Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Still smartly attired in un-ripped jeans and a shirt with more sleeves than food stains, Toby stepped back outside to announce his arrival to Johnny. His hair gleamed bronze in the midmorning sun – at least until he jammed his tatty pink baseball cap over it. I’d introduced him to Steve as well, which had seemed almost as pointless; Steve would be leaving himself in three days.

  As would I.

  It was something I was trying very hard not to think about.

  As Mel and Mark hauled their luggage out of the ‘master’ bedroom, Toby dumped his in it. The changeover from one ruling regime to another was all but complete. Back in the lounge I ceremonially handed over the baton of leadership. He didn’t seem particularly impressed by the gravity of the occasion – or by the fact that I’d actually made a baton of leadership. But then, Toby was a natural. I had an almost unhealthy amount of love for him.

  “Johnny was pleased to see you, I bet.” I was sitting on the spare single bed in Toby’s room, watching him unpack.

  “Yeah. The first thing he said was ‘Did you bring the gun? I’d almost forgotten how Johnny is!”

  “Ha! So what did you tell him?”

  Toby shrugged. “I told him yes.”

  “Really? But… why, man?”

  “’Cause here it is.” He pulled a wide package onto the bed and tore a long strip off the brown paper wrapping. Revealed underneath was the trigger section of the picture on the box. “Wanna see before I take it over to him?”

  I was awed and unnerved in equal measure. “Toby?” I felt compelled to ask. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Mark was fascinated by the weapon. Laid out in a custom foam case that would have presidential bodyguards the world over checking their insurance was paid up, the sections of the rifle gleamed menacingly. A separate case held small (empty) compressed gas canisters, and a cocoon of bubble wrap protected a selection of slim, hollow darts.

  “You’ll fill them with Ketamine then?” Mark sounded excited. Poor bloke, he was being teased, to see such a tool arrive only to know that he’d be long gone before we used it.

  “Leonardo will have to figure all that out,” Toby admitted. He lowered the lid and snapped the case latches shut. “I had enough trouble figuring out how to get this through without worrying about transporting Class A narcotics!”

  “I’ve seen them used in zoos of course, but never actually fired one. Never had the need to.” Now Mark sounded wistful.

  Mel had a last word of advice for me before carting her bags out to the waiting taxi. “Don’t go shooting yourself in the foot! Ketamine isn’t nearly as fun as some people think!”

  I’d seen enough of its effect on monkeys. “Hell no! Though I wouldn’t want to be in the area if Jimmy was firing it. Thank God it doesn’t have a ‘fully automatic’ mode!”

  And then, with hugs all round and enough forced laughter to mask the real emotions, the two were gone from the centre, and gone from my world. Well, temporarily at least. I had a feeling I’d be seeing them again at some point.

  Of the three of us left, only Toby was in genuine high spirits. “It’s so good to be back!” he exclaimed. He cast a satisfied glance around his beloved refuge and we headed back inside.

  “It’ll be quiet for a while,” I warned him.

  “Sweet!” he replied. “So, Steve, you play chess?”

  An Ocelot Odyssey

  My penultimate day at the centre promised to be as exciting as any I’d had. Having busted a gut (not to mention fingernails, fingers, feet and toes, and a fair proportion of what lay in between) to get the new ocelot enclosure finished before I left, we were now rewarded with the glorious opportunity of transferring the animals to their new home. It was another beautiful morning on the farm, very nearly my last, and I was feeling positively poetic.

  Toby had been wandering around the refuge, casting a critical eye over our handiwork of the last few weeks. Mostly, he seemed impressed. In the comparatively short time he’d been gone close to a dozen new cages had sprung up – at least one of them ending his hopes of a kitchen garden in the process – and almost all of them were stuffed to the gills with screaming, cheeping, howling, snorting life. It must have looked to him like we’d been putting fertility drugs in the breakfast mash.

  When it came time to inspect our latest achievement I could hardly bear to admit to building it.

