Los Haitises is a bay full of hills in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, hundreds of rounded limestone humps with rainforest matted over their backs, standing in the water and along the shore of Samaná Bay. They are mogotes, what is left of a limestone plateau that rain dissolved into humps, arches and caves, and the caves are the point. A boat out of Sabana de la Mar threads the flat channels between them, close enough that the rock walls you in on both sides. Where the limestone drops straight into the bay, your pilot can run the bow into the hollows the waves have cut, and the swell booms off the stone. Deep in San Lorenzo Bay he cuts the engine and the water settles to glass. Off the open channels the boats turn into the mangrove, the greatest concentration of it in the Caribbean. The trees close overhead, the light turns green, red roots arch into the water on both sides, and you hear birds instead of the motor. West Indian manatees browse these brackish shallows, which is the other reason the engine stays low.
The bare crags above the water are nesting ground, crowded with brown pelicans and frigatebirds, herons working the shallows underneath. Then the caves. At San Gabriel and La Arena your guide's torch pulls whales, sharks, human faces and hunting scenes out of the dark, drawn in charcoal and cut into the soft limestone by the Taíno. The whales were not invented: humpbacks fill Samaná Bay from January to March, just beyond the mangrove where the boats have come from. The forested tops of these same hills are the last natural stronghold of the Ridgway's hawk, of which fewer than about five hundred survive anywhere on Earth. Some of these caves were lived in for more than three thousand years, and every figure on them was made long before Columbus reached the island. The paintings are on the walls people slept against.