The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  Finally, when I’m able to speak again, I raise my head. Ru’s still panting.

  I laugh. “You’re getting old, bud!”

  He just looks at me as if he couldn’t care less what I think.

  In 2009, Ru started injuring people. Not badly, but bad enough. He was playing hard, growing up, getting more boisterous, more difficult to control. There was more noise over the river. More people, more construction, more logging. It was during a dry season when there were a lot of volunteers, and yet nobody really knew Ru. Harry wasn’t there. I remember it like it was yesterday. Ru’s volunteers standing there wide-eyed, one guy with his chin raised, stubborn, determined, the others just pale, terrified. One with a claw mark too close to his eye. Agustino was blank and frail. Osito, his face uncertain. Germáncito, lost. López, his throat working, his dark eyes confused. Mila—flushed and blotchy, angry, desperate. We stood in a circle in the clinic.

  “¿Deberíamos dejar de caminar Jaguaru?” Agustino asked. He tried to make his voice strong, but it came out little more than a whisper. Should Ru continue to be allowed to walk? We went round our little circle, one by one, giving our answers. If we said no, then Jaguaru would never come out of his enclosure again. He would never go down to his canoe. He would never watch his river again. If we said yes, Ru would still have his freedom. But at what risk? Was it worth it this time?

  We said no.

  That was eight years ago. I think, if I’m honest with what I believe, that’s what broke Agustino. Really and truly. The light left his eyes and didn’t come back. Mila lasted a little longer. But after that decision, after we voted for common sense over trust, logic over love, something in Agustino died. Maybe that’s what did it for Harry too. I’m not sure. I never saw him again to ask.

  Ru gets bored a lot. He’s smarter than I am. He is always testing, always probing, frustrated, sad. He’s not like Sama. All Sama had were bad memories. Ru had mostly good ones. But he hasn’t hurt anyone else. So . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how I would answer Agustino’s question now, if I could take the vote all over again.

  I look at my watch. It’s after six and the shadows are deepening.

  “Best give you your treat, right, Jaguaru?”

  Ru, seeing me look at my watch, looks up at the sky, as if to check the position of the sun. When he looks back at me, I wonder if he will remember Harry. I don’t really doubt it. I sometimes see him gazing towards his old trails, overgrown now, and his riverbank, in the direction of his canoe. Where they used to sit together, side by side, so many years ago. I hope it isn’t too painful, when Harry does come. I hope it doesn’t make Ru even sadder.

  “Alright, buddy,” I say once I’ve tied his cow head to a tree in the centre of his enclosure. I’ve put him in his small management cage, but after I’ve left him his cow treat I let him out, once I’m safely outside again, and then all I hear is the raucous crash, the crunch of branches, and the thud as he single-mindedly wrestles the head to the ground. He’ll be busy with it all night long.

  I pick up my things and steel myself for the long walk home. I hate wearing a head net with the cats, hate it when they can’t see my eyes, but I put it on now, brushing at the hundred or so mosquitoes stuck to my face. Then I forge into the growing grainy darkness, half-blind and almost incapacitated by my net. The layers of heavy, wet clothing, the mud that sucks at my boots, the swamp now up to my knees, thighs, waist . . . the sweat in my eyes and the deafening whine of the bugs. I’m as exhausted and physically ravaged as I’ve ever been and yet . . .

  The black dappled water threads and makes lakes out of fields of emerald patuju. At dusk, it drips with rain and shadows. I can just hear the reverberating call of howler monkeys and, as I always do, I imagine that it might be Darwin—leader of his own semi-wild troop now. He lives in the jungle. His howl is an impressive boom that always makes me smile, he had the best teacher after all.

  Thousands of yellow moths congregate on fragrant branches. Sapphire butterflies, their wings the size of my hands, flutter around my shoulders. Impossible fungi wave their caps. Jelly-like snails’ eggs, pink, purple and cream, float in grids across the water. Algae blooms. Frogs and flat, weightless spiders hover. Rainbowed snakes hide in tree knots and hummingbirds’ wings move faster than thought. I imagine pumas skulking. Anacondas curling under the water. Lizards closing their eyes, sloths slowly climbing and night-time bats starting to wake up. The shadows growing grainier by the second. The trail winds, the swamp knee high, crotch high, chest high, the worst bits neck high . . . I wade past a bulbous tree covered in a thousand caterpillars. Their heads are facing each other, as if gathered for a community meeting. They make the bark purple and quivering.