  “Nice door,” Toby commented, giving the outsized latch bolt a wiggle.

  “It’s the strongest bit,” I admitted. “And when we were back filling the buried section I dropped a full wheelbarrow on my hand!” I held up the back of my hand, where a wide band of angry pink skin was growing back. “And you know, that was more than a week ago and I haven’t been injured since!” I was justifiably proud of this, since it was not often I could make such a claim. It seemed fitting that I should end my amazing experience on such a high note. Santa Martha was a tough world, more so than I had ever expected, but I had conquered it nonetheless.

  “Don’t jinx it,” Toby warned me, pointing at the sun. “The day is yet young!”

  Johnny’s plan for the move was, as usual, an essay in subtlety. Catch the cats. Tranquillise them. Drive them to the new enclosure in the back of his truck. It glossed over some of the minor details, like how we were supposed to find six perfectly camouflaged, super-stealthy hunting cats in close to an acre of dense tropical foliage. And how we were supposed to avoid being eaten by them in the process.

  Okay, I’ll admit that that was a slight exaggeration. The cats ranged in size from not substantially bigger than a large house cat, to that of a decent-sized family dog. They weren’t going to be swallowing us whole or anything. But they were dangerous enough that volunteers weren’t normally encouraged to go inside without good reason. This time though, we were armed – by which I mean, Leonardo and Johnny were armed. Jimmy of course had a machete in his hand, but then Jimmy probably watched TV with a machete in his hand. It was more of a comforter than a tool, and disturbingly appropriate for it. For the rest of us, defence against a mauling was limited to a thick pair of welding gloves.

  I didn’t care. This was one of the moments it was all about for me; we were going to discover the secretive heart of the ocelot lair, to get right up close to these beautiful, elusive animals. And shoot them.

  I’d only been inside the enclosure for a handful of heartbeats when a rustle in the undergrowth announced our first visitor. Out came the friendly ocelot, recognisable less by the bright white spots above her eyes than by the way she stalked straight up to me, purring like a Harley Davidson, and started nuzzling against my legs.

  “Ahhh!” I bent down to pet her just as the dart slammed into her side with enough force to make her stagger sideways.

  “Jimmy! Fuck!” I yelled in shock.

  “See? It works now.” He handed the assembled dart gun back to Johnny.

  What with the gun’s instructions being in English, there had been some difficulty in assembling it in the long grass outside the enclosure. Toby’s explanation had been studded with words like ‘pneumático’ and the occasional cry of “Shit! Anyone see where that torsion spring went?” For some unfathomable reason I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the thing.

  By my feet the tame ocelot was already struggling to stay standing. I wanted to reach out to her, to apologise. She took a couple more woozy steps and collapsed on her side.

  “Ha! Easy!” Jimmy cawed.

  I felt a sudden urge to tranquillise him. It was a bloody good job no-one had trusted me with a gun.

  The next couple of cats were much harder to spot, and once spotted proved much harder targets. We retrieved a few darts from assorted trees and shrubs, none of which seemed much sleepier for their trouble.

  We floundered up and down the enclosure, climbing, falling and crawling more than walking. We saw nothing. Still, our noisy, complaining presence in the more remote environs of the enclosure was keeping the cats up close to the guns.

  One by one the cats were caug
ht. We carried them out of the enclosure, straining beneath the weight. They were so much heavier than they looked, especially after two hours of watching them effortlessly dodge dart after dart with breathtaking swiftness. It came to the point where the cats sleeping peacefully in the truck outnumbered the ones we were still stalking (or being stalked by). Toby and Johnny were watching over the sleepers anxiously while the rest of us searched frantically for the last two still at large. There was a shout from Jimmy – he’d scored another hit, and further up the paddock another ocelot was down.

  But before we could struggle up the sheer slope the cat had gotten up, shaken itself and loped off into the undergrowth. “Puta!” Jimmy was incensed. “Segundo vez! Puta madre!”

