The Pink Dolphins of the Amazon

by Helen Pugh

Copyright 2021 Helen Pugh

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Part 1: The Warrior

A strong legend persists deep in the Cuyabeno jungle in Ecuador, where the Aguarico River flows through Ecuador before it joins the Amazon and snakes its way through Peru and Brazil. So strong, in fact, is this legend, that it has permeated the sector of documentation and records. Myth, legend and reality have entwined themselves in the history of the strange aquatic creatures of that river and the people who live in the nearby communities.

They say there's a reason why the river dolphins inhabiting that part of the river are pink in colour. The reason is that the first-ever river dolphin was not born a dolphin.

The story begins with a young man, a strong and successful young warrior, who was loved by all his community because he kept it safe from wild animals and raids from other communities. He was a skilled hunter and often brought back immense hunks of meat for his parents and siblings. Many were the times in which they couldn't manage to eat all that he brought home- their bellies were fit to burst, and so the food was shared amongst many throughout the community.

But this young man did have one enemy and it was an enemy he did not care to have. A spirit-god looked down from on high and envied the man his arrogant strength and skilfulness. A rage set deeply in the spirit-god's heart, poisoning every second of his existence. He decided that he would seek vengeance upon that mere mortal who thought himself to be invincible.

The spirit-god waited until the man was alone. It took a few days for this to happen, for the warrior’s popularity meant that he was always surrounded by other men who wished to learn from him and women who fought over who he would choose as his wife. But at last the day arrived when, watched closely by the spirit-god, he decided to go down to the river by himself to relax and bathe. That was when the spirit-god chose to act out his revenge.

As soon as the warrior dipped the tip of his toe into the water, he started to feel strange and tingly all over.

Moaning, he collapsed to the ground and began to writhe and thrash around. In a panic, his eyes dashed about him and finally he caught a glimpse of his legs: they were melding together as if they were covered in sticky tree sap. He tried to touch his legs with his arms only to discover that they weren’t arms anymore, but looked pointed and slender like… a fin. His breathing was becoming laboured now as he grew more and more alarmed and that was when he realised that each time he breathed, it wasn't from his mouth but from a hole in his head and when he tried to speak, only strange noises came out.

His whole body had turned into a fish-like creature but unlike the other marine animals in the waters, he was pinkish rather than blue. Deciding that this was too vivid to be some terrible nightmare, he understood that it must have been a power from above who had cursed him like this. Deeply distraught, he shifted his body around awkwardly along the muddy bank. For lack of any other option, he slipped into the deep waters of the river.

Less than an hour later, people from the village came looking for him. They had known which part of the river he had gone to and when they found only his torn clothes on the banks of the river, a rising fear pounded in their hearts. The women clutched the warrior’s rags to their chests and wept that some sea monster had eaten him and taken him from them forever. One man, the hunter's best friend, thought it wise to sit on a branch on the river beach and wait patiently for the man to return. There could be a very reasonable motive for his sudden disappearance. Perhaps he had wanted to fish by diving deep down into the water and shed his clothes to make himself lighter and they had ripped in his haste. Maybe he had just wanted to go for a swim and so had left his clothes behind and some wild animal had come along and slashed them up. It could be that the scorching sun had made him sweat and rip off his clothes to cool down before jumping into the water.

Whatever the case, the day wore on and still there was no sign of him.

Part 2: The Dolphin

One by one, the others dejectedly retreated back to the community to pray to Pachamama, mother nature, to keep the hunter safe from harm. Yet the hunter's friend remained on the beach, his lance leaning on the branch on which he sat, his hands idle or else plucking the leaves on the tree then pulling them tight between his fingers and blowing through them to call out to his friend. Sometimes he even whistled to see if he would get a reply.

By now, the sun was steadily falling from the sky and even he had to admit that if his friend were still alive, he would not be sleeping in the village that night. He could do no more than climb down from the branch and creep back to his hut, hoping that everybody would have gone to sleep and would not hear his approach. He had no wish to be the barer of bad news.

He was wrong of course- the whole village, even the tiny children, were all keeping a vigil with a huge fire roaring in the middle of the clearing. They all stood up when he arrived but a small shake of his head made them turn away and back into insular sorrow. Without saying a word, he took a place by the fire and looked intently into its bright flames as if staring into it would give him a fresh idea as to the whereabouts of the mighty hunter.

Meanwhile, the man-dolphin swished and flailed around miserably in those waters. Whenever somebody from the community came down to the river, he swam towards them in the vain hope that he would somehow be able to communicate with them. But the women screamed and dashed away as soon as they laid eyes on him and the men jabbed their spears towards him and hollered aggressively. Then, out of loneliness, he tried to just be near them without being spotted so as just to hear a woman's song or listen to the village's news. But it is not easy to camouflage oneself when one is pink and one's river is murky blue. In the end, he gave up such ideas and resigned himself to a life of solitude and despair.

