The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  “Ella era una mascota. Como la mayoría.”

  She used to be a pet. Mila tells me Morocha only came here because she wrecked her family’s home. They didn’t want her anymore, it wasn’t any fun, so they left her here. Motherless, friendless. Her fur is black and fluffy. She’s got long, disproportionate limbs, an insane tail as functional as a hand, and a face that’s pink, eyes like spectacles. She’s young, but not young enough to forget that a bed is more comfortable than a tree. At five o’clock this morning, she broke into Santa Cruz, pulled down everyone’s mosquito nets, pissed on my pillow, and it was only after she’d thoroughly destroyed everything that we managed to get her out, using Tom as bait, sitting outside on the floor and waiting for her to crawl into his lap. Her eyes had been jubilant as she’d hugged him, or wicked, I’m not sure, dark brown in a sea of pink. Mila says we’ll keep her until we get permission from the government to transport her to our other sanctuary, where she can be with other spider monkeys. Here, our monkey population numbers just two: Faustino and Darwin, a new howler, a baby who was thrown out of the window of a passing car and who cries constantly. Faustino hates him.

  I turn away to stare blankly into the trees. For a moment, I let myself imagine that she’s out there. Not gone, real, her fur the colour of slate-grey shadows, of a brown sky. The smell of a wind kicking up dust. Eyes the colour of patuju, lined with black. Looking back at me. Her tail high. Her paws crossed under her chin.

  Mila stands, shouldering her backpack, and puts on her hat. The trees blur, two-dimensional again, nothing but fog and shapes.

  “Vamos,” she says.

  I don’t know where she wants me to go. The fog gets thicker, shapes of people walking past but I don’t see them. They’re a blur of beards and flannel shirts. Faustino’s booming howls rise, then fall. Vaguely, from the direction of the aviary, I hear Big Red laughing, Teanji’s high, aggressive beep and then, at an even higher pitch: “Don’t do that!” I hold my shirt cuff between my fingers, gripping it so tightly the button makes a white indent in my skin. When I let go, the blood floods back in, turning it scarlet. And then I nod, standing up too. And I follow her dumbly out of camp.

  I hear all the noises of the jungle but somehow, I can’t hear anything. There is a hollowness that I’m stuck in and it’s soundless. The sky is bowed and veined like a blue shell, pressing down hard in the brief segments of canopy that it’s managed to push apart. The jungle seems confused, the smells familiar but not, thicker than it was, wetter, sweeter. The pervasive rot, the slickness of new growth, the waning of another rainy season that I’ve again missed. I don’t care that rainy season sounds awful. I just wish I’d been here. The path trails in front of us. At first all I can feel is the weight of it pressing on my shoulders. I stagger along with a bowed head, gazing at the backs of Mila’s yellow gumboots. We walked down the road in silence, past Wayra’s witch trees, and in at the turning by the big lagoon. I can’t think where she’s taking me. Not to Wayra’s, anyway. And other than that, I don’t think I care. I will never see her again. The sounds pass me by, the smells. I think my feet are on the ground but otherwise, I’m not there. I could be back in Buenos Aires, lying on that sticky plastic bed, or on a flight to London, drinking wine and watching mind-numbing, awful reruns of Friends.

  My fingers trail over leaves. The ones that hang over the path seem to be intentionally in my way. I instinctively reach out for them, lightly, touching velvet, slick, papery skeletons. Some are wet, giving me tiny electric shocks. Some are beaded with dew, sticky. When I meet a young, furled patuju, I unconsciously pull it out of its stalk and the noise, a familiar soft swoosh, makes me jump. I bring the tightly coiled white end to my mouth and bite. The crunch, the wet cucumber liquid oozes over my tongue. I shiver, give a small smile, and look up.

