The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  “Jesus.”

  Charlie looks exhausted, his face grey in strange places. Charlie is our cat coordinator—a job that pretty much does what it says on the tin. He coordinates the cats and their volunteers. Makes sure everyone is trained properly, routines are upheld, animals and people are safe, happy, looked after. It used to be Mila and Agustino who did that and, basically, everything else. Jobs that we now aim to divide between two cat coordinators, an administrator, a volunteer coordinator, two cooks, a construction coordinator, a construction team, small-animal coordinators, one, two or even three vets, and a parque director.

  Mila and Agustino both left the parque about six years ago. Not easily. It was long, drawn out and painful. They suffered from undiagnosed PTSD, grief, stress on top of stress on top of stress. They have other jobs now, other families, in other parts of Bolivia, and I hope they are happy. In the years since, despite their roles being portioned off in an attempt to make the running of this place more sustainable, it isn’t sustainable. This isn’t a conventional job. We need local staff, but local staff are hard to find. The pay is low, the conditions difficult. We continue to depend on foreigners and volunteers that might leave at the drop of a hat—or that might stay, but who knows? We ask people to give up their lives and often their mental and physical health for little money. People have been doing this same thing for decades, in grassroots organisations and NGOs across the world, because there’s always the next disaster to deal with, right, and too little support? But every year, it seems to get harder, particularly for the people who stay. Friends leave, volunteers don’t extend their trips anymore. The world is uncertain, jobs are harder to secure. Travellers stick to their schedules. They travel to a plan and it’s rare that they’ll change it, even for something as magical as peeling away your onion layers and losing all your body weight and probably your hair just to make the jungle happy.

  Currently we have eleven great volunteers and twenty-three cats, plus the birds, monkeys, tejones, pìos, peccaries, tapirs and twenty or so animals in quarantine. Our staff includes two cooks, the stalwart Doña Lucia and a younger, sweet woman called Doña Clara. Osito—Oso—is our construction coordinator. He’s no longer a chubby eleven-year-old. He gets mad if I call him Osito, because he’s a strapping twenty-one-year-old now with twin baby girls. He is one of the most amazing, resilient young men. He’s the only one of the kids, who were in the parque when I first arrived, who’s still here year-round. Our construction team is made up of him, and Jhonny. Like Oso, Jhonny grew up round here, although not in the parque. His family used to hunt. Through their work with us, though, they’ve become activists. Jhonny is one of about eight brothers, at least four of which have been working at the parque, and our two other sanctuaries, for years. Monkey experts, construction experts, cat experts. They are all insanely handsome. Jhonny is perhaps the most handsome of all and can carry more cement through the swamp than anyone I know.

  Alongside Oso, Jhonny, Doña Lucia and Doña Clara, there’s Charlie and Ally. Ally is our volunteer coordinator. She’s exactly the same as she was a decade ago, except for a few more lines on her face and a few more tattoos of Amira. Our only vet left last week and our new one should arrive next week. But until that happens, Ally and I are the closest we’ve got to “vets.” We are not vets, but we do enjoy giving volunteers vitamin injections in their butts if they’re particularly hungover.

  I gaze at Charlie. He looks even more grey than usual.

  “Did something happen?” I ask warily.

  “Teanji escaped again. Jhonny had to catch him in the laundry basket. ¿Verdad, Jhonny?” Charlie raises his voice.

  Jhonny is welding fence posts on the other side of the garage. His T-shirt is tight across his burly chest and his dark hair is slung stylishly across his glistening golden-brown forehead. He looks over at us, cupping his hand over his ear and switching off the machine.

  “¿Qué?”

  Charlie does a complicated mime to indicate catching a tejón in a laundry basket. Jhonny giggles, nodding enthusiastically. I shake my head in desperation. Jhonny is surprisingly good at catching things in laundry baskets. He goes back to his welding.

  “A lot of volunteers barricaded themselves in their rooms,” Charlie says. “You might have to do some damage control.”

  I sigh. “Did he hurt anyone?”

  “Nah. Not this time.”

