Manatee Rescue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Living with Manatees

  Manuela’s paddle slipped in and out of the dark water without a splash. She steered the big dugout canoe between the flooded trees as lightly as a windblown leaf, never breaking the silent rhythm of her paddling. A flurry of small bats flitted over the water and disappeared into a tree hole, like smoke sucked back down a chimney. High above in the branches, a party of parrots quarreled. Manuela took no notice. All her attention was on the huge renaco1 up ahead, and the oil-dark water around it. The fig tree’s green fruits were floating on the surface and being nibbled at from underneath by the pale shapes of fishes.

  In the bow of the canoe, her father, Silvio, held up his left hand: the signal for her to slow down. Manuela didn’t need to be told; she was already bringing the canoe to a stop within perfect range. Insects, frogs, and birds called all around, but the deep shadow of the fig tree held a perfect stillness.

  Silvio shifted his grip on the end of the harpoon, and fixed his gaze on the flicker of fins and tails under the surface. Manuela held her breath. Silvio was a good fisherman, but when the river was this high, fish were hard to find. They had been out since before dawn and had caught nothing but a few little bocachicos.2

  The whiplash action of Silvio’s sinewy arm was too fast to follow, but the bobbing of the harpoon in the water showed that he had struck a fish, and a big one. With three deft strokes of her paddle, Manuela brought the canoe alongside, and a moment later, a fat silver fish, bigger than a dinner plate, flapped in the bottom of the canoe.

  Silvio hit the fish once with the handle of his machete, and it lay still.

  “Gamitana!” 3 He grinned. “Not the biggest I’ve caught, but big enough. We can cook it with peppers and celathro.4 You’ll like that, won’t you, Frog?”

  The thought made Manuela’s stomach growl. She looked at her father, and they both laughed. “Can we cook some bocachicos before we go home?” she asked.

  “Of course! I think Frog and her papa have earned some breakfast!”

  Silvio took up his paddle, and together they pushed the canoe out from the shade of the trees into the morning sunlight.

  They put aside their paddles in the middle of a flooded clearing. All around, floating plants covered the water in a carpet so dense it looked like land. Manuela loved these clearings, shut away from all the world by their wall of trees. The only sounds were the booming call of a camungo5 echoing in the still air and the faint sizzle of the fish, over the little charcoal fire in a tin can. Manuela closed her eyes and let the sunlight warm her face. Fishing with her father was so much better than going to school. She was glad the council in the town, Puerto Dorado, had run out of money for diesel. Maybe the boat to school would never run down the river again!

  Manuela’s daydream was interrupted by a sharp hiss. Her eyes snapped open to find that her father had poured water over the fish and doused the fire.He was pointing at a small area of clear water, perhaps ten canoe lengths away. At its edge, a patch of floating plants quivered, and the faintest of ripples spread over its smooth surface. Underneath the water, something big was moving.

  Silvio turned to her over his shoulder and silently mouthed a word: “Manatee!”

  Manatee! Manuela’s heart raced, her hunger forgotten. She had only glimpsed a live manatee once before, and never this close, close enough to hunt.

  “Not everyone can kill a manatee, little Frog,” Silvio had always told her. “Only the most skillful.”

  There was a law against killing manatees, but out here, so far from town, no one took any notice of it. Catching a manatee was too special to bother with what the police two hours downriver might have to say about it. When someone brought in a manatee, the whole village got excited. There was so much meat that whoever caught the creature could trade it for almost anything.

  But Silvio hadn’t caught a manatee for a long, long time. They were getting scarce. Sometimes, in the dry season, when the rivers and lakes shrank, somebody speared one. Sometimes one would drown by accident in a net, or a calf would be caught alive and sold in the town downriver.

  Manuela had always dreamed that one day she and her father would bring home a manatee. Then people would say how skillful she was and not how strange it was that a girl should go fishing with her father. She would be a heroine instead of a freak. Here at last was her chance!

  “Manatees are very wary,” Silvio had always told her. “They can hear a bare foot shift in the bottom of a canoe.”

  So Manuela slid her paddle slowly, slowly between the floating plants and pushed smoothly against the water’s resistance. Her senses were on high alert. Colors were brighter and even the tiniest sounds rang out: the scratch of a dragonfly’s feet as the insect perched on the gunwale, the plink plink of grasshoppers, jumping to avoid the canoe’s stealthy progress.

  Up ahead, the manatee’s nose broke the surface. It was so easy to miss: just a disk of flesh with two black nostrils set in it, no bigger than a coin. It took a breath, making a soft pfff, and was gone.

  “Remember,” her father had told her, “they swim backward after taking a breath, so if you throw a harpoon in front, you’ll likely miss it.”

  Manuela pointed the canoe behind the spot where the nose had appeared. They were almost close enough now. One more careful paddle stroke turned the craft to the side, to give them clear shots. Silently, Manuela put down her paddle and took up her own harpoon.

  The pool was a smooth, dark mirror again. Silvio and Manuela waited, their harpoons poised and ready to throw. A jacana6 screeched as it flew low over the floating mat of plants, its legs trailing, and the camungo’s mournful booming began again. Still they waited, eyes straining, muscles tense.

  There! A minute swirl on the surface, not quite a ripple, not quite a bubble. No ordinary person would even see it, but Silvio knew it was the trail of a tail, moving underwater.

  Manuela caught the flick of Silvio’s arm from the corner of her eye. Her own arm, already on a hair trigger, shot like a coiled spring. Silvio’s harpoon struck. It had been thrown with such force that when it hit the animal, it shivered with the shock of the impact. Just to the side, Manuela’s struck, but glanced off and lay floating on the surface. Then Silvio’s harpoon, upright and stuck in the manatee’s body, disappeared as the creature dived.

  “It will come up again in a moment,” Manuela’s father said. “Then we’ll have it!”

  They both took up their paddles and were at the the spot where the manatee had dived in a moment. Blood blossomed in the water, but there was something else, too.

  “Father!” Manuela cried. “There’s a little cria.7 Look!”

  A bristly nose showed above the surface, and a small dark body bobbed beside the canoe. But the calf was wounded. There was a bloody cut slanting across its shiny black back.

  “You must have scraped it as I hit its mama,” said Silvio. “Quick, put a rope around its tail. Then we can be sure the mother will come back!”

  1 renaco: a giant forest fig tree

  2 bocachicos: mackerel-size fish, prized for their flavor

  3 gamitana: a large fleshy fish that feeds on seeds in the flooded forest

  4 celathro: the local variety of cilantro

  5 camungo: a large black-and-white bird with a loud, mournful call

  6 jacana: a waterbird with huge feet and claws

  7 cria: the Spanish word for the young
of an animal

  Manuela had imagined that killing a manatee would be like killing a very big fish, just more exciting. But it wasn’t at all. The manatee mother fought hard and took a long time to die. Her calf tried to get up close to her, even after she was dead, when Manuela and her father were straining to roll the vast body into the canoe. The sun was already sinking by the time they managed it.

  “If we put the cria next to its mama, it might wriggle out of the boat,” Silvio said, looking at the huge corpse. “You’ll have to hold it on the way back while I paddle alone.”

  Manuela nodded but said nothing. The long, gruesome struggle had changed how she felt about manatees. Killing them wasn’t heroic or exciting. It was just horrible.

  The calf lay very still in the water, but it squirmed a little when Silvio lifted it into the boat. “It’s pretty small,” he said. “I don’t think it’s more than a couple of months old.”

  The calf didn’t seem small to Manuela when Silvio put it in her arms. It was as heavy as her cousin Valerio — and he was a solid little boy of nearly two.

  She held the baby with its round tummy against her chest, its paddle tail curled onto her lap. Its funny, bristly nose rested on her shoulder. It didn’t wriggle at all, but its nostrils opened and closed as it breathed, and its eyes, like little chips of polished charcoal, blinked. The skin of its back was tough and rubbery, but underneath its flippers, it was like velvet, the softest thing Manuela had ever felt. It was odd that an animal without arms or legs could feel so much like a human baby.

