I cast one long look behind me at the place where my brain tells me the road still is, and then I start to walk. It’s a fairy tale. The trail weaves, the ground flat until it isn’t, twisting sharply over a little hillock, and then I can see no more. A carpet of moss is on the ground and white blossoms shine in scarce patches of sunlight. We go in I don’t know what direction, only knowing that we are getting further and further from safety. We walk for ten minutes, twenty, I’m not sure. Whiffs of scent slam into me, choking me, before they fade, replaced by others, sweeter, thicker, heavier. It hurts to breathe. To think. The greens grow darker, the smells more sickly, rotten, the trail more overgrown, the sky nothing more than a memory.
“Every day I think it’s a dream,” Jane murmurs.
I’m caught on yet another overhanging bit of bamboo, a snarling vine of thorns. It is a dream, I think as I untangle myself. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place that has its own heartbeat. Millions of heartbeats. I picture people on the Tube, jostling for space on the London Underground that smells of sweat and humans. There are more than a million heartbeats there but they’re all the same. They’re all like mine. Here, nothing is like mine.
Jane stops. “We’re almost there.”
We’re standing in the shadow of a strangler fig. The trunk is wrapped in parasitic limbs, vines as intricate as hair that’s been braided, over and over, until it’s more braid than it is vine, continuing until it’s lost in an endless canopy.
Abruptly my fear of everything around me is supplanted with something deeper. Another fear, sharper, more concentrated. And yet, something else too. Curiosity. Anticipation. It tingles up my spine.
A sign has been nailed to the bark. It’s old and rotten but I can still read what it says: HOLA WAYRA PRINCESA.
Jane’s voice is high and clear. “¡Hola, Wayra!”
I stare at her. She seems to have grown five inches.
“Hola, sweet pea!” Oscar hollers.
“You say hello too,” Jane tells me. “So you don’t scare her.”
I nod, gulping. “¡Hola, Wayra!”
I don’t know what I expect to see as the trail curves. But Jane’s eyes, which can’t seem to decide whether they’re green or brown, are flooded with a kind of rapture.
“My love! Princesa. ¿Cómo estás?” It is almost a poem.
We drop down a steep bank. The dirt is sandy and my feet scrabble for purchase. There’s another little mound and then another strangled tree, bark red as the leaves of maples. Oscar helps me over a rotten log. I smell something fruity, and then suddenly, even though I’m expecting it, we’re at the top of a rise, overlooking a large clearing. About the size of two tennis courts, end to end. It’s edged by swathes of a singular plant that’s as tall as I am and has leaves like lacquered paddles, viridian green on top, lime where the sun catches it. Above is the blue of the sky, which shocks me. I’m almost surprised it’s still there. But I don’t look at it for long, because less than ten steps away is the cage.
Nestled against the bottom of the rise, it’s probably about ten metres by twelve, a little longer on the front than on the sides. It takes up about a third of the clearing. It’s roofed in a low triangular tent and a knotted tree is the central support, standing tall as a maypole, poking out through the apex. The floor of the cage is mud, the colour of burnt butter. There are a few interconnected wooden platforms, some high, some low. A few cut logs, some leafy shrubs and palm leaves. A raised house in the back, shaded by a blue tarpaulin. A tall, box-like protruding door on the front left. Patches of light dapple the ground but most of it, unlike the rest of the clearing, is still in shade.
She’s hard to see at first, so similar in colour to the shadows. But then her long tail whips.
“Hola, Wayra,” I whisper.
The only parts of her that stand out are her eyes, which are as green as the tops of those paddle-shaped plants, and her nose, pink as the tip of a sunset. She looks at us for a long, silent moment. So long that I start to think she might not move at all, and when she does finally leap from the top of a platform, landing so gracefully it’s almost like she’s not moved, I step back with respect.
She prowls towards us and I’m staring, so overwhelmed, that when Jane slides both her arms carefully through the fence, I almost yelp. I take another quick step backwards. What is she thinking? There’s no doctor for fifty miles! I’ll have to carry her back through the jungle and watch a vet stitch her skin back together. I think all this in the second it takes for Wayra to cross the cage. Then she’s licking. Actually licking Jane. And Jane’s face is transcendent. She’s rolled up her sleeves and the puma is pressed up against her hands.
