The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [157]
When the dolphins were just five hundred feet ahead of the boat, she caught sight of a steel-gray form lying inert on the mudbank. Instantly she shut her eyes, knowing what it was and yet hoping it would be something else. When she looked again it was still there, and it was exactly what she had feared: the carcass of an Irrawaddy dolphin.
A closer look brought yet another shock: the animal’s body was relatively small, and she knew at once that it was probably the newborn calf she had watched for the past several days, swimming beside its mother. Its body appeared to have been deposited on the shore some hours before by the falling tide. Now, with the water rising again, it seemed to be teetering on the water’s edge.
Piya’s intuition told her that these dolphins belonged to the same pod that usually congregated at Garjontola at low tide. The carcass explained the dolphins’ departure from their routine: it seemed they were reluctant to return to their pool while one of their number lay dead in plain view. Piya had the sense that they were waiting for the tide to set it afloat again.
Fokir had spotted the carcass too, Piya knew, for the boat’s bow had turned to point toward the shore. As the boat was pulling slowly up to the bank a smell caught the back of Piya’s throat. The full heat of the sun was on the dead animal and the stench was such that she had to wrap a length of cloth around her head before she could step off the boat.
Looking down on the carcass, she saw that there was a huge gash behind the blowhole where a large wedge of flesh and blubber had been torn out of the dolphin’s body. The shape of the injury suggested that the dolphin had been hit by the propeller of a fast-moving motorboat. This puzzled Piya, because she had seen so few such boats in these waters. It was Fokir who suggested a solution to the mystery, by sketching a peaked cap with his hands. She understood that it was probably some kind of official boat used by uniformed personnel — maybe from the coast guard or the police or even the Forest Department. It had gone speeding down the channel earlier in the day, and the inexperienced calf had been slow to move out of its way.
Piya took a tape measure out of her backpack and spent a while taking the measurements required by the Norris protocols. Then, pulling out a small pocketknife, she took samples of skin, blubber and a few internal organs. These she wrapped in foil and slipped into Ziploc bags. Armies of crabs and insects were now swarming all over the dead calf, eating into the exposed flesh of its wound.
Piya remembered how her heart had leapt when she first saw the newborn surfacing beside its mother and she could not bear to look at the carcass any longer. She gestured to Fokir to pick it up by the flukes while she took hold of the fins. Between them, they swung it back and forth a couple of times and then heaved it out into the river. She had expected it to bob up again immediately, but to her surprise it sank quickly from view.
This was as much time as Piya could stand to spend in this place. She went back to the boat, threw in her equipment and helped Fokir push it away from the bank.
As the current was pulling them away, Fokir stood up and began to point upriver and downriver, east and west. Presently, as his gestures became more explicit, she understood he was telling her that what she had seen was not an uncommon sight. He had come upon three such carcasses: one of them had washed up a short distance downriver from this very place — that was why he had thought of coming this way.
By the time they were in midriver, the dolphins appeared to be dispersing — except for one, which seemed to be lingering in the wake of the pod. Piya had the sense that this animal was circling over the sunken carcass as the currents rolled it along the riverbed. Was this the mother? There was no way of knowing for sure.
Then, all at once, the dolphins sounded and disappeared. Piya would have liked to follow them, but she