  “Do you think he will live?” she asked her father.

  “Don’t know, Frog.” He sighed. “That cut on its back is bad. I hope it lives, because Jose Gomez will buy it for a good price and sell it to some government official as a pet.”

  Jose Gomez brought basic supplies from Puerto Dorado in his big, fast boat and sold them in Manuela’s village, San Larenzo, for a high price. Everyone knew that he would do anything for money. They called him Clink-Clink because of the way money was always jangling in his fat pockets.

  Gomez fished too, with his three sons, but unlike Silvio, they used nets.

  “It takes no skill to use a net!” Silvio would grumble.

  “It may not take skill, brother,” Silvio’s older brother, Luis, would answer him, “but it catches fish.”

  Luis was right. Gomez’s nets caught enough fish to sell in Puerto Dorado. And, seeing how well the nets worked, other fishermen, like Uncle Luis, had begun to use them, too. But nets didn’t just catch fish. They caught other things as well, by mistake: river dolphins, turtles, and manatees. A baby manatee had been caught in Gomez’s net last year and he’d sold it for a lot of money. Afterward, Manuela had heard that it died.

  Manuela hoped the cut would discourage Jose Gomez from making a deal. She didn’t want this calf to die, too.

  Silvio paddled the canoe through the flooded forest and then out onto the milky-brown river. Manuela watched the rhythm of his paddle strokes and remembered the story her grandfather Mauricio had told her about manatees.

  “There are certain ceiba1 trees — big, big trees where fat caterpillars feed,” he’d said. “And when the caterpillars drop into the river, they turn into manatees!”

  Manuela loved this story. Even though Mauricio had drowned when she was small, she could still recall his voice. She’d dreamed of watching caterpillars drop into the water and becoming manatees.

  But this little calf had not dropped off a ceiba tree. It had come into the world the same way she had, from a mother’s belly.

  All the long way home, Manuela stared down at the dead mama manatee and felt sadder and sadder. The curve of the animal’s tail was just under Manuela’s feet, and her bloodied head touched the seat where Silvio sat to paddle. The pale patch on her chest stood out in the evening light like a bright island in a dark lake. Her flippers were folded on her chest, the way old ladies folded their hands in their laps.

  In her head, Manuela told the mama manatee how sorry she was that they had killed her. I’ll make your baby well, she told the mama. And I’ll put him back in the river one day. I promise.

  She whispered to the calf, “Don’t die! Please don’t die!” And in her heart she named him Airuwe. The word meant “manatee” in Ticuna,2 her grandfather Mauricio’s language.

  1 ceiba: a giant jungle tree, rare now due to logging

  2 Ticuna: a native people of the Amazon and the language they speak

  It was dusk when they got to San Larenzo. Yellow dots of lamplight showed at the doors of the houses, reflecting on the floodwater that had crept up between them. The forest behind the houses was one vast shadow, and the floating raft, where boats tied up, was almost invisible against the dark water. Everything seemed asleep, but the village faced the river and there was always a pair of eyes somewhere watching. When Silvio yelled out for help as they got close, Uncle Luis and his two sons, Jorge and Gonzaga, came out in their boat with the motor and towed them in.

  Luis slapped Silvio on the back, and there was a lot of laughing.

  “Who needs nets to make money, eh?” Silvio teased.

  Luis’s nickname in the village was Take-It-Easy, so he ignored his brother’s teasing. “You just got lucky, Silvio,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using nets to fish any time soon.”

  Jorge’s fine loud voice called out across the water, “Manatee! Manatee!”

  By the time they got to shore, half the village had gathered to take a look.

  Silvio was exhausted from paddling the heavily loaded canoe, but he stood up in the stern and raised his paddle in triumph over his head. This was the moment Manuela had dreamed of — returning home with a manatee that she had helped to hunt and kill. But something inside her had changed. It was as if a switch had been flicked on. So when Silvio turned to her and said, “Only the most skillful catch the manatee, Frog, and that’s us!” she couldn’t return his smile, and only whispered to the calf not to die.