  The jungle is dark. The sun must have gone behind a cloud. Slowly I adjust to the hazy, grainy gloom and the furious whine of mosquitoes, the painful stabbing of their attack. There’s a pool just to my right. It’s a syrupy coffee black, matted with bamboo and lianas. The braided hair of sleeping giantesses. The bamboo shoots are such deep greens. They stand so straight, they could be spears, topped with fluttering ribbons. The water looks like a place where anacondas and caimans live. It’s got a swampy, sweet smell. Then the sun suddenly comes out and the pool twinkles glassily. A cascade of purple orchids scatters the mulch-covered wet ground and the smell of vanilla wafts up my nose. There’s a long, low log that hangs over the water, and I imagine Wayra lying on it, resting her cheek against the warm bark, watching the light as it catches the surface of the pool.

  I turn to see Mila watching me, a half smile on her lips.

  “Creo que a Wayra le gustaría este lugar.”

  I smile bitterly. Wayra would like this place.

  “Do you think she’s OK?” I whisper, barely daring to ask.

  Mila’s about to answer when a low, throaty roar explodes, coming right out of the trees. I jump, grabbing her arm.

  “Mila!” I exclaim. “¿Qué es?”

  Her face falls, all the pleasure in this place slipping out of her eyes. The roar drops to a bark and then an echoing, miserable choke. I let go of her arm when I realise that the danger is perhaps not imminent.

  “It is Iskra,” Mila finally tells me. “El león.”

  “Lion?” I exclaim, as she starts to walk again. I follow quickly on her heels, trotting to keep up. There aren’t lions in Bolivia!

  “Laurita,” Mila sighs. “When you leave, how many cats we have?”

  I think about this. “Sixteen?”

  She nods, her hair casting a shadow across her face. All I see is the hooded expression in her dark eyes, the harsh frown on her lips. “Now, we have twenty-one.” My mouth drops. Five more cats? They’ve had to find and make enclosures for five more cats over this wet season, while I was sunning my way around the continent? She turns to me with a look that fixes me to the spot. “Iskra came from the circus. The government will ban all animals from circuses, I think. Soon. We will be the first country in the world to do it. But those animals.” Her eyes are heartbroken. “Where will they go? Here?” She snorts. “Iskra is a lion from Africa. She is in a cage smaller than your dorm. How are we meant to build an enclosure fit for her? But how can we turn her away? Where would she have gone, then?”

  I think she wants me to answer. Her eyes rake my face, as if searching for any clue as to what she should do. But what can I tell her? A useless art student. A foreigner. In the end, we just start walking again, her shoulders slumped. The light filters through pitted canopies of leaves like stars. But all I see is a lion, crying in a cage on the wrong continent. A baby jaguar, being driven away on a speeding motorbike, because two days after Iskra arrived, Mila tells me, she and Agustino did the unthinkable. They turned that tiny jaguar away, because they literally had no people, and nowhere for him to go. They listened to him mewling as the bike disappeared into the distance.

  Wayra, wherever she is. I hope for the breeze and the sun on her face.

  The next time I look up, I realise I know where we are. There’s that brace of spiky thorns, the clump of walking palms, the huge strangler fig that reminds me of an elephant’s face. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked down this path. By the end of last year, it had been widened through months of construction. But it’s had a full wet season to recover. The jungle is dark green, red with the petals of patuju flowers. I turn to Mila, my mouth open.

  “Sama?” I whisper.

  She smiles.

  I just feel a rush of panic. She’s assigning me to another cat. To Sama! The angry, ripping crash of his head, the snarl as he clamped his teeth on the bars! Katarina’s frantic tears every night in the fumador. I turn my head desperately, brushing the massive scaly root of the old elephant. The bark is cold. I can’t do this. This isn’t why I came back. I can’t do this again. I can’t—

  “Laurita.” Mila touches my chest hard with the side of her machete. I take a number of
deep breaths. She waits. I hear the faint echo of Iskra’s roar and then an answering bark from somewhere else. The lines of exhaustion around her eyes are awful to see. Her face is stiff with pain. I thought it was bad for me, not being here, not seeing Coco’s face when he died. But I left. Mila is the one who stayed. That was her choice, if you can call it that. Sama didn’t even have a choice.

  Mila watches my face change. I take a very deep, steadying breath, and then we’re walking again.

  After a few more seconds, Mila calls out, “Hola Sama!”

  “Hola Sama!” I repeat, my voice cracking only slightly.