  It’s nearly dark. This tree is the halfway marker. Even in daylight it’s difficult to see where the path goes, easy to get confused in the vast spread of passages. Familiar shapes become other things entirely. My heart thumps with the thrill of balancing so delicately on the edge of lost. I don’t have any ridiculous notions of invincibility, but I do feel . . . tingly. Acutely alive. More than just the nominally present feeling I have when I’m in bars with friends, at work, standing in a shop with Visa in hand, staring at the latest Instagram posts . . . the feeling I’ve never quite got rid of, as if I’m staring at life through a plastic sheet. This, when I’m here, here in this rot-inducing, kidney-disease-causing, anaconda-infested swamp, there’s no sheet. Not even a whiff of it. All I can smell is mud, thick and cloying, heady algae, moisture, creation and decay.

  Harry used to say the swamp teaches people who they are. I thought it was macho bullshit, and it was, but he was also a little bit right. For me, it was only when I started to trust the swamp, really, not to not kill me, because it will, it will totally kill me, but just to let me be who I am. A frail, strange human in a frail, strange, composting, muddy world. Once I’d fallen in love with the swamp, as I’d fallen in love with Wayra, I think that’s when I fell in love with my life.

  The landmarks are friends: the caterpillar tree a reminder of the root that trips me up every time, the hole that almost catches my ankle around the next bend, the bat tree on its floating island. If I take off my net and listen, I will hear them chittering, I will feel the brush of their wings over my face. My head torch is starting to fade and I shiver, the cold seeping up my bones, deliciously cool.

  I fall, my toe catching on an unseen root. I’m scrabbling for purchase, chin deep in water now, squealing and laughing, when I understand, for no reason I know, that something, someone, is watching. I whip up my net, getting my footing, and turn my head. My torch catches two eyes high off the ground, about a metre up, wide enough apart to belong to something sufficiently large to make me stop laughing immediately, my heart shooting so fast up into my brain that for a moment I see white spots. Bright yellow in the rapidly fading torch beam, batteries about to run out, the eyes like stars. The rest of the jungle is still, the little creatures suddenly silent. I don’t move. I can’t run, not through the swamp. I gaze across the gloom and the creature gazes back at me. I taste sour bile. I can see now, my eyes adjusting, the bulk. Pale with black rosettes.

  I have a blunt knife in my backpack, that’s it. I don’t have a machete, and I stink of blood and dead cow. There haven’t been sightings of wild jaguars for over a year, not in person and not on our camera traps. We saw a lot between 2009 and 2015 as the forests around us disappeared and jaguar territories shrunk, but with no sightings in the parque for the last two years, David, our researcher, has been worried that the corridor of jungle connecting our land with the protected areas in the north and to the south of us, the corridor that’s one of the key jaguar migration routes in the Amazon, may be gone too.

  This jaguar is small, smaller than Ru. Is this the one that used to hound his cage whenever she went into heat? David calls her Cersei. Perhaps, I think with a flash of horror, she’s been following me. She’s sitting on her haunches. Jaguars are pro swimmers. I am not a pro swimmer. I can barely
doggy-paddle. I keep my torch on her eyes but I can’t hear anything apart from terror, and it is deafening. A canal of black water separates us. I’ve encountered wild jaguars before, the end of a tail, the flash of an eye, but never like this. Never yards away, never alone, never in the swamp at night. I give a little desperate laugh. This serves me right, all that bullshit about trusting the bloody swamp! Should I feel small, I think, like prey? I feel huge, I feel like my brains are flying out of my nose. My synapses are firing, pop, pop, pop—pops of panic as my lungs struggle and fail to normalise.

