09-Twelve Mile Limit (37 page)

I suspected what the girl’s fear was—that she was now pregnant with black-beard’s child. But I did not press.

I listened to her say, “I’m very glad that you shot him, but I wish he had lived so we could take him back to the village. The old women. Oh! They would have enjoyed punishing him. They have ways. They know many tricks.”

I told her, “I understand now.”

We paddled all morning and did not see another human being or any sign that humans had been on the river before us.

In daylight, the forest had a different sound. Birds were wild along the riverbanks, chattering kingfishers, parrots, blue macaws, and screaming hawks. From the forest shadows also came a liquid, bell-like call—another type of bird, Keesha told me—and the grinding, chirping, cricket sound of toucans.

The electric hum and whine of insects were unceasing: cicadas and locusts and varieties of large wasps and bees that I’d never seen.

From deep in the forest and from the high sky canopy, monkeys used sound to impose themselves over other wilderness noises. Tribes of howler monkeys woofed and roared, communicating across the river. One tribe would scream as a group; a second and, sometimes, a third tribe would holler their reply. The tenor of their calls seemed territorial, combative. The rhythms were not unlike the drunken talk I’d heard among the guerrillas—men who now lay dead upriver.

The most spectacular thing I saw that morning, though, came tumbling toward us, following the course of the river as if the river’s current were generating an opposing wind. It first appeared as a glittering, metallic blue haze in the far, far distance, a quarter-mile away.

I stopped paddling to watch. What kind of cloud was this?

As it swept closer, the cloud began to oscillate in terms of its height over the water. The way it moved and reflected sunlight reminded me of the spontaneous movement of baitfish in clear ocean.

Then the cloud was close enough for me to finally define what I was seeing. It was a mist of butterflies, their metallic blue wings shining like mirrors, many thousands of butterflies, rare morpho butterflies, as delicate as rice paper. As they passed over us, we were shadowed from the sun for several seconds, and I could feel the breeze their wings created.

To Keesha, I said, “That is amazing!”

She shrugged. “Why? It is something that happens here.”

Later, as we saw a peccary charge into the water and watched a large cayman submerge in sync, Keesha said, “Food. We will soon need something to eat.”

The distance we covered hour after hour increased as the speed of the river’s current increased, and I knew that we were gradually ascending, moving downward through the forest, certainly toward some larger river, perhaps the Amazon.

Just as I asked questions of Keesha, she sometimes asked questions of me. Once she said, “The woman you seek. Amelia? Do you wish to keep her as a worker or take her as your wife?”

I hadn’t thought about it, so I was surprised at the pleasure it gave me when I said, “As my wife, maybe. It’s something to think about. I’ve never been married. Maybe it’s time.”

Later, Keesha said, “Someday, perhaps I will find a man to marry. But there are so few of them with brains!”

She seemed perplexed by my laughter.

I’d become so accustomed to a world in which we were the only two existing humans, that I was a little surprised—and irrationally peeved—when we began to see other dugouts, men fishing with cast nets, women paddling canoes loaded with baskets of palm fronds, and even a couple canoes driven by small outboards.

“Are we near your village?”

The girl shook her head. “No, I would not live here. This is an evil place. We must go fast now. This is a place called Remate de Males, and a very bad man lives nearby. These people rely on him for their wealth.”

“Will there be a telephone?”

I could sense that she didn’t want to tell me the truth, but she could not do otherwise. “It is possible that there is a telephone.”

“There’s a village, then?”

She gestured with her chin. “Not so far. Two bends from here, where the paranamirims touch. The small rivers, that is our word for them.”

Around the next bend, the river and the world were transformed.

One moment there was rain forest, the next moment the hillsides became a muddy moonscape. A horizon of trees had been scalped off the bare hills, thousands of acres of forest had been clear-cut. Rain had dug gullies down the mountainsides. The earth was the color of Georgia clay here, so the erosion had turned the river a chalky, chemical orange.

To the girl, I said, “What’s that smell?”

“Up the road from the village, there is a factory where they do something with the wood. I’m not sure what it is.”