  The path hits the enclosure head-on, so quickly it is a shock when I see it. The fence is more than double my height. Its thick diamond links shine in the sunlight, pulled taut, angling in at the top where the fence posts curve. I’d forgotten how impressive it is. A thin, well-trod pathway winds away in both directions, around the exterior of the fence. I can’t see the corners and I can’t see the other side. Something catches in my chest. Awe. I remember the dimensions. The perimeter is more than two hundred metres. Inside it is more than half an acre. It’s not square. It’s a weird meandering shape, his old red cage boxed on the side like an afterthought. When I left, it was still a building site. Now it looks like . . .

  “Jurassic Park,” I whisper. A massive, sprawling dinosaur-proof fence, shiny, not yet bowed or rusted, and the jungle! It’s a weighty thing, to fence in such a large piece of forest. The tree tops explode out of it, cascading over the sides. There’d been arguments during construction. Some of these trees are over a hundred years old. They are massive. They feed countless species of birds and monkeys and insects. There’s a troop of squirrel monkeys, even now, spiralling around the branches of one of the mapajo trees. They’re so excited it’s like they’ve taken a huge hit of speed.

  Some people, Harry, Paddy, Bryan—foreigners mostly—wanted to cut these trees down. If they fell—and trees do fall, a lot—they’d smash the fence. The fence we’d worked on for months, the fence that cost thousands of dollars. But with Mila, Agustino, Osito and the rest of the kids in charge, there wasn’t a chance these trees were going to be cut down. For them, the risk was worth it.

  I feel a shiver of fear, even though the late summer heat is making my jeans and shirt into a wet suit. I look around for the extremely dangerous jaguar. I’m expecting growling, hurtling, snarling. All, however, seems quiet and Mila has crouched down calmly by the fence. I peer into the undergrowth, my eyes scouring the darkness, patuju bursting out of it in disorientating flashes of green. When I look back at Mila, opening my mouth to ask nervously—Er, where is this guy, then?—I jerk back in surprise, my heart flying into my throat.

  Sama is lying on the other side of the fence, inches away from Mila’s face. The way the light is falling, it would be easy to miss the fence and think he’s a normal cat, just a very large one, enjoying a patch of sunshine with a friend. He has patted down the patuju and made a nest for himself. His markings, amber gold melting into hay yellow and then white under his belly and chin, mottled with liquid-black rosettes, camouflage him with the dappled, mulchy ground. He is silent. The expression on his face is the furthest thing from rage I have ever seen. His eyes are squinting into the sun and his ears are tipped, turned towards something in the bushes. His head is cocked, ever so slightly, to one side.

  Mila places her hand on the fence. He turns to look at her. His eyes are almost the same colour as hers, only a couple of shades paler, bright amber. I brace myself. The last time I saw him, he was trying to dig his way out, wanting to kill me. But he just gives a long, slow yawn, his tongue curling languidly. Then he sits up on his haunches, stretches the muscles in his front legs and shoulders, places his enormous paws side by side, leans forwards and starts to lick Mila’s palm.

  I let out a noise of shock. Mila flicks her gaze to me, and Sama pins me with those eyes. It’s like being raked through. I can’t move. He knows I’m afraid, he knows I didn’t want to come here! I see him turning me over in his massive mind. Who is this, then? Before, when he was screaming, trapped and in pain, I think he couldn’t hear anything. Now he can hear everything. I flinch when he opens his mouth, shows me his gigantic broken canines, then flicks his tail with disdain and just walks away. The black patterns of his rosettes move with his muscles. Two yellow spots, stark in the downy black of his ears, watch me like eyes. My breath rushes out, my head spins. I don’t even notice the mosquitoes whining around my ears. He crosses the open patch of ground in front of me. The bushy patuju plants seem to part and then close behind his swaying tail. Then he’s gone, into his jungle. I hold my breath, scanning the leaves.

  “Will he come back?” I whisper.

  Mila turns, and her expression is long-suffering, and patient. Waiting for me to figure it out on my own. My heart sinks. I realise that he probably won’t. Why would he? Not unless I can prove to him that I want to be here. That I’m worthy of being here. I’m not sure what I want to say, but I cast around for the words.