  There were plenty of hands to help get the dead manatee out of the boat. Everyone was excited about eating something that wasn’t fish for the first time in weeks. From the moment it was hauled out, people began bargaining.

  “How about a new propeller for that broken-down outboard of yours, Silvio?”

  “I have two bags of farina1 to trade. . . .”

  “How much meat for half a drum of gas, Silvio?”

  For the time being, Manuela and the baby were forgotten.

  A dog pushed its way through the crowd and looked down at Manuela from the edge of the jetty. It woofed a greeting and danced into the canoe, its tiny claws chittering on the wood. It sniffed at the manatee’s tail and growled.

  “No, Tintico!”2 Manuela scolded. “Be nice! Where’s your mistress?”

  There was a thud of feet, then Libia, Manuela’s cousin and her best friend, landed in the canoe.

  “Right here!” Libia announced.

  Libia was tiny, like her miniature pet. She was stunted and wizened, with one leg shorter than the other because of a disease she’d had as a baby. On land she walked awkwardly, but in a canoe she was as quick as a fish. Her mind darted like a fish, too — she was full of crazy ideas. Other kids were wary of her, which made her Manuela’s natural ally. She was another girl who didn’t behave the way little girls were supposed to.

  Libia crouched beside Manuela and put her skinny hand lightly on the calf’s side. “How can something that feels like a rubber mat be so cute?” she exclaimed.

  Manuela smiled. It was true. The manatee was a bit like a big rubbery slug, yet there was something irresistibly lovable about it.

  “I’ve named him Airuwe,” Manuela said, “and I’m going to take care of him and put him back in the river when he’s grown.”

  Libia raised her eyebrows.

  “I thought you wanted to hunt manatees, not be their mama!”

  “I did,” Manuela said sadly, “but not anymore.”

  “What does your dad thin
k?” Libia asked.

  “Papa wants to sell him to Gomez.”

  “I see,” said Libia. “Then we may just have to do some manatee kidnapping!”

  Silvio was calling loudly for Manuela, so there was no more time to talk.

  “Where is my daughter, the great hunter?” he cried.

  Many hands picked Manuela and the calf out of the canoe and put them on the jetty. People patted Manuela on the back and cooed over the calf.

  “This is our big day, Frog!” Silvio beamed. “We caught a manatee and its calf.”

  Silvio was so pleased and proud. Manuela didn’t want to oppose him, but right then her promise to Airuwe seemed more important than pleasing her father.

  Clink-Clink came puffing down the jetty toward them, and Manuela’s heart fell as her father tried to take the calf from her arms. She held on tight.

  “Papa, don’t sell the manatee to Mr. Gomez, please.”

  Silvio’s smile disappeared. He looked astonished, as if wondering why his daughter was behaving like this. She was always so practical. They always agreed on everything.

  “But, Frog, he’ll give us a good price,” Silvio said, bewildered. “Come on, give it to me!”

  Manuela shook her head.

  “Do what your father tells you!” Gomez barked. “Hand it over!”

  “But look, he’s wounded!” Manuela showed Mr. Gomez the cut on the calf’s back, but he just shrugged.

  “It’s only got to survive as long as it takes to get it to Puerto Dorado tomorrow. Once I’ve sold it, it can die as much as it likes.” Gomez laughed.

  Manuela saw how much Silvio disliked what Gomez said. There’s still a chance, she thought.

  “Please, Papa, please let me keep him. I’ll take care of him, I promise.”

  But Silvio wouldn’t meet her eyes. “No, you can’t keep it!” he said coldly. “Gomez is giving us good money for it.”

  Manuela had never heard such a chill in her father’s voice. She felt as if she had been slapped, but the hurt made her even more determined.

  “This is not an it!” she shouted. “It’s a baby, and you shouldn’t buy and sell babies!”