Journey of the Pink Dolphins Read online

DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW

  The Dance of the Dolphin: the beautiful girl meets her dolphin lover at the village ball.

  ANDY CAULFIELD

  At times the botos seem to hang in the water like a sail in the air: weightless, timeless, impossible.

  Time Travel

  Tell me a story.

  In this century, and moment of mania, tell me a story.

  Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

  The name of the story will be Time, but you must not pronounce its name.

  Tell me a story of deep delight.

  Robert Penn Warren

  There was a world before this one, the people’s stories say. It was destroyed, by fire or flood, or most of the animals went extinct; the people turned into stones, or were devoured by monsters. Though most of the people in Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo now recite the Christian creation myth—perhaps easily assimilated because, with its world-altering apple, Genesis echoes the ancient legends of the World Tree. But they still agree with the hundreds of different Indian tribes throughout the Amazon: the world is not now as it has always been.

  Once, they say, there were other worlds. Once, there were fantastic creatures, chimeras, monsters. Some of them are with us still.

  In the evenings, back at Paul’s lodge, Greg and Gary, Jim and Jon and Joy and I sometimes talked of these monsters. One is called the Mapinguary, a bear-sized, hairy, stinky, ape-faced creature. Gary thought it sounded rather like a Pleistocene giant ground sloth. He related that in fact, a Boston-based scientist, David Oren, is convinced some of these animals are still living. Gary was doubtful, but Oren had mounted an expedition to search for them in the Brazilian state of Rondônia in 1994. He never saw the animal, but there he collected twenty-two pounds of what he believes to be Mapinguary dung.

  Another is a creature that in Brazil is called the Water Jaguar, Onça d’água, or the Tapir Nymph, Tapir-iauara. It grows big as a cow and attacks people in boats. There are also gigantic snakes—longer and fatter than the most enormous anacondas—that dwell in the whirlpools and in the deepest portions of the lakes. Their eyes shine like flashlights. They are called Cobra Grande, and it’s said that their slithering across the landscape creates the Amazon’s constantly changing maze of channels. When a Cobra Grande growls, pirarucu and caimans slap the water with their tails in reply. The Cobra Grande can immobilize your boat, steal away your shadow, or take you away to the Encante beneath the water.

  Some of these ancient monsters are more frightening because they can assume human form. One of them, sometimes called Curupira or Chullachaqui, is a shape-shifter who may appear as an old man, a dwarf, a deer, a frog, or as the large adult male who leads groups of white-lipped peccaries on their migrations. He is the Father of Game, and he fools hunters. His feet point backward, so that hunters think they are fleeing from him when they are actually following.

  I had read about Curupira in Nigel Smith’s fine book The Enchanted Amazon Rain Forest. A Rio Negro peasant told Smith this story of an encounter with Curupira, which he said took place fifty years ago: A hunting party had ventured up a tributary of the Rio Negro, searching for peccaries and piacava palm. They killed many peccaries—each man took more than six—and they placed the carcasses on pole platforms over the fire to roast.

  That night, a stranger came to their forest camp carrying a message. “The Old Man says that those who killed five or more peccaries should give one to him,” he said.

  “Tell the Old Man to go hunt his own game,” one hunter retorted testily.

  The wife of one of the hunters, though, became alarmed. She told the group they were foolish to disobey. Her husband had killed only one peccary, but the couple gave the stranger a hind limb for the Old Man.

  At midnight, thunder rumbled in the forest, at first distant, then closer. An old man wandered into the camp. With a cane, he tapped the carcasses of the roasting peccaries, and they sprang to life. Dozens of peccaries assembled in the hunting camp, as if to watch the events about to take place.

  Next the Old Man went to the hammocks of the disrespectful hunters, and with his hands began to knead their bodies like dough, until inside their skins they were mushy as avocados. Then he sucked the pulp of their flesh out from the tops of their heads. He tossed their empty skins back into the hammocks. The generous couple, unmolested, heard what the Old Man muttered as he walked away: the peccaries, he said, were his children, and no hunter should take more than they need. He melted into the forest, followed by the animals he had resurrected.