I know what she is, now. I’ve always called it a mountain lion. Other terminologies surface too, from the hidden spaces of my brain. Cougar, panther . . . I don’t know. I didn’t realise these were all the same thing. I think about saying this out loud but decide not to. I can hear the licks, a sound harsh as rough sandpaper.
“How was your night?” Jane murmurs, reaching under Wayra’s chin to scratch her neck. The puma raises her throat, angling her face—all sharp-edged bones and soft colours—to the sky, squeezing up her eyes. She seems . . . calm. She’s skinny, lithe. Maybe I’m not going to get mauled by her after all. The edges of her spine are defined. The muscles along her back, shoulders, thighs too. She’s the colour of a lead-grey sky. Then I blink and she’s not, she’s the colour of tawny ochre. She’s smaller than I imagined. Perhaps the size of a large dog, only slightly bigger than my mum’s German shepherd.
I take an involuntary step forwards. But as I do, she whirls. Her eyes widen, suddenly going black as her pupils expand, and her ears flatten as she pins me with a look as if to say: WHAT. THE. FUCK. ARE. YOU? Then she opens her jaws and hisses. I feel a rush of fear and bile so sharp it’s like I’ve been kicked in the face. It’s physical. So violent, so savage, so utterly unquestionable that I almost, horrifyingly, burst into tears.
Wayra sprints away, jumps up onto her highest platform—at least a metre above my head—and glares. Then she starts to angrily lick her paws, her claws flicked out.
“It means ‘wind,’” Jane says with a luminous smile, pulling her arms out of the cage and standing up. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”
When I look at Jane, uncomprehending, she cocks her head to one side.
“Her name. It’s Quechua.”
“Don’t worry,” Oscar says, patting me on the back, jaunty grin still in place. “She just takes time to warm up. She’s a puma.”
I watch a red ant carrying a dead ant over my boot. I’ve been a receptionist, an envelope stuffer, a barmaid, a philosophy student, an English student, an art student, a cleaner, a cold caller, a fuel-pump operator, a marketing specialist . . . and none of these things have prepared me for this. In another life, maybe Jane, Oscar and I would have been friends. Maybe we could have met on a bus to Patagonia or something and we would have hit it off over empanadas and badly dubbed kung-fu movies. But right now, I can’t even look at them. Out of the corner of my eye, I’m aware that Wayra is watching me but pretending she’s not, tail hanging half in, half out of her mouth. Jane pulls a key from around her neck and slots it into a big padlock on the door. I feel muddled. I think the floor is moving.
“Are you about to open that door?”
“Yes.”
“And . . .” I don’t know what to say. “What will happen then?”
She beckons me over. When I don’t move, she smiles, eyes glistening a bit. Her cheeks have paled, freckles darkening like a galaxy inverted. I want to trust her. I really do. But she’s holding the key to the cage of a puma who’s just hissed at me like she wants me dead! Suddenly the full, ridiculous reality floods in. I almost laugh as Jane holds up a rope. It may have been red at some point but now it’s an old, faded pink. It’s hanging off a cable which stretches at head height from one corner of the cage, right by the door, all the way to the other end of the clearing, where it’s tied around
a big silver-barked tree. I’m frowning at this, unsure of the purpose, when I hear a low, evil growl. I spin and jump back about two metres. My hand flies to my heart. Wayra has materialised in the doorway. Her ears are back against her head so far that it looks as if she doesn’t even have ears, like a very angry seal. I school my face under control as Jane reaches in and puts her arm in front of Wayra’s nose. A sacrificial offering. Wayra ignores it.
“Try not to make any sudden movements, OK?” Jane says. “She doesn’t like to be startled.”
She doesn’t like to be startled? What about me? I take a number of breaths, swallowing the fear that I know is coming off me in waves. I stay very, very still. Jane threads the rope through the door. On one end is a carabiner, the kind that climbers use to scale cliffs. And Wayra is wearing a black collar (like night, like the colour of her eyes right now), through which there is a shining silver loop. Ready to be clipped on.
“You see the size of her cage?” Oscar asks, edging up to stand next to me, his sweaty, hairy arm pressing into mine. I’m grateful for it. I lean imperceptibly against him. “In the wild she’d roam over eighty square miles. Her world has shrunk to just this because a human wanted a puma for a pet.”
