children shrieked, laughed, and ran; adults gasped and pointed. To Chuckles, of course, the “zoo” was the visitors outside his tank, and he seemed to enjoy provoking them into doing something interesting for him to watch.
As the wild botos bombed us with bubbles, I laughed with delight; Dianne, however, was not amused. She was trying, desperately, to photograph the animals, and all she ever got was bubbles. “They are definitely playing tricks on me,” she said, “and now they’re laughing.” Perhaps they were. Cetaceans do seem to enjoy a good joke. I remembered an account of beluga whales who lived next to the dolphin tank at the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago some years ago. As part of an experiment, a Pacific white-sided dolphin there named Kri had been trained to stick her snout through a ring and hold the position until a low-frequency whistle signaled her to swim away. When Kri began breaking her routine, the researchers were mystified—until they discovered the belugas next door, excellent mimics, were precisely duplicating the tone, duping the dolphin, baffling the scientists, and foiling the experiment. “You could almost picture the belugas laughing in the next tank,” their trainer had said.
After six bubble bombs, the dolphins resumed their usual game of hide-and-seek: one would pop up, blow, and we would twirl to watch it vanish; two would surface on the opposite side, we’d cry “Look!” and they would sink. It reminded me of the game I had played as a child at the swimming pool: One child, eyes shut, cries “Marco!” and the others answer “Polo!” Trying to follow the sound, Marco tries to tag his tormentors, but after crying “Polo” the others dive or swim away, just out of reach. The botos, diving and blowing, were playing Marco Polo, and we were “it.”
This, of course, was not what we had come for. We were supposed to be working with the telemetry, in pursuit of a single electronic answer to a simple question: “Where are you?” “I am here.” Nonetheless, I put down the telemetry and unplugged the earphones, seduced by the pleasure of their game. I lost myself in their play, and let their motion flood my senses: wet skin gliding against wet skin, the kiss of air, wind and sun on arched backs, the embrace of the cool water. Over and over, they surfaced and plunged, sliding, timeless and weightless, between water and air. No wonder botos enter human story as lovers; they glide through the elements the way lovers slide through one another’s bodies, a tension of tenderness and hunger, poised on the threshold of joy. As the sunlight poured over us, heavy as honey, sweat drenched my hair, my bra, my shirt, my socks, my shoes. Sweat ran into my eyes and mouth and ears. But I never noticed until they left us, and then my mouth would water as if hungry, and I would feel tears stinging my eyes.
All morning, and later that afternoon, groups of dolphins surrounded our boat, rushing to us as if to embrace, and then swam and dove and returned again—a flirting game of hide-and-seek. Of course, we lost every time. Dianne never got a photo; I never got a “hit” on the telemetry. Yet we felt as if the waters had opened to us—and then swallowed us whole.
One of the dolphins, a dark gray one, surfaced so close to our boat I could have touched her. She opened the top of her head to us. I stared down her blowhole, an intimate, mysterious abyss of life, and inhaled her moist breath.
We were supposed to meet up with Miriam and Andrea at 11 A.M. at Boca the next day. The morning of the meeting, we searched again with the telemetry; again, though we found many dolphins, none answered my questing antenna with its electronic kiss.
Now we waited at Joaquim’s floating house, but at 1 P.M. there was still no sign of Miriam and Andrea. Had we mixed up the time or place of the meeting? Had our friends met with trouble? Had they forgotten us? Of course, there was no way for us to know. We waited, afloat in the middle of nowhere, feeling isolated and cut off.
At 1:40, a speedboat arrived. It was Ronis. “You know Princess Diana?” he asked. “She die,” he announced. “Have cigarette?”
Dianne gave him a Newport in exchange for this news, and, his English momentarily exhausted, he departed.
Miriam and Andrea arrived on the big houseboat, the Uakari, sometime after two. They had a list of errands to accomplish before we could head north to Jarauá: they had to deliver a new gas-powered refrigerator to Ronis and Barbara; they had to rescue a floating telemetry tower, which had run aground. On the way, Dianne and Andrea, Miriam and I sat on the bright yellow roof of the Uakari. Miriam and I swapped the telemetry equipment, monitoring the channels for dolphins and manatees.