  Apparently this was the cat’s second dose and it was still up and running.

  “The Alpha male,” Leonardo surmised from where he stood scanning the paddock.

  “How much can he take?” I asked.

  “Difficult to tell,” he said. “The smaller ones, one dart is plenty, but with ketamine… sometimes, the animals, they can fight it. Sometimes they still wake up after a massive dose. It’s just not reliable. But, it’s what we have.”

  This was not the best news I could have heard. “What about the other cats then? The ones in the truck? When will they wake up?”

  “Yes, we will have to go soon. Take the first ones before they wake up, then come back for the others.”

  While we’d been chatting another cat had collapsed. It had been darted earlier, and like the alpha male was proving particularly resilient to the ketamine. When Steve closed in the cat was already sound asleep, having spent its last strength fighting the drug. Two darts were protruding from different sides of the inert form. Jimmy came up to help manoeuvre the cat out of the gate.

  “We’ll go now,” Leonardo decided. “Help Jimmy. Try to find the big one. We’ll be back soon.”

  And off they sped, a truck full of sleeping cats and hyper-tense humans. The road was rugged to say the least, and I winced in sympathy as the truck hit a bump. If the ketamine started to wear off on the first customers, the back of that truck was not going to be a fun place to be.

  So that left one cat, and two of us. And one of us was Jimmy. I felt distinctly outnumbered. Nevertheless, fortune favours the brave. What it does to idiots I’m not sure, so I wanted to be as far from Jimmy as possible when he found out. I set out again to scout the now familiar territory around the top of the enclosure. Since most of the cats had been darted around there, it seemed likely that it contained a den of sorts. Which was pretty lucky; if they’d chosen to build a den at the bottom of the enclosure we’d have be hauling their shaggy asses up the mountainside until tomorrow morning.

  A warning growl stopped me in my tracks. It was close. I scanned the dense undergrowth at eye level, spinning slowly on the spot. Stupid! Unless the cat was stood on his hind legs, balancing on tiptoe on top of a box, he wasn’t going to be at eye level. I swung back around checking lower, and there, not two metres from my feet, was our errant moggie. He was lying down in the middle of a bush; body flat but head up and staring right at me. Magnificent! It was the only word to describe the sight of such a creature at such close range. He had a dart in his side, and was obviously feeling the effects. This then would be the most dangerous time to be around him – he was probably scared out of his mind, hallucinating crazily yet still alert enough to tear me a new arsehole. I did nothing. Over the next few minutes the cat’s eyes began to lose focus. He rested his head on the ground for progressively longer periods of time, blinking heavily, panting and twitching. Around the time he lay down for the last time Jimmy crunched through the bushes to join me.

  “He’s sleeping now?” He asked.

  “Not very much! I think still very dangerous.”

  Jimmy snorted his opinion of that and strode over to the inert form. Prodded it none too gently with the toe of his boot. He grinned back at me. “Yeah, very dangerous!”

  I gave it up. After three months I had finally realised that there was no way to win with Jimmy. Maybe because after all was said and done, he was the genuine article. Immensely strong. Apparently fearless. Intensely annoying. He had the ego of several ancient Greek heroes all rolled into the body of one weather-beaten dwarf. But you always knew where you stood with Jimmy. I’d impressed him enough times to take any rancour out of his taunts. He would never view me as an equal, but then neither would I him – he could kick my ass in a machete fight (with both arms tied behind his back and a bag over his head) but he’d never be much for scrabble. It was awfully hypocritical of me to complain about his inflated sense of superiority, and I’d certainly had my share of jokes at his expense. A bizarre thought was occurring to me. I was going to miss Jimmy. Now that really was a surprise.

  The cat was fast asleep. Jimmy rolled him over to retrieve not one but two other darts from the flank he’d been lying on, making three darts in total. That much ketamine would turn Chuck Norris into a drooling vegetable.