  “He’s finally happy?” I say happy under my breath, as if I don’t even dare to say it out loud. She doesn’t hide the tear that’s sliding down her cheek, coupled with a broad, beautiful smile.

  “Creo que sí.” Then she hesitates, pulling herself up on the fence. “I think so. He has a choice now, no? He can walk away if he wants. He has dignity. This is all any of us can ask for.”

  A thicket of head-high patuju is swaying, far off to the right. I think maybe this is where he’s gone. And the squirrel monkeys are squeaking with alarm, scurrying away, leaping through the branches and out, chasing new, safer horizons. Lines of ants seethe around my boots, making their way in the opposite direction, into the enclosure. The leaves they’ve carried here gleam, as if they are shards of painted porcelain. I shake my head, unable to keep the smile off my face. Then I laugh. I can’t wait to tell Katarina. She’s in London now, working in her job as a dentist. A dentist! I never even asked her what she did, until we started emailing. I feel a swell of emotion. This place. This is why I’ve pushed my bank balance into the red and disappointed all my friends and family. This is why I’ve come back.

  “Gracias Mila,” I say quietly.

  She nods, her brown-gold eyes sparkling. We worked so hard to get this enclosure built. And it was worth it. All worth it. We start to walk around the perimeter, Mila in front, me following on her boot heels.

  “Así es como le damos a Sama su caminata por la selva,” Mila tells me over her shoulder as we make laps. This is his version of a jungle walk. “He can follow if he want, no?”

  Somewhere, I hear him call. It is a beautiful, huffing bark. The sort of noise that belongs here. He is busy right now, I think he’s telling us. If he’s even thinking about us at all. Around us, the jungle doesn’t pause, doesn’t cease, but it listens, always. The ants continue to carry their loot, monkeys scream and play and search for food, giant rodents scuttle about their burrows, spiders make their webs, snakes sleep quietly in tree knots, fungi grows—living, composting, making rainbows—roots expand.

  Wayra . . . I don’t know where she is. Is she out there, somewhere, amongst all those roots and rainbows? Or is she dead and gone? Is she filling up with worms, fungus growing out of her eyes? I may never know. I look out at the jungle. It knows, somewhere. Somehow. It is listening, and it knows what has happened to her.

  The patio is a glaring yellow, flooded with midday light. Groups of volunteers are sitting around on the benches laughing hysterically as a very tall, gangly Danish volunteer in his forties, called Dolf, tries to race a very short, very sweaty, foul-mouthed Kiwi, called Ally, around the dorms and back. Both are pretty out of shape, although right now Ally has the edge. Various obstacles have been set up. A dip through a swamp containing last night’s compost, for example. A climb over an old fence while doing your best impression of a pìo, and a hare-brained rummage through the washing lines to retrieve the most brightly coloured piece of clothing you can find belo
nging to your competitor. The finish line has been marked out between the comedor and Faustino’s favourite tree. Faustino is on my lap, however, watching morosely as Teanji, who seems to have taken ownership of Faustino’s tree, watches the contestants avidly with his stripy tail in the air, like some kind of strange referee. The laughter increases as Ally, going for the win, lunges for Dolf’s legs. She topples him, leaving him squealing in the dust, brandishing a pair of bright-gold, compost-covered hot pants. Just as she races for the finish line, however, Morocha swoops out of the trees and rips the slippery hot pants out of her hands. The sound of cheering resounds as Morocha streaks across the finish line.

  “And Morocha takes the win!” Harry and Sammie yell as one, the foul architects of this nightmare. Mila and López, from up on the roof of the comedor, both wolf whistle. I hear Dolf groan as Ally collapses on the ground next to him, swearing copiously.

  “Not feeling tempted?”

  I look up as Tom plonks down next to me. He is still slightly flushed and out of breath. He ran the race before this one. Osito beat him piteously, but he was a gracious loser. Much better than Harry, who, when beaten by Mila, threw a papaya at a tree. Faustino and I have stationed ourselves strategically out of the way, underneath a mango tree, where we hoped we could avoid detection.

  I laugh. “Not likely!” And Faustino grunts in agreement, pursing his lips.