Tom wipes his face, his soft-blue eyes not quite meeting mine. His freckles are dark in the bright sunlight, and his beard looks particularly ginger today. I think it’s grown redder, somehow. Maybe from the sun. Or lack of it. I’m not sure. He gazes down at Faustino, who has rested his chin in the crook of my shoulder, then looks away, swallowing. I watch his throat bob.
“Sensible,” he says with a wry, shy smile. “Someone’s definitely going to get hurt soon, and my money’s on Harry.”
I laugh. “Oh yeah, he’ll get bitten. I’m just not sure if it will be by Teanji, or Ally.”
He grins. “It was a good idea though, right? We needed a laugh.”
I nod, although we both know the real reason for this. Last year, Agustino would have been the first to sign up for something this stupid. He would have been tearing out in front, doing his world-famous pìo impression, wearing nothing but sparkly jaguar-print leggings and compost, followed hot on his heels by a joyous Coco and an incensed Faustino, intent on derailing the proceedings. However, like Coco, Agustino is not here. He is nowhere to be seen. Not even this could draw him out of his bedroom. I’ve been back a week now, and I’ve only seen him once. I barely recognised him. His grief over Coco, over Panchita, was written all over his face.
“How’s it going with Sama?” Tom asks quickly, changing the subject.
I smile. “Awful.”
He chuckles. “Ignoring you?”
I nod. I’ve spent the week walking endless laps around his enclosure. I see him once when I arrive, when he shoots me a scathing look and disappears into the undergrowth, and once when I leave, when I give him his food. The rest of the time, it is just me and the jungle.
Tom shrugs. “He’s testing you.”
Slowly, I pick a piece of muck out of Faustino’s fur. He grunts, grabs it and places it, like any of the best connoisseurs, on his tongue. I know Sama is testing me. I think he watches me as I walk around and wait.
“Do they all do this?” I ask.
Tom looks towards the sky. There’s not a cloud in sight. “They’re all different. But they all test us, in different ways I think.”
I remember how long it took before Wayra began trusting me. Then I wonder, Did she ever really? I did leave her in the end, after all. Jane too. Do they all just know that at some point we’re going to leave? Is that why they make it so hard? Faustino, sensing my mood, glares at me. Then with a disgusted huff, he clambers off my lap and lands with a thud in Tom’s. Tom buries his face in Faustino’s fur. Faustino wraps his arms around Tom’s neck. I sigh. Maybe they don’t make it hard enough.
“Who did you come back for?” I say quietly, looking at Tom’s fuzzy beard. It is thick, and the same colour as Faustino. I almost cannot tell where he ends and Faustino begins. I realise that I’ve never asked him. He’s always just been in the background. Mila’s go-to volunteer. Unlike the rest of us, I’ve never heard him talk about “his cat.”
He shrugs, without lifting his head. “I don’t know. All of them, I think.”
I stare at him. Then I say, almost desperately, “But how do you have space in your head for that? I can barely fit in my own anxieties, let alone Wayra, and this guy”—I nod at Faustino—“and now Sama! I think I’d explode with anyone else.”
With extreme gentleness, he holds Faustino’s chest in his hands. Faustino nuzzles against him, his whiskers trembling. “I suppose my head must be pretty empty otherwise.” Then he laughs, blushing a furious pink, and looks towards the now emptying patio. “I think the spectacle is over. What do you say we go and find out what Doña Lucia has made for lunch?” He wipes his forehead dramatically. “There’s nothing better after a sprint through a sauna than a nice warming bowl of soup.”
“¡Laurita!”
I jump up off the bench, tumbling Teanji out of my lap. His orange tail bristles, the rings bright like hoops of fire. The sun is sinking below the trees, the day almost gone. There are candles being lit in the comedor, the smell of dinner wafting over the patio. Mariela is helping Germáncito with his homework, huddled by torchlight on the opposite bench. They look up as Teanji gives a disgusted beep, shakes himself and waddles away, but I’m already running. It’s a week since the races, two weeks since I got back, two weeks and one day since Wayra escaped.
“¿Qué pasa?” I yell.