  It’s an eon in a split second, and then I remember that I’m me, and as I have trained myself to do—what began as a coping mechanism for anxiety turned into something useful, something that helped me over a decade of working with animals who smell fear as sharply as bullies do—I take my fear and I swallow it. I push it into my belly, where it sits, hidden, until later, when I’ll look at it again and it’ll be valuable, useful and precious. Something to learn from. And I reach round very carefully, take my metal water bottle and one of the empty meat buckets from my backpack. The jaguar’s muscles tense, and then, my muscles tensing too, I open my mouth. I bang my bottle against my bucket and sing “Purple Rain” as loudly as I can. My voice explodes across the darkness, punctuated with the thundering slap of metal on plastic, and the next time I look, she’s gone. There’s no one there at all.

  “I saw a jaguar!”

  “What?”

  “I saw a fucking jaguar!” I grip Charlie’s arm, panting hard.

  “Yeah, so did I. I actually walked one today. He was called Rupi.”

  “No!” I try to glare at him but I’m panting too much. “I was stalked by a jaguar.”

  “Sure, sure.” Charlie laughs. “Was it Ru?”

  “David!” I yell, spinning, brushing at the cloud of mosquitoes that have followed me out of the jungle. After the jaguar fled, I flailed, splashed and swam at my top speed back to camp.

  “Yeah, what?” David pokes his head out of the office. It’s pitch dark now but the electricity generator (finally installed in 2012) is still on, the hum whirring in the background, our tiny, box-like office glowing with sharp electric light, illuminating my old, faded seven-foot painting of Coco, gripping a branch with his toes, on the wall of the shower block.

  “I saw Cersei!” I exclaim.

  David has a wad of coca in his cheek and an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a scar down his face from a recent bout of flesh-eating bacteria.

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “No! I swear. It was like out of a film or something. She was a supreme being! She was just watching me across the swamp. I could have died tonight!”

  “Sure.” Charlie laughs again and I kick him, and he just kicks me back. David has already gone back into the office, talking to himself and shaking his head excitedly. I can just see Oso in there too, plotting construction budgets or something. He should be home already. Back in Santa María with his girlfriend and one-year-old twins. I should go in and finish the accounts. The finances no longer depend on a wet notebook and an old powdered-milk tin stuffed full with bolivianos, kept underneath Agustino’s bed. We have a safe now, which I can never manage to open, and a computer, which has to live in a box of rice to stave off the humidity lest it die. But I need to get out of my wet clothes, I need to shower, I need to dry my feet, I need to eat, I need to sleep . . . I need to find Sammie and Harry!

  It’s past seven thirty. “Birds in bed?” I ask Charlie hopefully.

  He shakes his head. “Big Red’s being difficult.”

  I sigh as we both start towards the aviary. Our boots, full of water, make sucking noises. The comedor shines on my left and I catch the delicious smells of dinner, making my stomach rumble. I can hear Big Red laughing maniacally, and I see a crowd of volunteers around the fence looking worried. One of them shoves a long stick at Charlie.

  “That bird is crazy,” I hear her mutter as she passes me. “He bit a hole in my fucking boot!”

  The rest of them shuffle after her. I sigh as I put my head torch away, batteries entirely gone now, and pull my phone out of its dry bag. Using its torch, I peer into the pìos’ enclosure.

  “Matt Damon’s still out,” I say. Charlie grunts, already half into Big Red’s cage, so I open the door to the pìos, listening as Charlie starts singing. He’s got a good voice, so good he routinely uses it to convince gullible volunteers that he reached the finals of Australia’s Got Talent 2015. I listen with half an ear to his upbeat version of “No Woman, No Cry” while Matt Damon skulks awkwardly in the trees.

  “Hey, Matty D.”

  He stares at me with beady, baleful eyes. The pìos’ ranks have risen and fallen in a soft undulating volunteer-terrorising wave. Some were able to be released, some died. We gained about four new ones and gradually people forgot who was who. Now there’s just Matt Damon, the lone survivor, and most likely not the original Matt or Damon. We’re hoping to release him next summer. There’s a reserve for free-roaming pìos to the north of town, managed by a friend of ours, and we’re hoping Matty D can find a home there.

  “Time for bed, buddy.”

  Matt Damon draws out his wings, curls his long neck and hisses. I coo gently, walking slowly past and making for his house. Sneaking a glance over my shoulder, I grin. He’s following close behind. He makes a big fuss, but I have a suspicion he just really enjoys the palaver. When I push open his wooden door, he stops at the entrance to shit explosively on my boots before trotting by semi-belligerently and lying down in a soft pile of hay.