“We used to think the pink dolphins migrated, and the manatees didn’t,” Miriam told us as I held the antenna aloft on a pole, to increase its range. “But the manatees are the migrants, and the travel they do turns out to be pretty impressive.”
As Dianne and I scanned for dolphins, Miriam told us about her manatees. She’d begun her telemetry project in 1994, and by now had attached radio transmitters to six of them, by means of a belt around their paddle-shaped tails. She discovered that Mamirauá’s manatees migrate more than sixty miles out of the reserve. They begin to leave the area as the dry season begins—they were moving now. But they don’t leave en masse. Manatees are basically solitary animals, and when they migrate, they leave alone, at different times, choosing different routes to different places. An individual may even take a different route each season; one of her study animals, a male named Zé Taboca, spent one dry season in the Solimões, and stayed another dry season at Lake Mamirauá. “It’s intriguing,” Miriam said. “They spend six months at the headwaters of the Solimões, and then two months in the busy part of the river, with all those fishermen and the dangerous boat traffic, and they are generally thought to be very shy.” How they know when to leave, how they decide where to go, and what they do when they get there, no one yet knows. But they have their reasons, and they must be good ones. “Two weeks ago, when we were tracking them, the water was going down, and then suddenly, the water went up —and the manatees moved. The manatees knew before the people knew,” Miriam said.
Yet people generally don’t consider manatees very bright. “People say they are cretinoso ,” Miriam told us, shaking her head, “just because they are slow.”
Researchers who have examined the brains of manatees long ago decided the big, gentle animals were dumb. The brain is relatively small for its body size, and the surface is very smooth. Large, wrinkled brains are associated with thought—although no one actually claims to know why this should be, since, as we know from electronics, anything can be miniaturized. “Scientists tend to find what they expect,” Miriam said. But she knew a University of Florida researcher, Robert Keep, who looked at manatee brains a different way: he notes that the percentage of the manatee’s brain devoted to cerebral cortex—the portion that, in humans, is associated with thinking—is relatively high. It’s comparable, in fact, to the brains of primates, and a markedly greater proportion of the manatee’s brain is devoted to cerebral cortex than in animals like bats.
“To find all those lakes and creeks,” Miriam said as we scanned for our study animals, “to know when the water level will go down and they will have to leave, manatees must be far more intelligent than people think.” At Mamirauá, she said, the manatees are wary. “It’s hard to catch them. The fishermen tell me, you can’t blink, you can’t breathe—they slink away.” Miriam is convinced they have learned to avoid people, becoming increasingly nocturnal, just as some researchers believe beavers have done in America during this century, in response to hunters. No one would have expected that of manatees—but in Mamirauá, a lens into the Amazon itself, reality seldom conforms to expectation.
“The theories we have for many subjects are not completely true,” Andrea added thoughtfully, continuing the conversation as we handed over the telemetry to Miriam. Last year, for instance, during the dry season, Andrea had witnessed an event undescribed in the scientific literature, which nobody would have believed.
Andrea, too, was a maverick. A sturdy woman of thirty with long black hair and pillowy lips, to the dismay of her family she saw forestry as her calling, and chose the fantastically complex mechanics of seed dispersal in the flooded forest as the subject of her master’s thesis. The project required that she sit motionless beneath fruit trees for ten hours a day, ten to fifteen days at a stretch, observing who eats the ripe fruits as they fall into the water. One day, she was watching a group of brown capuchin monkeys at the side of a river at Jarauá. To her great surprise, she saw they were grabbing fish out of the water with their hands! Most primatologists believe New World monkeys don’t eat fish, except for an occasional scavenged meal. No one had recorded monkeys actively fishing for them.
“That, I think, is why Mamirauá is special,” Andrea continued earnestly. “Here we are always discovering things that we thought cannot happen—but here it can happen.”
What were some other examples? I was surprised by Andrea’s answer: “In the past,” she said, “we thought that in a reserve you cannot have people living in it. But even we don’t know that it’s possible even now. The challenge is to discover this.”