I said, “If there’s a factory, then we’ll find a phone.”

The village of Remate de Males was the sort of South American slum that springs up on the perimeter of industry or around tourism centers. The workers have to live somewhere, and very cheap labor can afford only the cheapest of housing.

But this was no place for tourists. Remate de Males consisted of some heavy commercial docks—if there was a pulp factory nearby, boats would have to service it—a few plywood shacks, and dozens of huts made of bamboo, roofed with banana leaves.

Along the muddy bank were a half-dozen dugouts similar to ours. Keesha steered us in among them, and I pulled the boat up far enough so that it wouldn’t drift away.

I asked, “Is there somewhere we can buy some food here? I’m starving.”

She said, “Perhaps, but this is not a good place. It is an evil place. We must not stay long. Believe what I am saying to you.”

“Keesha, I have to get to a phone. I’ll be fine here. Take the boat, and keep going if you want. I’ll understand.”

“No. If I’m on the river alone, the soldiers might capture me again. I would rather die than let that happen.”

I motioned to her with my hand—come on. “Then stay close to me.”

From a woman cooking over a wood fire, I bought a loaf of flat bread, but she refused to sell a small can of beans she was heating.

“Money means very little,” Keesha said, “when there is no food to buy. This village, these people, they stay because of the coins he gives them. I do not understand why.”

Nor did I—though there was something I did understand. Something terrible had happened to the river here. The smell I’d noticed didn’t come from some distant factory. It was the water itself.

I offered the bread to Keesha, then tore off a hunk myself, chewing slowly, troubled by something, but I wasn’t certain what. Then I realized: There was no surface activity, no jump and slap of small fish, nor were there any wading birds. Why? I’d seen hundreds of egrets and herons upriver.

I watched an old man paddle his dugout to the bank and climb out with arthritic care. There was a handmade cast net in the bow of the boat, so I asked, “How was the fishing today?”

He shrugged. “Upriver, I took a few cara-chama, and an acar.” He lifted the lid off a woven basket to show me the fish: One was long with a bony armor plating, the other two were a peculiar gray with large heads. “Downriver, though, it is dead. Even the paranamirims have been poisoned. There is nothing alive in the water there. A few turtles, perhaps. I’ve been told that a man must paddle several days, all the way to the big water before the river shows life again.”

I asked, “Poisoned by what?”

He made a open-palmed gesture. “When I was a boy, we’d mash the roots of liana or a bush called timbo, and pour the milk in places of still water. All the fish would soon come to the surface, unable to breathe. Perhaps someone has found all the timbo bushes in the world and boiled them.” I helped him pull his canoe onto the bank as he asked, “Do you know something of fish?”

I said, “They are an interest of mine.”

“Then you will find this unusual. Because the lower section of river has died, we’re are now seeing for the first time many botos searching here for food. This far upriver, it is unusual. Our younger men have been hunting them with harpoons.”

I said, “Botos?”

Keesha was eating her bread, listening. “They are hunting botos?” she sputtured. “Are they crazy? That will bring the worst kind of luck to you and all your people!”

The man ignored her, and wagged his finger at me. “Come. If you are a student of fish, I will show you.”

The men of Remate de Males were hunting, harpooning, and butchering freshwater dolphins.

In a little circle created by bamboo huts, five Amazonian dolphins had been hung on a crossbeam wedged between two trees. Even after death, the animals were pink in color, bright as flamingos. They were hanging nose-down, tied by their tails. Gravity had engorged their heads with blood, so their small eyes bulged.

As children and women stood watching from the shade, three young men in ragged shorts took turns with a long, curved knife, gutting the animals and carrying the viscera off in buckets. They worked within a glittering ballroom of flies.

To the old man, I said, “This is a tragedy.”

Misunderstanding my meaning, the old man answered, “Yes. It is not a good thing. Only the man on the hill has ice. The flesh of these botos will soon rot, yet the women stand here, doing nothing! They should be constructing bamboo flats for salting. And a good fire for smoking the meat. But these young women, their brains have gone soft. They think only of owning a television set and living in the city.”