“So we’re going to put her on that rope?” I whisper, not wanting to point out the irony.
Oscar inclines his head, ignoring my wry tone. “Only if she wants us to.”
Wayra has stopped growling. She’s lain down and is pressing her neck up against the fence. I’m ashamed that in that moment, I do hope she might not want to. But Jane is already slipping the carabiner through the loop on Wayra’s collar. As it snaps shut, Oscar pulls open the door. There’s a long moment of silence. Wayra plants her front paws on the earth. Then—she’s away! Out of the cage. The rope moves along the cable, “the runner” Oscar has called it, with a noise like a zip wire. She flies. When she reaches the other end, I think she’ll just keep going. But in the gloom of the silver tree, its branches curving—tall as a sentinel—she spins. Its shadows fall across her back, turning her silver too. Her ears prick, the tips black to match the end of her tail. And there’s no fence, no walls between us. The speed with which she crossed the clearing was inconceivable. She’s only what . . . thirty metres away from me? She could cover that in seconds. My heart is so terrifyingly loud, it’s making it hard to hear anything else. Yesterday I was in a city. There were buildings there, light switches and doctors. Things that I understand. Now I’m standing in the jungle with a puma!
Jane whispers, “The runner is here so she can have space outside the cage, without being attached to us.”
I do not move and I do not speak. Wayra’s head is cocked to one side. Her mouth is open and she’s growling, low in her belly. Her teeth are gleaming, sending my heart into my bowels. One of her front canines is cracked and jagged. She raises one paw. There is no reason I have to think this, nothing in my experience whatsoever, but I know she is judging me. Weighing me up. My fear won’t stay down where it belongs. It’s wafting off me, strong as old fish, as cheese that’s been left at the bottom of the cupboard, a dog when she’s rolled in shit. There’s so much adrenaline, someone’s stabbing my chest with hot needles. She’s a million shades of grey and brown, pewter and black. What am I doing here? Don’t move. Don’t run. Don’t . . .
“Come on, let’s go!” Jane grabs my hand and suddenly we’re moving. I let out a kind of gurgle, which I mean to be some kind of question, but it gets lost between brain and tongue. Wayra has turned disdainfully and is walking away. I don’t have time to be relieved because Jane’s fingers are digging into my arm. Wayra’s tail is swishing and there’s a dark-tawny line down her back, cut through with stark, geometric shadows. She’s still growling.
“When she wants to walk, off the runner,” Jane tells me as we move forwards way too fast, “someone always goes in front. She needs someone to protect her.”
Protect her? She needs protecting? She’s confidently heading out of the clearing.
“We have to hurry,” Jane mutters. “Está bien, chica. Está bien.” I’m confused whether she’s reassuring me or Wayra. But I concentrate on her voice. Australian. If I close my eyes, maybe I’ll wake up in Sydney. She moves me forwards. With each step, I am not in Sydney. I’m closer to Wayra. Wayra looks back over her shoulder, shooting me a look of absolute disgust. My hands are shaking so I cover them with my sleeves. I focus on the mottled leaf litter, crunching too loudly. The leaves melt into the mulch of the roots, then up into the ocean colours of the canopy. Down again. I can smell flowers mixed with the acrid scent of cat pee. There’s tension on Wayra’s rope, she’s reached as far as she can get and her growl has got louder, an engine now, coming from inside her belly. It was an illusion before: her size, thinking she wasn’t big. She’s huge. Her back is as tall as my upper thigh and her paws are plates.
Jane grabs my hand. “Go!”
Oscar transfers Wayra’s rope to a belt at his waist. There’s a trail leading past the tree and Wayra’s blocking the way but Jane doesn’t hesitate. She keeps walking as if she’ll just push past, taking me with her. Jane is so close my nostrils flare with the sour scent of her sweat. One moment, I’m staring at a rumbling puma, thinking there is nothing in this world that would make me go past her. The next, it’s done and I’m looking back, faintly touching my thigh where her fur has brushed my side. Then we’re running. I’m running. I see a flash of blue sky, a blur of green, but mostly all I can think about is Jane’s grip on my arm. Moving, not stopping and not breaking an ankle, running. Blood rushes to my ears and my lungs feel as if they’re about to pop. I can’t hear Wayra but I can hear Oscar and he’s behind me, crashing down the trail. Somewhere, between me and him, is her.