Here, where so many impossibilities come true, she and Miriam, Márcio and Ronis, are hoping for a new miracle: that today, people can rediscover how to live in a flooded forest without destroying it. And beyond that, they are hoping that these people will actively protect it.
As we traveled, scanning for botos and manatees, we passed their settlements. As at Tamshiyacu, the people, here called caboclos, come from mixed ancestry, with both Indian and Portuguese blood. They live simply. Most houses are wooden, with tin roofs, and only three rooms, lit by kerosene. Some families live on floating houses, but most homes are built on stilts. If the waters rise too high, the family simply raises the floor. Those who have cattle or pigs build for them floating pens called marimbas, or else they bring the animals inside the house with them. Usually, the entire family—including, on average, five children—sleeps in one bedroom. The average family income here is $900 a year, which people use mainly to buy salt, sugar, cooking oil, powdered milk, and soap. But not a few now have televisions, powered sporadically by village generators or by solar panels, bringing them the news of slain princesses, of foreign wars, of fancy clothes and shiny new appliances.
These are the people traditional conservationists consider the problem. The first step in establishing a new reserve is usually to move the people out, at least into border or buffer zones. But again, Mamirauá defies convention. The reserve’s founders hope instead that these people will serve as the forest’s guardians.
Yet, despite federal laws prohibiting it, the people hunt manatees here. They hunt and eat endangered turtles. They fish in the reserve’s waterways. They cut its timber. All of these activities are allowed under Mamirauá’s management plan. For, the reasoning goes, if the people understand Mamirauá’s riches are their own, they can protect this vast ocean of forest—its manatees, its dolphins, its fish, turtles, and timber—better than federal guards.
The Brazilian government had stationed two rangers to patrol Mamirauá’s vast waterways—better coverage than in most Brazilian parks, Miriam told us, which average one ranger per 1,415 square miles. But the guards were powerless to stop the commercial fishing fleets that streamed in from as far away as Manaus and even Colombia. In a single season, outside fishermen had stripped one of the lakes of eighty tons of fish—and threw away all the catch but the tambaqui, wasting enough fish to have fed one-third of Mamirauá’s residents for a year.
Enraged local residents, with the help of Mamirauá planners, created community patrols to evict the trespassers. In the first year of community surveillance, 1993, the amount of fish sold in Tefé taken from the reserve was cut in half. According to a 1996 report by the Overseas Development Administration, which helped fund the Project, “the invasion of lakes by fishermen from Manaus and Manacapuru, before very extensive, practically disappeared. The surveillance of these lakes, under the responsibility of the communities, has already proven to be effective.”
Next, General Assemblies, in which representatives of all fifty-three of Mamirauá’s settlements convened, developed a zoning scheme for Mamirauá’s lakes. Some are assigned strict protection; others are reserved for subsistence fishing; and still others allow commercial fishing by community members. Logging is similarly restricted. No tree-cutting is allowed along the elongated levee banks known as restingas, which support the tallest trees. No logging is allowed except during the wet season, when the trees can be more easily taken out, lifted by the water, leaving fewer scars on the land. Lumbering areas are divided into sectors, where cutting is permitted only every thirty years. The people are working on an agroforestry program, similar to the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve’s.
But what the community agrees to do and what actually happens are not always the same. That was why we were traveling to Jarauá: Andrea needed to talk with the woodcutters there, to confirm that she had counted every log cut, catalogued every species. It is extremely important that researchers be able to accurately document what is really happening, Andrea stressed—and this demands that people trust her. “In 1993, when we were beginning the research, they were very afraid to talk with us,” she explained. “They thought it was a vigilance.” Rumors were rampant: some people suspected the researchers were secret police financed by the government to spy upon and punish them; others believed the scientists were conniving to sell all the fishes to Great Britain. Many feared, not unreasonably, that the researchers would use their data to outlaw all logging in the reserve. And many of Mamirauá’s residents could not survive without it, which Andrea both understands and respects.