  When our previous companion, Jerry, had gone survival camping in the forest with Rudy, they had come across a curious stretch of parklike forest where the trees grew tall and the ground was bare of understory; it seemed as if someone had tended this land. Greg, too, had seen areas like this. They are called supai chacras, he said. And this was what Jerry and Rudy had been told by their barefoot guide: this land was Curupira’s garden. The guide suggested they get out of there, fast. “I wanted to stay longer,” Jerry had lamented when he came back to the lodge. “I would have loved to have met that guy!”

  Scientists laugh at the stories of Curupira. But they have stories of their own. And they agree there were worlds before this one, complete with fantastic monsters. Some of them, we were to find, are with us still.

  Shortly after we returned from our first foray into the reserve, I asked Gary what he had been experiencing when he had gazed spellbound before the swamp at the edge of the path.

  “You could say this place takes you back in time,” he told me. “The species aren’t the same, but the structure of the forest here is the same. Rain forests dominated by flowering plants date to more than 100 million years ago. Rain forests are one of the oldest biomes on earth today.” Temperate woodlands, he said, appeared just 33 million years ago, during the Oligocene, when the world first became seasonal; grasslands evolved only 23 million years ago, in the Miocene, followed by the first grass-eating horses; and modern coniferous forests, like today’s taiga, weren’t around until the Pliocene, a mere 5 million years ago. The world is not now as it always was. “If you go back to the Eocene period, at the Poles there were forests with really big leaves, broadleaf trees! And that biome doesn’t exist at all anymore. Even the current glacial habitats, the North and South Poles, weren’t there all that long ago,” he told me. “But the rain forests were.”

  Gary, I found, often travels back in time. He can go there without blinking. As we journeyed through the rain forest with the other RCF board members, on foot and by motorboat and canoe, sometimes the normally loquacious professor would become suddenly quiet; he would get a dreamy look in his eyes, and one could see that he was gone. Gary sees nothing mystical about his ability, and in fact would be horrified at the suggestion that he possesses anything similar to shamanic powers. He is a scientist, first and foremost, and doesn’t believe in trances or gods or powers outside those of the laws of physics.

  And yet, sometimes he would say to me, “Let’s go back to the middle Jurassic,” or propose, “Suppose we go back into the Cretaceous,” the way other people might suggest a trip to the mall. The Age of Dinosaurs is his favorite time, and in fact he will tell you this is where he spent much of his childhood, rather than in Kentucky in the 1950s. But he could see the tree-fern-shaded landscapes of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops more vividly than the willow tree and the squirrels in his family’s backyard. It was not until Gary was halfway through second grade—by which time he had already memorized the geologic time scale, as well as the scientific names for most of the major animals in each epoch—that an ophthalmologist diagnosed his severe myopia. With his new eyeglasses, Gary saw for the first time that the teacher was writing words on the blackboard, and that trees that had resembled big lollipops had individual leaves. But by then he was already well traveled in the lost worlds of the prehistoric past, and continued to dwell there. During our time in Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo, he would take me there with him—back into times when fish were shielded
in armor, when birds flew on clawed wings; back to times of wondrous transformations, when fish began to crawl out of the water, and mammals began to crawl back in. For here in the Amazon rain forest, time is permeable; reminders of these fabulous creatures are with us still. One of them is the bufeo.

  We began the day in the Devonian. Juan Salas brought us, that morning, an armored catfish, and it catapulted us 400 million years back in time, to the period immediately preceding the Carboniferous. The fish was a bit under a foot long, and covered with black, armorlike plates. Gary stared at it as if it had been plucked from Devonian seas. “Four hundred million years ago, until about three hundred seventy million years ago, one of the most important groups of fishes, the placoderms, looked much like this,” he told me. The name of the group comes from the Greek placo, for “plate,” and derm for “skin.” “They had extensive plate armor, especially on the forepart of the body, and several of them even had little plates covering part of the eye sockets. There was a huge armored fish called Dunkleosteus. His skull is several feet long! This armored situation was much more common then. The placoderms were very badly hit by a mass extinction near the end of the Devonian period. Without that large-scale extinction, they might have continued to be a really important group of fish.”

  Today’s armored catfish belong to the family Doradidae, which evolved their armor separately from the placoderms. One of them, called the rock-bacu, is so named because its hard covering gives its flesh the weight of rock. Some of these fishes’ thick, bony plates—their plate-skins—support backward-curving spines, each serrated like a saw, which they can erect like a trident. Later, Dave Meyer, the lawyer, discovered this to his sorrow, when he tried to hold one of these animals, pinning it in shallow water with the palm of his hand. He spent a quarter hour trying to dig the spines out of his flesh.

  The placoderms had to contend with predators more fearsome than lawyers. Among the giants in Devonian seas, Gary told me, were huge, eel-like sharks with bizarre jaws: the upper jaw was like a Frisbee covered with teeth. They rammed their prey, severing the body in half. Back then, the great monsters all lived in the seas. The earth’s scattered lands were peaceable kingdoms of giant club mosses growing thirty feet tall, towering, arrow-straight horsetails, and seed-bearing plants that bore fruit but no flowers—the ancestors of the conifers. Until the twilight of the period, the landscape of the Devonian was untouched by the fleshy fins that would later become toes and feet. But in the genes of these ancient fishes were the unlikely future of the land animals: the amphibians and reptiles, the hoofed animals and the terror birds—and, surprisingly, the mammals who would much later venture back into the water as whales and dolphins.

  Gary and I ate breakfast 360 million years later. Over eggs and beans, we had planned our travels to the Jurassic. But first we would pass through the Carboniferous in our canoe.

  “Three hundred million years ago, a good part of the world was like this. Most of North America and Europe was near the equator, and there were these huge swamps. . . .” The flooded forest is studded with snags capped with bromeliads. “But there were no flowering plants then,” Gary says to me. “The trees had scaly bark and little scaly leaves. There were no bees or beetles or butterflies, but plenty of dragonflies and roaches. And there are fish, lots of fish, including the fish that our ancestors had come from. . . . It is a lush, steamy, swampy time. . . . I’ve thought about this ever since I was a kid.” Gary has switched to speaking in present tense, for this is where Gary is now—back in the Carboniferous. He does not notice the spines protruding from the carachama palms as our canoe scrapes past them; there were no palms in the Carboniferous. I have to pull his hands away from the gunwales of the canoe so his fingers aren’t impaled.

  Gary tells me what he sees, but I cannot: The air is thick with dragonflies flying on wings big as seagulls’, and huge stoneflies, the ground stalked by springtails, cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes. The first amphibians have appeared, big as men. Forests of lycopsids, with their scaly leaves, and trees of horsetail and fern rise and then drown in cycles of inundation by shallow seas. The Carboniferous is known as the Coal Age because the flooding knocked over the trees and formed coal deposits over 3,000 feet deep.

  We are bound for the Jurassic. We are heading to Caiman Lake to see one of its most peculiar denizens: the hoatzin, a chicken-sized bird whose young possess wings with claws like a reptile’s. Some scientists have linked this species with the dinosaur-era bird Archaeopteryx, the “Ancient Wing.” The hoatzin is not a remnant of that time, but a reminder of it. The hoatzin is actually a member of the cuckoo family, and like the armored catfishes, evolved its primitive characteristics quite separately from its prehistoric look-alike, millions of years later.

  But in the genetic plans for their bodies, the fish and the birds remember the time of armor and claws—just as our own bodies remember. Like Curupira, like the botos of the Encante, we are shape-shifters: As embryos, humans are first fish. And from gilled creatures floating in the womb’s warm ocean, we transform to lives more amphibian, more reptilian, until finally, we assume mammalian form, complete with tails. Weeks before birth, we are nearly indistinguishable from fetal monkeys. We emerge as complete humans only after recapitulating our evolutionary history, the plan of our bodies paying homage to our ancestors.

  Dusk rises from the water as our canoe approaches the spindly, leafless snag in which the hoatzins have built their nest. Hoatzins nest over water so that when danger threatens, the young, who are excellent swimmers, can plunge to safety; they use the two claws on each wing to climb back to the nest. Two of the chicken-sized birds hiss down at us like reptiles—as the Archaeopteryx would have done 150 million years ago over the still waters of Solnhofen lagoon.