I stumble when we reach a junction made of bamboo and those paddle plants. I think my face is on fire. I think I’m on fire. I’ve never run like this in my life. I turn back, elated, my head so light I think it might burst right off my neck.
“Is she . . .” I pant, pulling my arm away and trying desperately to see past the junction, but I can’t see anything, just a brace of bushes and tangled red and blue vines, like the veins around a heart. I can hear the slowed thump of Oscar’s feet. “Is she chasing us?”
Jane’s cheeks are so flushed the blood has sucked up all her freckles. “No! She just wants to run too!”
I hear a rustle. A paw, a pink nose, pricked ears. She pads round the junction, casting one sharp look in our direction, cursory rather than predatory. Some fear, the top layer, blows away. She’s not chasing us. I’m in the jungle with a puma and she’s not chasing me!
She’s stopped, looking upwards. Oscar stops too, a few metres behind. There’s a squirrel above Wayra’s head. He’s an English squirrel on speed. His fur is the colour of a traffic cone, and his tail looks as if he’s spent the last week at the salon, getting it blow-dried. He’s in one of the stalks of bamboo, a brown nut clasped tightly in his paws. He knows. He’s got a wide-eyed look that I recognise. Absolute terror and yet, hope. Hope that if he just stays very, very still, no one will notice him. But the tip of Wayra’s tail is jerking like a house cat’s. I know what this means. This is when your feather, or sparkly little fish toy, or sock, or whatever you’ve got is about to get royally fucked up. I gaze helplessly at the squirrel, trying to transmit mind-to-mind: RUN! A drop of drool falls to the ground. Wayra’s face, the way it’s angled upwards makes her eyes seem bigger, like an animal who’s been living in the dark. Her eyes have had to grow, suddenly, to take all this in. The white fur around her chin stands out like snow. Her face is almost all green. I realise she hadn’t looked small in the cage, she’d looked squashed. And now, outside, she’s expanded to fill what she should have been filling all along.
I think with a sickening jolt: if I’d changed my flight, I’d be on my way back to England right now. And in a few weeks, I’d probably be back in an office. I’d be staring at tabs open on my computer screen. Facebook, BBC news, travel sites where I browsed p
laces I yearned to visit, job sites where I looked at jobs I yearned to apply for. Then, when I couldn’t look at these anymore, when I felt as if my brain had spiralled, gone into a dark place it couldn’t crawl its way out of, I’d stare through the window at the only things I could see. Pale clouds and concrete.
She moves so suddenly that I’m caught, distracted, sluggish like I’m back at my computer screen. Jane has to steady me, and then she’s pulling me forwards as Wayra, having leapt four feet off the ground into a branch above the squirrel, hampered only slightly by the rope and the six-foot-five American holding it, pitches forwards. The squirrel’s bolted but Wayra doesn’t care. She lunges and it’s all I can do to keep in front of her. The trail is something she devours. Monkeys to chase here, massive rats—the size of small dogs—there, a tree to scratch, a pile of leaves to roll in, a herd of wild pigs, a shiny armadillo that’s snuffling so close to my boot we all almost trip over it, a group of the orange racoonish things—tejones, Jane tells me, or coati in English—about fifty of them, leaping from tree to tree as if they’re monkeys and beeping madly.
I have no idea where we are, how long we’re going to be walking for, what time of day it is even, but all I care about is staying in front, staying with Jane. Finally, when I don’t think I can run or walk any longer, Wayra’s energy changes. I’d thought she was having a good time. But now she growls at the tejones, swishing her tail, and leaves them behind. She gets grumpy. Really grumpy. She starts hissing at Oscar, slamming her paws down as if suddenly, now, for no reason whatsoever, she hates this jungle. And she hates us for bringing her here, she hates Oscar for being attached to her. The sun powers down on our heads. I try to pull forwards to get away but Jane drags me back, until we’re so close I can hear the pad of her paws, the rush of her breath. I can smell her musty fur, feel her eyes boring into my back.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 3