  “Hey, Bitey,” I murmur, entering the toucan’s cage next. I can just see the eerie lines of the massive black posts that are still waiting outside—ready for the new aviary that never happened. Bitey swoops down with a rattle, his curved black beak, neon-blue stripe across the base, snapping. The moon has started to come up, giving everything a soft blue glow. He feints at my boot, then hops up onto a branch so that he’s at head level, still snapping. “OK, friend,” I laugh. I hold up a stick. Bitey looks at it for a long moment before rubbing his beak, hopping on and letting me carry him to his little night house. I stare at him as he croaks haughtily from his perch. I just see him cocking his head, his blue-rimmed eye expanding in the darkness. Flighty died four years ago. Since then, like Matty D, Bitey’s been alone. He must be at least fifteen, his feathers bedraggled. We’re an old people’s home, I think sadly, hearing the jar of Big Red’s agitated laugh.

  I lock Bitey’s cage and circle back round.

  “How you doing?” I lean against Big Red’s fence.

  Charlie gazes out at me, a pained look on his face. “You want to try? He’s not digging Bob Marley tonight.”

  I nod. Pulling out my phone again, I scroll through my music. When I find what I’m looking for, I turn up the volume. “Bridge over Troubled Water” is usually a winner. Entering the dark cage, I go to stand by his bed.

  “Come on, friend.”

  Big Red waddles towards the music, but the moment he comes within inches of me, he sets off in the opposite direction, until he’s underneath a leaf, where he stays, rocking back and forth. Charlie and I gaze at each other, smacking at the increasingly infuriating bugs. If by the time I get to the shower there’s no water left, I will kill someone.

  “Don’t move . . .” I slap Charlie’s sweaty, dirty forehead, which is seething with black, blood-swollen mozzies. “Shine the light, will you?”

  Charlie angles his phone onto my upturned palm and we begin to count.

  “Fifty-two!” I exclaim, wiping the blood and the broken bodies off on my leggings. “That’s a good slap.”

  “Look!” Charlie points as he crouches down, and holds out his hands. Big Red waddles into his palms and rubs his beak miserably across Charlie’s fingers. Charlie gazes up at me, wide-eyed. It’s only in the last weeks that Big Red has started letting Charlie pick him up. Charlie carefully lifts the blind, senile macaw up into his night cage, slides him inside and closes the doo
r. I pull the curtain over.

  “How much battery you got?” I whisper. “I’m almost out.”

  Charlie peers at his phone. “Yeah, I’m OK.” He chooses some music and sets it on repeat, something to help Big Red get to sleep. When we’re outside, I immediately start to feel jubilant again, imagining all the joys this evening still holds.

  “I’m going to shower!” I clap my hands. “Or maybe I’ll eat first. Oh, I can’t decide! What are you going to do?”

  “Eat.” We’re at the water tap in the middle of the patio. The comedor is shining brightly to our right, the showers—almost begging me to enter—to our left.

  I bite my lip. “Do you know where Harry and Sammie are?”

  Charlie grins. “Ah, you oldies. Probably in bed. Reminiscing about the crazy old days over some hot cocoa.”

  I laugh, then set off at a run. The comedor, the showers—they can wait. Charlie is wrong. I know exactly where Harry and Sammie will be.

  When I get to the road, the moon is bright, almost full, a hanging silver penny. There’s a group of volunteers in the fumador, but no Harry and Sammie, so I cast left, then right, and am about to go back in when I see two shapes a few hundred metres down the tarmac. I wave wildly and am about to set off when I see them getting up off the ground and coming back towards me.

  “This road sucks,” Harry snaps as they fall level with the fumador. He casts a suspicious look inside, at the volunteers almost half his age. Sammie gives me a twisted, slightly pained expression, and I cock my head, imagining how they’ve spent the afternoon. Harry looks deeply unhappy. A truck zooms past us too fast, and all three of us jump into the verge, shielding our eyes from the rocks that fly out from under the tires. The truck is closely followed by another, and then another.