Here, Pi is describing Orange Juice, the orang-utan who floats up to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas. Later, Pi will tell an alternate story of the shipwreck, one in which he more or less identifies Orange Juice as his mother. Therefore, Pi projects human traits onto an animal who is not really an animal but is actually his mother who has taken on, in Pi's imagination, the guise of an animal. There's enough interaction between man and the natural world to make a fellow dizzy.