Agustino is sprinting up the path to the road, beckoning wildly for me to follow. His limp black hair flails in the breeze. The extra pounds that he’s gained in the months that I’ve been away have made his face bloated, and some of the blood vessels around his cheeks have burst. His hands are shaking. We stop on the edge of the road, just in front of a gloomy, empty fumador. Agustino raises his hands, and then drops them again. Dolf, the gangly Dane who lost his race so spectacularly, is waiting for us, bouncing up and down on his toes. My eyes flick nervously between him and Agustino. Dolf waves his long arms, his thinning blond hair frail across his egg-shaped forehead. I frown to follow what he’s saying, his accent thick as eating marbles.
“Agustino says one of the hunters from the mountain has seen her.”
I feel a wild surge of joy before I look again at Agustino’s worried face.
“No sé qué pasa,” he says.
I just stare at him, taking this in.
“He isn’t sure what happened!” Dolf’s words tumble out. “He doesn’t know—”
“Doesn’t know what?” I hiss. But I don’t wait for an answer. I spin, taking a step up the road as if right now, I’m going to run all the way to the mountain. The sun is almost gone. The shadows are lengthening. Soon, they’ll be gone entirely. Horrible possibilities run through my mind. Guns. Blood. Cages. Chained up in a nameless backyard.
I look around in panic. When Dolf grabs my hand, I pull away unthinkingly. He’s Wayra’s volunteer. He’s the one who was with her when her collar split. He’s the one who’s been helping Mila look for her, every day out in the jungle, even though he was only assigned to Wayra two days before she ran. Suddenly Mila appears with a backpack and starts sorting confidently through ropes, carabiners, head torches. I give a sigh of relief to see her, but when she snaps her head up, and I see the tightness around the edges of her eyes, I feel sick. Sick to my stomach. She claps her hands and then is running towards the motorbikes. Wordlessly, Dolf and I follow, leaving Agustino behind on the rapidly darkening road.
The bikes swerve violently over deep, cavernous potholes. I cling helplessly to the back of Mila’s shirt. Wind rushes around my ears. My eyes are watering. My face stings. These potholes are massive. Gaping scars. I swear they weren’t this big last year. It must be the rains, washing away the tarmac . . .
Evening has fallen and the stars are just emerging in a deep-blue sky. Dolf is on the second bike, just in front of us, his lights stuttering. When I see him veer suddenly, I bury my face in Mila’s back. She veers too, almost throwing us both, and we choke on the cloud of rocks and dust that’s hurled into our faces as another giant logging truck thunders past, blinding us with its headlights.
Mila mutters angrily, “¡Borracho!” Drunk.
I crane my head around to count the trees on the back. Five. Each as wide as I am tall. They’ve been attached to the base by heavy chains, like giants that have had their heads and feet chopped off and yet still they need to be restrained. I watch them bounce, trying to jostle free as the truck crashes through another pothole, but the chains hold. Last year, one logging truck would pass once a week at most. Now they seem as common as the flocks of wild macaws that fly overhead. Another reason for the potholes, I guess.
I remember facts teachers parroted at school. Three football pitches disappearing every minute, children! We need to plant some trees! A sponsored cake sale to save the Amazon! I’ve seen the cattle ranches spreading across this continent now, like oceans, and I’ve stopped eating meat. Ice cream has lost its joy. But saying no to ice cream feels almost as useless, sometimes, as those cake sales.
Now, back in the thick of i
t, I can almost smell the smoke of the fires again. It makes me feel like the jungle is being eaten alive. Everything—the ants, monkeys and giant rats, the spiders, snakes, fungi and roots, and people—being eaten with it.
I turn back just as Mila starts to slow, then she’s pulling to a stop at the base of the mountain. Its bulk looms darkly above me, cutting out most of the sky. I look around, back the way we’ve come, disorientated. The last time I was here was when the whole thing was on fire. But it was jungle. Jungle, then grassland, then forested, scrubby mountain. I turn, turn again, almost falling off the bike. Where has it gone? Where have these fields come from? They seem to stretch as far as I can see. The stars should be consigned to the ribbon of the road, yet they spread now, uncontained. Young crops, monocrops, row after row after row. They rustle eerily, reflecting the low light of the moon. It’s as if someone has shaved the earth.