He stayed that way for many months, depressed and bored with a life condemned to the rivers and lakes of the region. He searched far and wide for other mammals similar to himself for company, but there were none. He had contact only with tilapia fish, catfish, shrimps, bocachica fish and other small and dull lifeforms. It is difficult to claim to have friends when the only contact between the two is a few seconds before the smaller one gets killed and eaten, sometimes eaten by him, for he soon realised he was a carnivore.

The man-dolphin's sadness was obvious to the powers on high. So, another spirit-god, who had not approved of his counterpart's cruelty, took pity on the former warrior and created a female pink dolphin to keep him company and so that he might have children, even if they were aquatic instead of human.

The warrior did indeed cheer up when his female companion was created and to thank the powers on high for creating her, he vowed to populate the whole river with his offspring. And so it was that the first pink Amazon dolphins came into being.

But, his male offspring still desired female humans and the first pink dolphin also wanted to act out revenge against his condition and produce human children also. That is why in June, the month of the fiestas of dancing, firework displays and music, when the Indigenous people celebrate saint days and the men are busy having fun, the male pink dolphins come out of the river to seduce young women. And for that month only, they emerged from the water as attractive young men. Having inherited all the charm and light-footedness of their father, they knew that they would be very successful.

With all female eyes on them, they danced magnificently with all the flexible grace that their bodies had in the water. They took the hypnotised women by the hand and led them to the middle of the dance. The women fluttered their eyelashes, smiled at the mysterious men and began to move their bodies in time with their partners.

The men watched from the sidelines in shock. They were at first filled with jealousy that even their most proficient dancers could not match the man-dolphins. Dancers as elegant as these strangers had not been seen since their famous warrior had mysteriously vanished. Then, they let hatred boil inside them, watching their wives, fiancées, friends, mothers and daughters be sashayed about the place by those smug intruders.

Meanwhile, the same man who had waited all day for the warrior to return suddenly caught a glimpse of something strange on the top of one of the strangers' heads, half-hidden by his straw hat, a type of hat that nowadays is wrong labelled Panama hats when its true origin is Ecuadorian. You see, the only distinguishable feature left on each man-dolphin’s body was a blow-hole on top of each head. But the dolphins could hide this with those straw hats.

The man shrugged and thought nothing more of the strange shadow that could easily have been a birth mark.

And so it was that the man-dolphin never returned to the village but his sons visit the communities every year to please the women and anger the men!

According to the legend, nowadays the dolphins do not wait for the month of June, but are ready and able to seduce once a month. It is said that when young women menstruate on a night with a full moon and go down to the banks of the Amazon River or they pass through the river in a canoe, they will always be visited by pink dolphins who come to try and get them pregnant. They are said to be insatiable, skilled and gentle lovers. They make women forget who they are, forget past and future and even in some cases, forget to whom they are engaged. They entice single and married women into their arms and create a sphere of enchantment around the women. Upon seeing the man-dolphins, the women's only thought is to give in to pure pleasure and succumb to those mesmerising eyes and be seduced by the magnetic pull of the dolphins' allure. The man-dolphins need only smile to put women under their spell.

That is why in that region, all children born to single mothers are said to be offspring of the pink dolphins.

For that reason, whenever a man wearing a hat comes to a fiesta in the month of June, the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle ask that he take off that hat to make sure that he is not a dolphin! And the indigenous men of the region are always intent on finishing off these animals so that they cannot impregnate the women anymore. The hatred that they felt at the first dance only heightened with time and as the legend was passed down so too was the anger against the dolphins' seductive ways. Despite having been close friends with the first pink dolphin, there is now a fierce battle between man and man-dolphin, one striving to annihilate the other, and one attempting to reproduce himself with the women and thus eliminating the other by replacing them as fathers.

On the other hand, there is many a woman who looks forward to the arrival of the elusive man-dolphin who will take her in his arms and make passionate love to her. For her, the dolphin is an outlaw, a handsome stranger, her knight in shining armour who will whisk her away to a land of fantasies and dreams.

The Real Pink Dolphins

The pink river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis), also called the Amazon river dolphin, is the largest freshwater dolphin in the world. Its lifespan is only around thirty or forty years of age and this legend, along with others, has unfortunately put the species' continuation at risk. Certain ethnic groups also believe that the teeth and eyes of the pink dolphins have magical powers and so have hunted them.

However, whatever risk these legends have caused is nothing in comparison to what the modern world has done to the aquatic mammals. They have been affected by large-scale fishing, the oil industry, deforestation, gold mining and waste disposal.

Once, pink dolphins were amongst some of the least threatened dolphin species in the world, but with the onset of industry in the Amazon region, they have now become one of the most threatened.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of 'Intrepid Dudettes of the Inca Empire' and ‘Inca-tastic Tales’, Helen Pugh has long believed in the importance of rescuing historical women from obscurity. With an honour’s degree in Spanish and Italian from Bristol University, she embarked on a quest to discover the forgotten women of the Inca Empire.

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