Manatee Blues Read Free

for our patient. “Manatees spend their days searching for food in rivers and canalsand along the coast,” she explains as she pilots the boat. “They’re herbivores, which means they eat only plants. The average manatee eats one hundred pounds of vegetation a day. They’re like vacuum cleaners.”
    “Wow!” Zoe says. “A hundred pounds!”
    “I know,” Gretchen says. “A lot of veggies, isn’t it?” She pauses to steer the boat around a drifting log. “Manatees spend eight hours a day swimming and eating. They move very slowly and are extremely hard to see if the water is murky. If boaters are driving too fast, or not watching out for them—
boom!
Boat hits manatee.”
    “Wait!” I call out. “Is that it over there?”
    A gray lump of something drifts in the current. Gretchen and Dr. Mac crane their necks for a better look, then Dr. Mac picks up a long pole from the bottom of the boat. She stretches out and prods the gray blob.
    “False alarm,” she says as she lifts the dripping thing in the air. “It’s just a trash bag.” She dumps the bag in the boat and puts the pole away. “Keep your eyes open.”
    “Do a lot of manatees get hit by boats?” Zoe asks.
    Gretchen slows down a bit as we enter a sharp curve in the river.
    “It averages out to about one boat strike a week,” she explains. “Some manatees die from eating trash thrown into the water, like that bag. And they die of natural causes, of course. They’re tropical animals and very sensitive to cold. If we have an unusually cold winter, the number of manatee fatalities goes up.”
    “Don’t forget red tide,” Dr. Mac adds. “That’s a kind of algae that killed a couple hundred manatees a few years ago.”
    “That’s so depressing,” I say.
    She glances back at me. “I know. Florida manatees are our most endangered coastal mammal. There are fewer than three thousand of them left right now. That’s not many.”
    “How much farther?” Maggie asks as she slaps a mosquito on her arm.
    “A little while yet,” Gretchen says. “Walker’s Point is about a half mile from here.” She keeps her eyes focused on the water as she drives the boat.
    I scan the area with my camera. The river-banks close to the rescue center were wild with trees, shrubs, and vines, all draped with strands of Spanish moss. But here the river is lined with neatly mowed backyards. There are houses everywhere, lots of them with private docks jutting into the water. I didn’t realize that manatees lived so close to people.
    I turn the camera from the houses back to the water. The sun glints off the surface of the river, making colors swirl and shift, murky blue to pale green to stone gray.
    Hang on. What’s that?
    “Gretchen, look over there!” I say, focusing the lens. The patch of gray in the water is striped with red. Blood.
    “It’s the manatee!”
    “It’s Violet!” Carlos shouts as he cuts the engine. “She’s alive!”
    Gretchen brings our boat alongside the injured manatee, drops the anchor over the side, and turns off the engine. Carlos does the same, positioning the
Gordito
so the back end faces the manatee.
    Maggie, Zoe, and I crowd the side of the boat for a better look. The manatee is huge. She’s longer than my dad is tall, and shaped like a seal: roly-poly round in the middle, then slimming down to a paddle for a tail. She’s rolled up on her side. That can’t be good. Manatees normally float straight up and down.
    I can’t keep my eyes from the horrible gashes that have opened up the skin on the manatee’s back—seven deep, straight lines, four of them curving around her side. I shudder, then snap a picture.
Click!
    “Yep, definitely Violet,” Gretchen says. She kicks off her sneakers and slips into a pair of rubber shoes.
    “The manatee has a name?” I ask.
    “We’ve treated her before. She’s had a few run-ins with boats. Look at her tail,” Gretchen says, pointing to its jagged edge. It looks like something took a bite