  All we had to do now was wait. We moved him out of the enclosure between us, then Jimmy headed back in to fetch his weapons. I stood by the cat and watched him pant in his sleep, eyes wide open and unblinking. Man it was creepy!

  The others were taking their sweet time. It felt like I’d been waiting forever for the truck to return, probably because I was so nervous that the cat might wake up. I had no idea whether or not Leonardo and co. had gotten the other cats across the farm in time. He’d certainly seemed concerned when they set off. How long could this stuff be relied upon to keep a cat like Shere Kahn here sleeping like a kitten? Three darts it had taken to put him down. If he came to before the others got back… I really didn’t want to be responsible for letting a semi-comatose cat get away from me. Not on my last shift.

  So gently, ever so gently, I rolled his head into my arms. I slid my arms around his body and rested his head on my shoulder. Then holding him tightly against me I stood up. He wasn’t that heavy after all! At least, that’s what I resolved to tell the others. I grunted at Jimmy, who had watched my efforts without comment. Obviously he wanted to stay with the guns.

  And staggering slightly, I set off down the path towards the new enclosure. With every step the cat became heavier and I recognised a serious flaw in my plan. If I didn’t make it all the way, the returning truck would find me standing halfway down the road for no apparent reason with the poor cat lying in the dirt at my feet. Then I’d just look like a dick head.

  Which perhaps would serve me right. I tightened my grip and accelerated.

  It must have presented a strange image; as the truck full of people rounded a bend in the track they caught sight of me, shuffling at full-tilt towards them, with an enormous jungle cat draped over me like an exotic shawl. My knees were sagging under the weight of the beast and I staggered the last few steps to where the truck skidded to a halt. Toby was there instantly, and another three or four sets of hands plunged in from all sides, all grabbing hold of a leg, an ear, or a handful of fur. The ocelot suddenly became weightless in my arms, then rose above me into the truck. I scrambled up after it and sank down gratefully with my back against the cab.

  Then they dropped the cat back onto me, which I wasn’t expecting. They’d all assumed that I was crawling into place ready to take the critter back off them to hold onto for the journey. I on the other hand had figured that my part in this struggle was finally over, and so I was distinctly unprepared for being flattened under half a tonne of still life. As the wind rushed out of me I made a sound not unlike a moose approaching orgasm.

  “Jeez-us! You alright mate?” Toby’s concern was touching, if belated. I didn’t have enough air in my lungs to answer him, so I concentrated on trying to breath past the cat on my stomach.

  “Let’s go!” He shouted in earnest.

  Everyone else piled back into the truck, the engine gunned, and we sped away, bouncing down the track at breakneck speed.

  “Woah!” I gasped, “Slower!” I waved
at Toby for emphasis, but he was already thinking along the same lines. He slapped the car roof and bawled “Lento, lento!”

  The car slowed, which was a mercy as every good bump saw the chunky cat propelled fractionally skywards, only to slam back down onto me an instant later. My arse was being driven through the floor of the truck – sooner or later one or the other had to give.

  Then we hit a pot hole. Sprawled across me, the ocelot felt the ferocious impact and twitched in his sleep. His paws flexed and his eyes slid into focus for a second before he was lost to the drugs again.

  “Shit! Toby! He’s waking up!” I wheezed.

  “LENTO!” Toby all but screamed, and the car speed dropped another notch. I managed to haul myself back into a seated position, cradling the cat across my knees. Its head now rested on my chest, which made it all the more alarming the next time its eyes moved. For a heartbeat it was looking right at me, and I swear I could feel its malice. its teeth, inch long daggers, were less than a hand-span from my throat.

  “Guys, he’s really waking up…” There was genuine fear in my voice.

  “It’s okay,” hissed Toby, “we’re here.”

  People scrambled out of the truck as I scooted forwards. Leonardo was already there with a huge wire cage, fumbling with the door as I cradled the Ocelot to my chest, shifted to a crouch, and jumped down from the tailgate.

  The impact of my heels on the solid ground sent a shock wave through my body.

  It also woke the ocelot.