Stephen never claimed to be the first to fall for an animal like Piti, though I dare say few have done it quite so dramatically. Everything seemed to be hurting – his arm, his shoulder, his back, his head, his ribs, his knee. He was feeling sick and yelping in pain with the slightest involuntary movement. But it was his right arm that seemed particularly bad, and we were worried because he was complaining of numb fingers and a ‘weird’ feeling in his elbow.
We were less than three weeks into a four-week trip. We weren’t quite at the end of the universe, but for a while that morning it felt pretty close.
We should have taken notice of the omens.
There’s nothing worse than seeing a friend in pain, and feeling unable to do anything to make it better. We made him as comfortable as we could, under the circumstances, and waited for help.
The next few hours are a blur of satellite phone calls, BBC medical kits, boat journeys, jungle clinics, plaster of Paris, injections, pouring rain and howls of pain. And all the time we were being filmed. Cameraman Will, ever the professional, kept his finger on the button.
Eventually, after a lot of agonising debate and soul-searching, we split the crew in two. Will, Tim (Sound) and Sue (Assistant Producer) stayed with Piti, while the rest of us returned to Manaus.
Captain Wilson had responded to our SOS and, surprisingly quickly, half of us were in the air heading towards proper medical help. I looked across at Stephen, eyes shut, slumped in his seat, with his shirt tattered and torn and his arm in a temporary plaster. The adventure was over and we were alone with our thoughts.
All I could think about during the two-hour flight was that it could have been much worse. Stephen could so easily have knocked himself out and fallen into the fast-flowing river. I had visions of the rest of us diving in, holding our breath, feeling around in the darkness under the hull, in the vague hope of finding and rescuing him.
The next 24 hours were awful – another blur of clinics, X-rays, blood tests, heart checks and second opinions. At least we got a firm diagnosis. His right arm was broken, very badly, in three places. We decided to get him to Miami for a delicate and potentially dangerous operation to put it right.
But just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do. I woke up with food poisoning and was vomiting every half an hour or so. A doctor was supposed to come to the hotel to clear Stephen for flying, but didn’t. Then we discovered that he couldn’t fly anyway, unless we could remove the fresh plaster cast from his arm (and all we could muster was a pair of curved nail scissors). In all the kerfuffle we lost the crucial hospital X-ray, and then mislaid the key to the storeroom where we kept all the kit. Tim and I were running around like headless chickens, while Stephen (who had slept in his torn and tattered clothes and looked as if he’d just stumbled out of the jungle after being raised by a troop of howler monkeys) was limping around with an unexpectedly stiff leg.
Stephen and Tim eventually made it to Miami – only after persuading the airline to hold the flight – while I hitched another ride on Captain Wilson’s floatplane to catch up with the remnant crew, and Piti.
I had the GPS coordinates of the Com te Abreu, hastily written on the back of a laundry list following a crackly satellite phone call from Sue, and after the usual death-defying swoop over the rainforest the missionary plane touched down in the nick of time. Against all the odds, I’d caught up with them just as Piti was about to be released.
The staff of the Mamiraua Project had built a temporary wooden enclosure next to a village overlooking the release site, where Piti could become acclimatised to his new home until it was time to be released fully into the wild.
We carefully lifted him out of his tank, carried him across another floating wooden platform and gently lowered him into his halfway house. He disappeared beneath the surface of the murky water, but not before releasing a telltale trail of bubbles that said simply ‘I’m okay.’
I watched his ripples for a while and then glanced at Miriam, Carolina and Michelle. They were hugging one another, with tears in their eyes. This was their big day, the result of months of planning and preparation, and they cared so much about Piti and his wild and endangered relatives.
They had a dream. They hoped that the enthusiasm of all those children, for one baby peixe-boi, would feed back through families and traditional hunting communities and make manatees something to cherish rather than hunt. If their dream came true, Piti’s new-found freedom would be just the beginning and they would repeat the care and release of orphaned manatees across the Amazon Basin.
The next day I managed to speak to Stephen on the satellite phone. He was in surprisingly good spirits, under the circumstances, as he awaited his operation.
I was worried that he might be having second thoughts about our future travels together, but I think even he was surprised to discover just how much he was missing his home from home in the jungle.
‘Wherever we meet next,’ he said, though, ‘it is firmly understood that Stephen never leads, he only follows, and everybody helps him onto boats. Because he’s a clumsy arse. That’s just got to be understood.’
And that was that. After all the mad panic of the past few days, both Stephen and Piti were in safe hands and there was nothing left to do. As we began the 12-hour boat journey back to Tefé, picking our way along the backwaters of the Amazon, I crawled into a hammock and slept.
If Miriam’s dream comes true, Piti’s new-found freedom will be just the beginning, and more and more orphaned manatees can be released across the Amazon Basin.
A four-hour operation and several recuperative months later, we were on the road again. This time Stephen had a steel plate and no fewer than ten aluminium screws in his arm, along with an impressive 25-cm (10-inch) scar – ample proof of his official new status as intrepid adventurer.
Our next stop was Africa.
Twenty years ago, Douglas Adams and I visited Garamba National Park, in the northeastern corner of Zaire.
I say ‘Zaire’ because that’s what the country was called while we were there, but it changes its name more often than The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. It was originally called Congo Free State, then Belgian Congo, then Congo-Léopoldville, and finally Zaire. Actually, it’s not even true to say ‘finally Zaire’ because since our visit it has changed its name yet again. Now it is called the Democratic Republic of Congo, or just DR Congo, or even DRC for short. It’s not to be confused with one of its many neighbours, the Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Brazzaville or just the Congo, which is a former French colony rather than a Belgian one.