The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [166]
HORIZONS
AT DAYBREAK, when Piya woke, her face and hair were wet with dew, but the water’s surface was almost completely clear of fog. She guessed this had something to do with the unusually warm night and was pleased to notice that a brisk breeze had started up and was stirring the river: it looked as though the weather would be somewhat more pleasant than it had been the day before.
Fokir was still asleep, so she lay motionless in her place, taking in the sounds of the early morning: the hooting of a distant bird, the rustle of the wind blowing through the mangroves and the lapping of the swift currents of high tide. As her ears grew attuned to her surroundings, she became aware of a sound that did not fit with the rest — a brief, breathy noise not unlike a sigh. It sounded like an exhalation, and yet it was not at all like the breathing of an Irrawaddy dolphin. She turned over onto her stomach and reached for her binoculars: her instincts told her it had to be a Gangetic dolphin, Platanista gangetica. Moments later she spotted a finless back rolling through the water some five hundred feet from the boat’s bow. Yes, that was what it was; she was excited to have her intuition so quickly confirmed. Nor was it just a single animal: there were maybe three of them in the immediate vicinity of the boat.
Piya sat up. So far the paucity of her encounters with Platanista had disappointed her — this sighting was an unexpected bonus. She took a GPS reading and then reached into her backpack for some data sheets.
It was the data sheets that made her suspect something was amiss. Logging the dolphins’ appearances, she saw that they were surfacing with unusual frequency, with barely a minute or two separating their exhalations. And more than once, along with the breathing, she heard a sound not unlike a squeal.
There was something odd here, she decided; this was not the way these animals normally behaved. She put away her data sheets and raised her glasses to her eyes.
As she was puzzling over the dolphins’ behavior, her mind wandered idly back to an article she had read some years before. It was by a Swiss cetologist, Professor G. Pilleri, one of the pioneers in river dolphin studies, a doyen of the field. As far as she could recall, the article had been written in the 1970s. Pilleri’s research had taken him to the Indus River, in Pakistan, and he had paid some fishermen to catch a pair of Platanista, a male and a female. The article, she remembered, had described the process in great detail. It was no easy task to capture these dolphins, for Platanista’s echolocation was so accurate that they were usually able to detect and evade a net once it had been lowered into the water. The fishermen had resorted to a strategy of luring unwary dolphins into places where nets could be dropped on them from above.
Once his two specimens had been secured, Pilleri’s next step was to transport them to his laboratory in Switzerland. The story of this journey, Piya recalled, was so complicated that it had made her laugh out loud as she was reading it. The animals had been wrapped in wet cloths and taken by motorboat to a roadhead on the Indus. A waiting truck took them to a railway station and they traveled by train to Karachi. All through the journey their bodies were regularly moistened with water from their native river. A Land Rover met the train in Karachi and transported them to a hotel, where a swimming pool had been prepared for the two cetaceans. After the dolphins