Keesha glared at him but said nothing.

I asked permission of the three hunters before walking to the animals to get a closer look.

Supposedly, of the five freshwater species of dolphins in the world, the pink Amazon River dolphin, Inia geoffrensis, is the most intelligent. I say “supposedly” because the bottle-nosed dolphin has been so consistently imbued with compassionate, human qualities—even by biologists who should know better—that, these days, I doubt much of what I read about them.

But research on these rare, freshwater dolphins predated an unfortunate transition, for some, from science to wistful mysticism. Even early researchers described them as sensitive, intuitive mammals with a measurable brain capacity 40 percent larger than that of humans. At that time, they were considered to be one of the least threatened species of dolphins, though even then their numbers were small.

If desperate men were now hunting them for food, I doubted if the future of the species was still as certain.

I remembered reading that, because Amazon River dolphins had no known natural predators, they didn’t need to live in large groups, or pods, for protection. As a result, they were solitary swimmers, though occasionally seen in small family groups of five or six.

These village hunters had managed to kill three females, a young male, and a very large, mature male that looked to be just over nine feet long and had to weigh at least two hundred pounds. There was no mistaking the sex. Death had freed the muscles that held their genitalia within their abdomens.

I touched my finger to the harpoon hole in back of the large male, then moved around the animal, noting the physiological differences between this freshwater animal and the dolphin I saw so often back on Sanibel Island.

He had a very long beak that was lined with tiny hairs, and small, almost piggish eyes—in water so murky, sight would not be so important. He had disproportionately large flippers, and a hump on his back instead of a fin. The pink color, I suspected, had something to do with the iron oxide color of the river.

To the hunters, I said, “Did you take them near here?”

“Yes! Very close. Only a few kilometers away.”

“I’ve heard they are very intelligent. I’m surprised they let you get close enough to harpoon them.”

One of the men stepped forward, very proud of himself. “Sir, you are correct in saying that they are the smartest of fish. But they are not so smart as man. I discovered a way!

“We found one of the botos in a narrow river, and used a net so that she could not escape. Are you familiar with the strange noise these animals make when they are hurt? We kept her wrapped in the net while she made these sounds. Soon, other botos appeared. Perhaps to rescue this female. It was easy, then, to use our harpoons.” Laughing, he added, “Though it was not so easy to stay in our boats as they pulled us all over the river!”

Everyone in the circle of huts thought that was hilarious.

I opened the belly of one of the females, using my hands to part the stomach panels as if opening a thin curtain. She had net burns on her delicate skin—this was the female who’d called for help.

They’d emptied everything out of her, but for one small oversight. There was a partially developed pup in her womb. I left the dead infant where it was, then knelt, and searched through the viscera. “Was there anything in their bellies?”

“One small catfish, nothing else. They were very hungry.” The young hunter laughed and added, “Like our families. But not now. Tonight, we will have a feast!”

Keesha told me, “Do you believe me now? This is an evil place.”

We were walking through the village, up a mud road. Among the huts, naked children played in banana thickets while scrawny dogs lay in pools of sunlight, cleaning themselves. We’d been told that a man who lived on the outskirts of the village was very rich and might have a cell phone we could use, so we were searching for him.

To Keesha, I said, “I don’t know about evil, but it certainly isn’t very attractive.”

“No!” she said. “Evil! The botos, the pink ladies—they are sacred animals. How can you have lived and not know about them? At night, they grow hair and walk away from the Tefe River. They have magical powers—they’re witches. They will punish this village. They’ll destroy it. We must leave very soon!”

She was very agitated. Killing human beings didn’t seem to bother her nearly so much. I told her, “I don’t see much worth destroying. But, yeah, I’m with you. The sooner we get away from here, the better.”

The wealthiest man in the village was a middle-aged Irishman with blood-bleary eyes who wore Birkenstock sandals, hiking shorts, a native shirt made of colorful patches, and a black beret over his long gray hair, which he wore tied in a ponytail.