“There is a period of the year—May, June, July—that all the land is flooded so they can’t plant,” she explained. “Fishing is difficult because the fish are distributed into the forest. Logging is an important economic activity. So we are looking to find a way to let them continue this important activity.”
The loggers cut with axes—chainsaws are only for the richest villagers. “The villagers dream with chainsaws,” she said. To cut a tree with a chainsaw, and not an ax, would be, for most of the people here, an unimaginable luxury. But axes alone still kill forests. They felled New England’s, after all. Here in Mamirauá, the large kapok tree was once highly sought-after for plywood, since it grows so big—“a huge tree, one of the biggest,” Andrea told us. “But now, each year it’s harder to find.
“When you talk with older people, they tell stories of big turtles and big pirarucu they used to see, and don’t see anymore. They are worried about that, too, as we are. But it’s not easy . . .”
The Project has attracted international interest and generous funding. New York’s Wildlife Conservation Society funded the reserve’s establishment with $4.3 million in 1980; it is now also supported by respected organizations including Conservation International; World Wide Fund for Nature; the Rainforest Alliance; Friends of the Earth. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge send some of their finest scientists here. Mamirauá was proposed as a biosphere reserve under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program (and listed as such in 2002). And as the first sustainable development reserve in Brazil, Mamirauá provides the legal framework for the creation of similar reserves throughout the Amazon. “Other people are watching us,” Miriam had told a visiting reporter for Science in 1994. “If it works, some of these techniques will be copied.”
But still, many are skeptical. Michael Goulding spoke to the same Science reporter as did Miriam. He regretfully predicted that local people would eventually overfish and overlog, just as the outsiders did. For human greed does not always lust after oil and gold and diamonds; sometimes greed merely whines for a chainsaw. Sometimes it only wants a television, or a motor for the canoe, or a little extra meat to flavor the manioc. Greed urges good people to take just one more manatee out of season, or just a few more logs than the neighbors have harvested. And for us, with the produce of the globe in our markets and the splendor of the nations beamed to our computer screens, it seems monstrously arrogant to blame them.
“When we see a manatee, and think how long it spends to become an adult, we wonder how can they kill something so beautiful?” Andrea said. “But when you live here and spend days and days eating just one kind of food, you begin to understand.
“The people here, they like to live here. But in their minds, all the world is like this, you see.”
We arrived at Jarauá the following day at noon. Jarauá is a little village of floating houses with potted gardens and stilt-legged shacks. In one of them, a green mealy parrot perched in a window and a satellite dish squatted on the roof. Gooselike horned screamers, who issue their unearthly calls all day, hoisted their corpulent bodies from the water and flew ponderously to the tops of trees, gulping “Hoop! Hoop! Yoik-Yoik- Yoik!” A shimmer of parakeets twinkled across the sky, and the sun beat down like a hammer on a sheet of gold.
Only a half day remained until I would have to give the telemetry back to Miriam. We had seen many dolphins in the past two days, but none bore radio tags. Above a town called Pirarará, near a grassy area where Miriam often sees manatees, we had stopped to watch two botos fishing together, and also saw six tucuxis. Three botos had come to watch us as we’d stopped to tow an errant floating tower back to the middle of the river, and one had come to observe us delivering Ronis’s refrigerator, spy-hopping at a distance of about thirty yards. At a crossroads of rivers, where small fish skimmed the surface, we had seen five botos together. Most of the sightings, though, were single botos spotted in shallower waters; the tucuxis preferred the deeper channels. Traveling at the Uakari ’s stately six miles per hour, we had counted what we thought may have been thirty different botos since we’d left Boca. In the silence of the telemetry, though, I read a lesson: in the Amazon, you never get the answer you expect.