  I nod. Desperately relieved. I remember Mila and Agustino’s blind belief that Coco had the right to be free, more than a person had the right not to be bitten. Gradually, though, over the years, as those animals who were our friends back then died, new animals that arrived—along with new staff members, and new policies on safety—weren’t given the same kinds of freedom. It was for the best, probably. Lorenzo . . . he disappeared, in 2011. We don’t know what happened to him. One day he was flying about the patio, flapping his bright wings at Sammie flirtatiously, and the next he was just gone. Hit by a logging truck, stolen and sold as a pet, caught and eaten by an animal. Nobody knows. And Faustino. Oh, Faustino. He was hit by a car in 2009 on the same road that took Coco two years before.

  Teanji is our last survivor. He was still free until the beginning of this year, when Oso and Jhonny finally completed a brand new “tejón garden,” a huge enclosure for him to live in. He is safe there, as are volunteers who still insist on wearing flip-flops. Teanji is blind and senile, but he still manages to escape, sometimes climbing into Oso’s bed for a cuddle, and sometimes robbing the breakfast rolls out of the comedor.

  “Everyone was panicking.” Charlie leans against the truck, crossing his arms. Bruce sidles over, sticking his snout affectionately into Charlie’s ear. “He ran out of the bushes and I’m not joking, that guy moves so fast, he’s like a tiny orange roadrunner. He launched right at my nuts, I squealed so loud. I blocked him with a broom, and Jhonny was just giggling, watching, but then he picked up the laundry basket, cool as a cucumber, and caught Teanji mid-air like some kind of superhero.”

  I’m laughing so hard, I’m choking on my coca leaves.

  “I swear, I almost lost it.”

  We sit there for a bit, my green bag of coca between us, stuffing leaves into our cheeks and listening to the sounds of volunteers playing volleyball on the patio, the crackling reggaeton music from Jhonny’s radio propped next to him on the bench as he works. Finally, when my cheek is full and Bruce has started to snore, his chin on Charlie’s shoulder, I pat Charlie on the arm.

  “Come on, then,” I say.

  “Let’s crack some skulls?”

  “I guess so. Have you got the axe?” I touch the heads softly and say a short thank-you. Their dark eyes gaze back at me. They’re huge, each weighing about thirty kilos, with horns that curl majestically and sadly from their soft hay-coloured foreheads. I haven’t eaten anything cow-related in years, but cats will be cats. We start splitting the heads in half, ready to be divided up amongst the jaguars.

  I spent a long time, after I left in 2008, trying to process what had happened to me. I stayed with my mum because all I wanted to do was earn enough money to get back to the parque. I tried to be normal, to put it out of my mind, to get back to “reality.” Tom helped a lot. I did go and see him, and we started dating. We were together for about three years. It didn’t work out. Tom was at university studying to be a vet, I was all over the place. We both missed the parque with a fury that kept us up at night, but he had something else, other than Bolivia. A purpose. He was going to be a vet. He never wavered from it, and in the end he met someone else. Someone also training to be a vet. I didn’t blame him, not really. I’d made my commitment, and it wasn’t to him. I kept trying to fool both of us every year—I swear, this is the last time, this is the last time I’m going to go back to Bolivia, I’ll move in with you next year, I swear . . . but I never did, and it never was the last time.

  I wrote a lot. Drew pictures of Wayra. Made sculptures. Tried desperately, oh so desperately, to find a way to talk about her without
people eventually drifting away like I was crazy, with a blank Oh, that must have been cool, I guess, a puma, huh? expression on their faces.

  I walk across the patio, covered in blood and cow brains. I’ve got a hessian sack containing one head, destined for Ru, slung over my shoulder. It’s difficult to walk. A cow head is heavy, and I am slow. Charlie’s laughing at me, trotting behind, carrying his two heads with ease. One of his is whole, going to Amira, the other is split in half for Rupi. A jaguar who can’t bear to eat anything that looks remotely like an animal. Give him a whole cow head, with two liquid eyes to stare at him, and he’ll hide under his bed and won’t come out until it’s been removed.

  Sammie is waving, her wild honey hair, dyed darker than it has ever been, caught up in a huge ponytail. She’s wearing a dirty old flannel shirt and jeans, another shirt thrown over her shoulders to protect her from the mozzies, which she has always hated but seems to hate even more with age. She’s an attorney now, fighting for the rights of immigrants in the US. She’s able to come for only two weeks every year, has a massive student debt and is in her mid-thirties with a serious job, a house cat, and a wardrobe of trouser suits. She’s still one of my closest human friends, even though we’re lucky if we see each other every few years. We try to cross paths here, and occasionally she’s managed to come see me in the UK, or I’ve gone to her on my layovers in the States.

