Anasty one, the dolphin,’ Derode grumbled when he returned home, trading the humid heat of an Amazonian afternoon for the cool, sheltered interior. Inside, his wife Rosa and I shot hungry looks at his empty hands. Once again, the Caquetá River surrendered no fish. I was only two weeks into my fieldwork with the Andoque people in southern Colombia, and my eyes zigzagged in confusion between the two septuagenarian spouses. What did a dolphin have to do with anything? Rosa explained: ‘Derode had left baits by the river, and it seems a dolphin had stolen the fish that had gotten hooked in them.’
Derode nodded.
The fishing had been poor ever since my arrival, and as Rosa cooked lunch from the rice and lentils I had brought from the city – the ‘White People’s Food’ – she reminisced with her husband about times when the river had been generous. She recalled how her grandfather had once hauled in an almost legendary catch by throwing poisonous plants into the shallow stream and asphyxiating the fish in great numbers. Among this enormous catch was a dolphin. Of course, she added, as if it needed no explanation, her grandfather did not eat it.
‘Why not eat the dolphin?’ I asked. The Andoque were accomplished hunters and fishermen, and there was almost no walking, swimming, crawling or flying creature that they wouldn’t relish, if they could catch it.
‘Because dolphins are people,’ Rosa said, matter-of-factly. ‘Besides, their meat smells terrible.’
Dolphins were not simply people, she went on, they were bad people, shapeshifters. Her father had once warned her never to accept the advances of unknown men while bathing at the river. As handsome as they may seem, he had said, they may be dolphins in disguise. Those reckless enough to fall for their charms would soon grow feverish, drift into madness and hallucinations, and ultimately die. No cure would save them.
Look what happened upriver, Rosa said. She then told a story about a strikingly handsome man and a stunning woman who walked into a riverside bar in some village one night. Both were impeccably dressed in white clothes, with fancy accessories, such as a belt, a watch and a hat. The man ordered drink after drink, while the woman remained quiet and abstained. The bar owner sensed something strange about them, though he couldn’t say what. The other clients were enchanted: the men drawn to the woman’s grace, the women to the man’s charm. Then, at some point late in the night, the couple disappeared. The last place they were seen was down by the riverbank. At dawn, villagers returned to the spot, and found the visitors’ elegant accessories scattered on the ground. Only now, those items had transformed: the belt had become an electric eel, the watch a crab. Gazing at the stingray that had previously been a hat, the villagers finally understood. It had been needed to cover a blowhole. The visitors were dolphins in human form, on the hunt for unwitting prey.
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