  Since Gary was in junior high school, he has treasured a book illustrated by the Czech painter Zdenek Burian portraying, among its many prehistoric scenes, the artist’s conception of the mud flats of that ancient swamp whose limestones yielded the vaunted “missing link” between reptiles and birds. And this is the image that floods his consciousness now: the Archaeopteryx glides on greenish wings in a lush, wet forest of prehistoric conifers. Three claws are visible at the wing’s bend. The long jaws show tiny teeth in a pointed snout, and the tail—a long, bony tail, not mere tail feathers—trails behind it, like a lizard in flight.

  In fact, the hoatzin is about the same size as the Archaeopteryx: about two feet long, weighing two pounds. The birds above us have long tails, plumage streaked brown above and yellowish below. Their heads bear loose orange crests, and their bright red eyes stare at us from blue faces. “Wow,” Gary says softly. “This is really primeval.”

  We could watch those birds for centuries—but dark is coming. As our guide, George, tries to thread our canoe back toward camp, increasingly we bump into ant trees—not just cecropias, whose ants are small, but other species whose leaves I cannot make out in the dusk but pray are not tangaranga. In the gathering dark, we cannot find the ants in our canoe until they bite us. These ants bite hard. But we cannot afford to pay them too much attention as we try to duck branches and dodge spines, which are now also difficult to see in the gloom.

  The water level at the lake has fallen considerably in the last few days. George finds the regular water pathways too shallow. Our canoe is heavier than usual, with four passengers: We have come with Rachel Dulin, an RCF member from Israel, and Carolynn Charleston, one of Jon’s former students. This is their first trip to the tropics, and they are worried that we may never find our way out in the dark. But the worst that can happen, I tell them, is we spend the night in the canoe. Lightning pulses in the sky. OK, worst case is we spend the night in the canoe in pouring rain. Of course, we could be struck by lightning, too, Rachel helpfully volunteers.

  George now seems clearly lost. Unfortunately, we have only one flashlight, whose bulb is dimming. And now we are stuck. We have hit a submerged log, and our canoe is wedged atop it. We really might have to s
pend the night in the canoe—uncomfortable, given the impending rain and mosquitoes, but not, as Gary points out, truly dangerous. But then I catch a pungent scent like buttered popcorn. In India, that scent was significant: it is the smell of tiger urine, which the cats spray on trees to mark their territories. There are no tigers here, but there are jaguars—like tigers, stalk-and-ambush hunters; the name comes from the Indian word yaguar, meaning “he who kills with one leap.” And like tigers, they establish territories, which they mark with squirted urine.

  I again revise my worst-case scenario, but I keep the revision to myself.

  Pushing against two trees, we rock the canoe over the log. We are free. Now George recognizes a canal, and after a short passage, we emerge from the forest to the wide river, and motor home under the stars.

  Later, I told Gary about the buttered-popcorn smell, and we asked Moises what creature might have produced it. It is the fluid ejected as a defense by a species of beetle, Moises said, which spews acrid spray from a flexible abdominal turret.

  “A beetle!” exclaimed Gary. “Middle Jurassic!” And then he was gone again.

  The present epoch brought its own delights. One morning, a four-foot electric eel was spotted swimming in the shallow water covering the camp’s dry-season courtyard, which by now had dropped to two feet deep. We all leaned over the rail like passengers on a whale watch. Beneath us swam a weird and beautiful creature: scaleless and gray-brown with a red underside, fat and sleek, and capable of producing a discharge, from the electric organs in its tail, up to 650 volts. Dianne had washed her hair here a few weeks back, on a day when the showers weren’t working; I wondered if the eel had been there all along, harmlessly concealed in the dark water. It may well have been. In Paul Beaver’s book Tales of the Peruvian Amazon, he relates how a friend, wading through the muddy water at the edge of a river, suddenly froze when she felt the soft brush of a fish on the inside of her calf. She looked down and saw a six-foot electric eel swim between her legs. The eel slid by quickly, but to her horror, as she remained frozen, it was immediately followed by a second large eel, and then a third, a fourth, and a fifth.