  “Frodo!” she exclaims, her waving getting more dramatic.

  “Yeah, Samwise?” But even as I say it, I see who is behind her, talking emphatically to Oso, and my sack drops to the floor with a thunk. “Fuck,” I whisper.

  Sammie dances on the toes of her boots. Oso beams, his cheeks just as round as they were when I first saw him on the patio, eleven years old, carrying Teanji in his arms.

  “Harry,” I murmur.

  Harry turns to me, his face flushed. “Hey, Frodo.”

  “Are you real?” I exclaim, breathless.

  “¡Sí!” Oso exclaims, gripping Harry’s biceps, barely able to contain himself. Last time we saw Harry, Oso came up to his chest. Now, Oso is the taller one. Oso squeezes Harry’s unimpressive arm muscles with delight. I shake my head, shake my head again.

  “Frodo,” Harry repeats, stepping forwards to hug me, so awkward that we miss and knock heads. We both laugh. His voice is familiar and strange. He’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He smells—clean. His beard is trimmed, his hair short under his baseball cap. He’s got lines around his eyes, but other than that, he looks . . . healthy. Normal. He looks like a normal person. “You’re covered in swamp,” he says dryly.

  I put on a low drawl. “Well, ya know. You don’t really know yourself until you’ve spent months in the swamp.”

  He looks at me for a long moment, and then chuckles.

  I feel light-headed, giddy. “But it’s not swamp,” I clarify. “It’s cow brains.”

  “Oh.” He looks around. Then he laughs again and prods my cheek. His fingers are suspiciously clean too. “Still chewing, I see?”

  I touch my wad of leaves with my tongue and shrug. “Are you . . .” I pull down his head, staring at the hair poking out from under his cap. “Are you going grey?”

  He pushes me away.

  “¡Sí!” Oso giggles. “¿Viejo, no? So old.” He grins cheerfully. “Y un poco gordo.” He pokes Harry in the stomach.

  “Yeah, alright!” Harry jumps away, holding his cap firmly on his head with one hand, the other over his stomach, which is definitely larger than it was. “Maybe! That’s what happens when you approach your forties.”

  I nod wearily. “Sammie and I at least won’t be the oldest people in camp anymore.”

  Harry looks pointedly at Charlie. “So it’s true. The volunteers are getting younger.”

  Charlie grins, raising his eyebrows. Charlie is barely twenty-three, and very proud of it.

  “No,” I say, rolling my eyes. “We’re just getting older.”

  After I left in 2008, Harry stayed. Not forever, but for a while. But like Mila and Agustino, in the end, he lost his mind. PTSD. Overwork. Too many parasites. Too few vitamins. Too little sunlight. There are some of us—me and Sammie, Ally, Bobby, Ilsa, René—who’ve spent the last decade booking return flights every year. Not quite able to assimilate but not quite able to let go either. There are others who did that for a while, but eventually settled for a stable life. A house, kids. Oscar, Bryan. Paddy, Tom, Dolf. Once that happened . . . each year they might say, Yeah, next year for sure. Next year I’ll definitely come back. But then next year would come, and there’d be another bill to pay, another deadline, or just something else, another project to visit, another chance at changing the world, or it just became less easy to justify flying halfway across the planet. Jane. She did a PhD in illegal logging and is a researcher now. We talk, sometimes. She always likes to hear how Wayra is. But it is vague for her. Distant. Like hearing about a person she once knew a long time ago.

  And Harry. After he burnt out, none of us heard from him. It was like he’d dropped off the map. I haven’t seen him in over six years.

  And now. Here.

  I raise my sack. “I’m just on my way to take this to Ru.” I eye Harry, not quite sure what to say. “Do you want to come?”

  He looks at me for a few seconds, and I cannot read what he is thinking. But then he looks away, down at the ground.

  “No,” he murmurs. “Not yet.”

  I nod. “I’ll see you when I get back, then?”

  He raises his gaze, and his blue eyes are as blue as they always were.