Andrea and Dianne took the speedboat downriver to talk with villagers. Miriam and I debarked to visit the turtle researcher Augusto Teran in his dockside lab. A small, passionate Peruvian, he was studying the freshwater turtles here for his doctoral thesis. Miriam translated as he told us in Portuguese that he had captured and marked fifty-two turtles the night before in his nets. He sets the nets across the channel, at the deepest point, so they don’t catch caimans. For the turtles’ safety, he checks his nets every four hours—the reptiles can go without oxygen for six hours, but the main danger is piranhas. Enthusiastically, his dark eyes aglow, he showed us the shells of the six species found here: the largest are the three Podocnemis species, who tuck the neck sideways beneath the shell, like the one Gary and I had bought from Don Jorge.
The biggest shell was, for a freshwater turtle, enormous: the largest species, Podocnemis expansa, known here as tartaruga da Amazônia, can grow a shell thirty-five inches long. They eat leaves, fruit, and seeds, hunt fish, shrimp, and crabs, and scavenge dead fish, Augusto explained. Augusto showed us the shells of the two smaller species, Podocnemis unifilis, known locally as tracajá, and Podocnemis sextuberculata, or iaçá. There are also three other kinds of turtles: the land tortoise known as jabuti, the freshwater perema, and the weird, side-necked matamatá, which hunts underwater motionless with open jaws, waving a fleshy protuberance on the tongue to lure fish. But Augusto’s primary focus is the Podocnemis species.
He explained his work: Once Augusto captures a new turtle, he measures it, bores a hole in the back of the shell, and affixes a small yellow plastic tag with a number. The tiniest turtles are too small for tags, so he inserts a minute electronic marker under the tail. From this research he has been able to determine the rate at which they grow: one he caught in January then weighed 10.5 ounces, and by September it had grown to weigh 15.5 ounces. When locals catch his tagged turtles, they bring them to him so he can record their growth; and then, of course, he must let the fishermen take the turtles back home, where they will be cooked and eaten. Otherwise, the people would never bring them in.
This had been the fate of all the animals whose empty shells we now beheld—a fate that now threatened their existence. The biggest Podocnemis, the tartaruga da Amazônia, has been nearly hunted to extinction in Mamirauá, Augusto told me. “So the people turned to the next-largest species,” he said, the tracajá. Now that species has been decimated to the point that people are hunting the little iaçá—and now they are mainly catching only the juveniles. “The people are wild for turtle meat,” he said.
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 animal 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 such 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.
After we returned the equipment, we continued to watch the dolphins every day. Our backs and legs ached from the boat’s hard, backless benches; our skin blistered; we stank with sweat—and all of this vanished with the sight of a fin, a face. Every day they came, surrounding us, six, eight, ten or more at a time. They seemed to recognize us, though we didn’t recognize them; if Ruffles or Shika or Scar ever reappeared, the water and glare kept their identities secret.
Each day brought some fresh wonder. One morning, tucuxis joined the botos, and one of the small gray dolphins rolled and rolled at the surface, over and over like a child twirling herself dizzy. Another morning, the whole river seemed to be gathering its breath for song: the tucuxis splashed, the dolphins blew, and then from the forest, the howler monkeys began to chorus, their voices growing in intensity like a gathering wind. Their song rose and sank and pounded, its melody curved like the botos’ smooth bodies. Then their song died, and almost instantly, the dolphins vanished, taking even the waves on the water with them.
Each surfacing brought a physical thrill, like the sudden drawing in of breath, or the rush of a shudder. With each sighting, the waters opened with new promise. Yet at the end of each day our longing was undiminished. And when we left Mamirauá, we knew our journey was not over.
What did I want from them? No longer did I hunger to map their travels, Point A to Point B. No longer did I need to count them, to time their surfacings, to measure their breaths. I no longer wanted to pursue them; now I wanted to join them. I longed to swim, like them, with my nostrils above water and my lips below. I longed to look into a face, and know that face. I wanted, in short, to partake of their grace—not simply the grace of their effortless beauty, but the grace of a benediction. But what form this might take, how or where I might seek it, I had no idea—only that this still awaited me, an unspoken promise.
Later, back in New Hampshire, I remembered Dianne’s dream of lovers and diamonds after Ricardo first consulted the dolphin spirits, back in Peru. “Glass is good luck for you,” he had told her. “So is clear water.”
Perhaps the dream had offered that promise.