“Is it rice?” I say quietly. Farmland. Spattered along the roadside are a few stately trees that have been left, refusing to be moved. They open their limbs like the nests of enormous birds, dressed in mourning black. It’s only a little bit before the sanctuary’s boundary line that the jungle starts again. There’s a small pale sign to mark our parque’s land. No barbed wire, no fences. Just trust, that no one will come in and take our trees too. But the sign is old and battered, almost falling down. Written on it are the words of a Native American proverb. CUANDO EL ÚLTIMO ÁRBOL SEA CORTADO, CUANDO EL ÚLTIMO ANIMAL SEA CAZADO, CUANDO EL ÚLTIMO RÍO SEA CONTAMINADO, SERÁ ENTONCES QUE EL HOMBRE SE DARÁ CUENTA QUE EL DINERO NO SE COME . . . When the last tree is cut, when the last animal is hunted, when the last river is polluted, it will be then that man will realise that money cannot be eaten . . .
When did this happen? How did it happen so fast?
“Arroz.” Mila nods bitterly. “Girasoles, choclo.” Rice, sunflowers, corn. “Some are local farmers but many . . .” She pauses, her face stark in the torchlight. “Many are big contracts. Shipped overseas.”
I can’t look at her after she says this. I just stare at the place where the jungle used to be. A dirt road, which wasn’t there before, now runs along the bottom of the mountain. We dismount from the bikes and start down the road on foot in silence. Mila is in front, Dolf behind, me behind him. The rising moon makes our shoulders pale. Dolf is hunched. Tension radiates off him. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. He’s barely been here two weeks. If I’d been dragged out into the jungle at nightfall to chase after a puma only a fortnight into my stay, I would likely be peeing in my pants by this point.
The track looks ghostly and the fields stretch with an uncanny silence, just on the edge of my torch beam. The mountain feels menacing on my left. Soon the road thins, tightens, and climbs, and we’re climbing too, our breath coming in sharp bursts. Fields drop away and the jungle crowds back in. First it’s a relief, until scraggly trees, whose branches are monstrous hungry spiders, start to block our way. They smell like roots, dug out of the earth, and moss. We have to fight through pillars of bamboo, vicious knots of palms and curtains of rubbery vines. There are streams, I hear them tumbling over rock falls.
The jungle at night is impenetrable, incomprehensible and disorientating. I can see nothing but the blinding beams of our torches. The ground is uneven, ragged with stones that make walking difficult, pulling painfully in the small of my back. Crickets scream for their mates, an incessant whirring made by the rubbing of their wings. Insects hiss. And animals. A lot of animals. Wherever I shine my torch, I see eyes looking back at me. Each one: Wayra? Is it her? Is she here? But most are too small, low on the ground or high, peering down creepily from tree branches. More than once I hear Dolf stumble and then whimper. I find myself reaching out to catch him, an act that has been done for me so often that it almost makes me smile. But then I let go of his hand, suddenly awkward and angry, and thrash at the mosquitoes.
Mila is walking ahead of us, violently swinging her machete, and I think I will ask her where in all the heavens we’re going. But just as I open my mouth, I hear a dog barking. She holds up her hand quickly. The dog barks again and Mila lets out a low whistle. After a few seconds, there is a returning whistle, the rustle of undergrowth. A man pushes his way out of the bushes, and Dolf and I instinctively stand a little closer together. The man is short, about the same height as Mila, half a head shorter than me, about two heads shorter than Dolf. He’s got a serious, heavy-set look, his eyes almost hidden by deep lines, and he is watching us warily. I quickly lower my torch. I can’t tell how old he is. Older than I imagined, older than Agustino. He’s wearing a Boca Juniors football shirt, jeans and ragged trainers, and he’s chewing a ball of coca the size of a fist. There are green stains engrained around his lips and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. A machete wedged in his belt. Two ratty terriers are snuffling around his feet.
He and Mila speak, fast and clipped. I frown, trying to understand, but soon get lost in the unfamiliar syllables, the buzz of the insects a constant ringing at the back of my ears. They’re speaking Quechua. The local language is Guaraní, but many people around here don’t speak it. In the eighties, during a stark economic crisis, whole communities were relocated from the altiplano, the cold highlands near La Paz. They were poor, their Indigenous cultures mountainous, Incan, pre-Incan, and they came wind-hardened with different languages. The government said they wanted to redistribute the wealth, promising that farming would be better down here. But divides between the collas, these migrants, and the cambas, people from the richer, eastern lowlands, are stark and difficult. Mila, Agustino, the kids, many of the proud, toughened people from the local pueblos . . . they speak Quechua. They don’t talk about where they come from.
I gaze between Mila and the man. They’ve stopped talking and the man is staring hard, almost belligerently, at his trainers. I look at his bowed head, his slicked black hair. Is he one of the men I’ve seen speeding past the fumador on a motorbike, a dead jaguar slung over the back? The jungle rustles around us ominously.
Mila sighs, finally turning to us. “Alfredo has been hunting here for years.” She pushes one of the dogs away as it sniffs her boot. “He knows this land.”
I try to read her face. I know how she feels about hunters. But I also know she’s been working with some of them for years, trying to teach them about endangered species, with some success. With all the will in the world though, she can’t stop people hunting. She can’t even stop people coming into parque land. It’s forbidden to hunt on private ground, but it’s not forbidden to use the waterways. Our lagoons and rivers are public, and of course, isn’t that how it should be? She takes a long, deep breath. Come on, Mila! What did he say? My eyes flick anxiously between her and Alfredo. “Last night,” she continues, “he saw a small puma, just here on the track.”
“She’s alive?” Dolf cries. He’s grabbed my hand. I’m grateful for it. I find my legs are shaking.
Mila nods curtly. “He almost shot her.”
“But he didn’t?” Dolf exclaims. “He didn’t shoot her?”
When Mila nods again, I think I almost faint.
“He said if she had attacked him, he would have. But when she just disappeared into the forest, he let her go.”
I turn to Alfredo, nodding my head. “Gracias. ¡Gracias! Pachi!”
He looks up, meeting my eyes for just a second. His gaze is soft, reminding me suddenly of Tom, and he breaks into a wide grin at my use of the local Quechua when I say pachi—thank you. It makes him look years younger, and I smile back. Maybe he’s never shot a jaguar. Maybe he lives out here, just him and his dogs. Or does he have a family in town? Does he have babies? Has he tried to farm, but was pushed out by those low-paying, slave-labour multinational contracts Mila talked about? He starts speaking again, this time in Spanish, gesticulating wildly, but his coca wad and his speed make it incomprehensible to me, and to Dolf, who is trying so hard to understand he looks like he might be about to have an aneurysm. Mila finally laughs.
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br /> “He says we can go with him tonight and look for her, if we’d like.”
“Yes!” I nod rapidly.
“¡Sí!” Dolf exclaims. “¡Por favor!”
She smiles. “Entonces, ¿vamos, Alfredo? Mis hijos quieren encontrar un puma.”
The man grins, cheerful now, and whistles for his dogs. Then he sets off at a speedy pace. We follow after him, and as we wind our way further and further up the side of the mountain, there’s the murmur of waterfalls, the dark whisper of the canopy and the thrill of animals on the hunt. And maybe, I think wildly, amongst all that, a small greyish puma with wide, slightly goofy green eyes.
The next morning, I see Dolf eating breakfast by himself and I quietly slide onto the bench next to him. When he looks up at me, his eyes are red. We walked for hours through the tangled darkness, trailing Alfredo and his dogs. By the time we got back to camp, the sky was turning tangerine orange and we’d not seen a puma.
“She’s ghosting us.” He laughs miserably, rubbing his face, stretching out his exhausted feet. I look down. His boots are too small. He’s had to cut the ends off an old pair and cover his toes with duct tape. We sit together in silence, watching Morocha tearing across the patio. The morning is startlingly bright, and the trees seem to shine with a particular brightness, hurting my bloodshot eyes. Morocha’s long prehensile tail flails and the hair on top of her pink heart-shaped face stands up as if she’s forced one of her doting volunteers to spend the morning back-combing it.
After we finish eating, Dolf and I walk outside together, neither of us keen to endure the chatter in the comedor for a second longer than we need to. Morocha lets out a squeal, at first I think because of us, but then I see Teanji waddling towards us covered in some kind of faeces. He’s taken to swan-diving head first into the baños, much to the horror of anyone who wasn’t here for Panchita’s shit-covered rampages. I smile, knowing the pig would have been proud.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 17