  “You can count on it.”

  In 2012, I opened an art gallery. It’s called ONCA. Panthera onca. Jaguar. With a lot of help, it became a charity. The idea was that it would be a place where people might come to share stories, take part in stories, listen to stories—through painting, performance, writing, music, puppetry, whatever—about the issues that were important to them. The kinds of things that affected animals like Wayra, and the people that I met in the parque. The kinds of stories that I was so desperate now to tell but for which I couldn’t quite find the words. The forests across the Amazon were disappearing. Cattle farming and soybean production were increasing, multinationals were stripping communities and lands of their identity. Fires continued, flooding got worse. Climate change was still a side note, barely covered in the news in the UK, but in the parque—it felt real. It was real. We saw record numbers of wild jaguars, not because they were doing well, but because their territories were decreasing so sharply. Because of deforestation rates and the increase in slash-and-burn agriculture, the increase of temperatures, the loss of food sources.

  You wouldn’t believe how many people said to me: Er, are you sure? Art about the environment? Why don’t you just start a normal gallery? Otherwise you’ll never make any money. But ONCA was the first arts space in the UK that was dedicated to environmental justice. Environmental justice cannot be separated from social justice. The two are deeply intertwined. Over the years, I’ve learnt this. I’ve learnt that the stories that affect Wayra are similar, and connected, to the stories that affect a lot of people, a lot of different species, and a lot of places. Health, for example, and happiness. Loss and homelessness, soil and waste, food, water, work, isolation and otherness.

  Now ONCA has two spaces—a city-centre gallery and an old floating barge. We work with many people—young climate activists, people suffering from cancer, people wanting to connect across generations, and ways of living . . . We explore transformative sci-fi that envisions future worlds, we try to admit our failures, and question—and challenge—the cultures that we find ourselves in. We discuss extractivism, surveillance, the extinctions of peoples and species. We provide space for queer make-up tutorials, Deaf poetry nights, and—as thinker Donna Haraway advises—we try to “stay with the trouble” of climate grief. I don’t know if art can change the world. I don’t think there is just one world to change, there are thousands, millions of worlds, and of worldviews. But I do thin
k that art can change people, just as Wayra, Coco, Mila and all their stories changed me.

  I will never forget my realisation in the forest, about my choices, and my privileges. I can’t take everyone I know to Bolivia. I can’t introduce Wayra, and the parque, to everyone. But they opened my eyes. They gave me a gift. They changed my world and because of them, I set up ONCA in an effort to repay that gift, just a little bit. To create a space where Wayra and the parque, and the multitude of worlds they are entangled with, might change other people’s stories too.

  “Hey, buddy,” I croon softly.

  Ru stares at me, his eyes wide as I start walking around the fence. The hexagonal-shaped enclosure seems to go on and on, the jungle exploding around and inside it, vibrant green with red and orange lobster-claw petals. Trees shoot upwards, mahoganies and gringo trees, strangler figs, spiky ochoo trees, striped bamboo, walking and huicungo palms, banana plants, lemon and mandarin trees, spreading carpets of flat and bulbous spicy seeds across the swamp. The whine of mosquitoes is unreal, the temperature scalding. It smells sweet, wafting on bursts of heat. I follow a path about six metres wide around the outside of the fence. Ru’s lying down, his handsome, strong head pressed against the side. He’s thinking about pawing the ground again, trying to dig his way out. It’s never far from his mind. But when I start to move, he watches with half an amber eye. It’s only when I reach the first corner and I’m almost out of sight that he gets up. I feel rather than hear his muscles bunching.

  “Come on, Ru!” I break into a sprint. In no time he catches me and we run, he on one side of the fence, taking corners like a pro skater, me on the other, scrabbling to stay upright, stumbling on roots, falling into holes. We manage two laps, each almost two hundred metres, before we both collapse, me with my hands on my knees, panting for breath, Ru a little way in, in a patch of shade underneath some curling silvery-yellow vines. He’s flat out on the ground, his sides labouring, his tongue lolling. Even though the sun has already gone down, if my clothes weren’t already soaked from the swim through the swamp to get out here, they would have been just as wet from the amount I’m sweating. It’s mid-March and we’re in the throes of one of the worst and longest wet seasons I’ve ever seen.