Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Kanai, meanwhile, was watching the dolphins with a puzzled frown. “Are you sure these are the right animals?” he said at last.

“Of course I’m sure.”

“But look at them,” he said in a tone of plaintive complaint. “All they do is bob up and down while making little grunting sounds.”

“They do a lot more than that, Kanai,” Piya said. “But mostly they do it underwater.”

“I thought you were going to lead me to my Moby Dick,” said Kanai. “But these are just little floating pigs.”

Piya laughed. “Kanai, you’re talking about a cousin of the killer whale.”

“Pigs have impressive relatives too, you know,” Kanai said.

“Kanai, Orcaella don’t look remotely like pigs.”

“No — they do have that thing on their back.”

“It’s called a fin.”

“And I’m sure they don’t taste as good as pigs.”

“Kanai,” said Piya. “Stop it.”

Kanai laughed. “I just can’t believe we’ve come all this way to look at these ridiculous porcine things. If you’re going to risk jail for an animal, couldn’t you have picked something with a little more sex appeal? Or any appeal, for that matter.”

“Orcaella have a lot of appeal, Kanai,” Piya said. “You just have to have the patience to discover it.”

Despite his jocular tone, Kanai’s perplexity was genuine. In his imagination, dolphins were the sleek steel-gray creatures he had seen in films and aquariums. The appeal of those animals he could readily understand, but he could see nothing interesting in the phlegmatic, beady-eyed creatures circling the boat. He knitted his brows. “Did you always know you were going to be tracking these animals around the world?”

“No. It was an accident,” said Piya. “I knew nothing about the species when I met my first Orcaella. It happened about three years ago.”

She had been interning with a team doing a marine-mammal survey in the South China Sea. At the end of the survey, the ship stopped at Port Sihanouk, in Cambodia. A few members of the team went up to Phnom Penh to visit friends who worked for an international wildlife conservation agency. That was how they learned that a river dolphin had been found stranded near a small village in central Cambodia.

“I thought I’d go and take a look.”

The village, it turned out, was an hour’s journey from Phnom Penh and a long way inland from the Mekong River: Piya was driven there on a hired motorcycle. The terrain was a patchwork of huts, rice fields, irrigation ditches and shallow reservoirs. It was in one of these reservoirs, a body of water no bigger than a swimming pool, that the dolphin had been confined. The animal had swum inland with the floodwaters of the rainy season and had failed to depart with the rest of its pod; meanwhile, the irrigation ditches had run dry, shutting off its escape routes.

This was Piya’s first glimpse of Orcaella brevirostris: it was about five feet in length, with a steel-gray body and a short dorsal fin. It lacked the usual dolphin snout and its rounded head and large eyes gave it an oddly ruminative, bovine appearance. She named it Mr. Sloane, after a high school teacher to whom it bore a distinct resemblance.

Mr. Sloane, the dolphin, was clearly in trouble: the water was drying up fast and there were no fish left in the reservoir. Piya went with her motorcycle driver to the next kampong and brought back some fish from the market: she spent the rest of the day sitting beside the reservoir, feeding the dolphin. Next day, she went back again with a cooler filled with fish. Although there were many farmers and children present, Mr. Sloane ignored the others and went straight over to Piya’s side of the reservoir.

“I swear to you it recognized me.”

Back in Phnom Penh there was much concern in the small wildlife community. The Orcaella population of the Mekong was known to be declining rapidly and was expected soon to fall below sustainable levels. The Mekong Orcaella had shared Cambodia’s misfortunes: in the 1970s they had suffered the ravages of indiscriminate American carpet bombing. Later they too had been massacred by Khmer Rouge cadres, who had hit upon the idea of using dolphin oil to supplement their dwindling supplies of petroleum. The once abundant population of Orcaella in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s great fresh-water lake, had been reduced almost to extinction. These dolphins were hunted with rifles and explosives and their carcasses were hung up in the sun so their fat would drip into buckets. This oil was then used to run boats and motorcycles.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Kanai said, “that they were melted down and used as diesel fuel?”

“Yes, in effect.”

In recent years the threat to Orcaella had grown even more serious. There was a plan afoot to blow up the rapids of the upper Mekong in order to make the river navigable as far as China: this would mean the certain destruction of the dolphin’s preferred habitats. Thus the stranding of Mr. Sloane was not just an individual misfortune; it was a harbinger of catastrophe for an entire population.

Piya was given the job of caring for the stranded dolphin while arrangements were made for transporting the animal back to the river. Every day for six days, Piya traveled up to the reservoir bearing cooler-loads of fresh fish. On the morning of the seventh day she arrived to find that Mr. Sloane had disappeared. She was told that the animal had died during the night, but she could find no evidence to support this. There was no explanation of how the remains had been removed from the pool. What she did find were the tread marks of a heavy vehicle of some kind, probably a truck, that led down to the water’s edge. What had happened was all too obvious: Mr. Sloane had fallen victim to the flourishing clandestine trade in wildlife. New aquariums were opening throughout eastern Asia and the demand for river dolphins was growing. Mr. Sloane was a valuable commodity — Irrawaddy dolphins had been known to fetch as much as one hundred thousand dollars on the black market.

“One hundred thousand dollars?” said Kanai in disbelief. “For these?”

“Yes.”

Piya was not inclined to be sentimental about animals. But the idea that Mr. Sloane would soon be sold off to an aquarium, as a curiosity, made her stomach churn. For days afterward she was haunted by a nightmare in which Mr. Sloane was driven into a corner of his tank by a line of hunters armed with fishnets.

Trying to put the incident behind her, she decided to go back to the States to register for a Ph.D. program at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla. But then an unforeseen opportunity came her way: a wildlife conservation group in Phnom Penh offered her a contract to do a survey of Mekong Orcaella. The offer was perfect in every way: the money was enough to last a couple of years, and the material would count toward her Ph.D. She took the job and moved upriver to a sleepy town. In the three years since she had become one of a tiny handful of Orcaella specialists, she had worked everywhere Irrawaddy dolphins were to be found: Burma, northern Australia, the Philippines, coastal Thailand — everywhere, in fact, except the place where they first entered the record book of zoological reckoning, India.

It was only when she reached the end of her story that Piya realized, with a guilty start, that she had not said a single word to Fokir since she stepped onto the boat.

“Listen, Kanai,” she said, “there’s something I’ve been kind of puzzled about. Fokir seems to know this place so well — this island, Garjontola. He seems to know all about the dolphins and where they go. I wish I knew what first brought him here, how he learned about these things. Could you ask him?”

“Of course.” Kanai turned away to explain the question and then, as Fokir began to speak, he swiveled around to face Piya. “This is what he says: