The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  Text copyright © 2021 by Laura Coleman

  All rights reserved.

  “She Unnames Them” by Ursula K. Le Guin was published in the January 21, 1985, print edition of the New Yorker magazine.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542022194 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542022193 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542022187 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542022185 (paperback)

  Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino

  Interior map by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  Unless otherwise noted, all photos and illustrations are courtesy of the author.

  First edition

  For anyone who has ever loved the parque.

  And for Wayra.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  MAP

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm—that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

  —Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Pumas are known by many names. Perhaps because they once ranged across the full expanse of the Americas, from Canada to the edges of Tierra del Fuego. Florida panther, cougar, mountain lion, catamount, painter, mountain screamer, red tiger, cuguacuarana, ghost cat . . . It is alleged that they have over eighty recorded names, more than any other animal. But for me, in Bolivia, I knew them simply as “puma” (pronounced poo-ma).

  Most of the names in this book have been changed. Some of the characters are composites, and some timelines and events have been altered to fit within a reasonably sized book, although most are as I remember them. The organisation and the place, I have not changed. Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi is a Bolivian NGO, dedicated to offering victims of wildlife trafficking a second opportunity in life. The sanctuary is Ambue Ari. Both are kept alive by people with more strength than it’s possible to put into words.

  PART ONE

  It is 2007 and I’m twenty-four years old. I am not small, although not really large either. About five foot seven, with a crooked nose, boobs that give me backache and feet that flap. I am a bit lost, for no reason I understand. I’ve been single most of my life. I eat and smoke when I’m nervous, and I’m nervous a lot. My parents are psychologists. I have a sister and two brothers, all very successful. I’m from England and I’m an art history graduate who doesn’t know that monkeys can make jokes or be depressed. I don’t know what a puma looks like.

  “Gringa. ¡Aquí!”

  We’ve been rumbling along in a rickety bus for I don’t know how long, five hours perhaps.

  I rub my sleeve against the cracked window and peer through a streak in the condensation. I see only jungle.

  “¿En serio?” I can’t keep the fear out of my voice.

  “¡Sí! El parque.”

  The woman next to me hauls her child off my lap, and a man—already climbing over the rows of seats, over other squashed passengers, chickens, babies, some kind of exotic bird and sacks of rice—lays claim to my precious inches of space. Then I’m standing by myself on an empty, straight road in the middle of the Bolivian Amazon, watching the bus lights fade. There’s a soft haze that makes the thin, broken tarmac float like water. Tall grasses and trees, green, purple, orange and gold, overhang the banks. There are leaves of every shade until everything seems to melt into a looming vastness. It smells hot, as if the air is too tight, and I struggle to breathe. The sky is blue but the edges are already turning reddish gold. It’ll be night soon. From inside the bus, I’d thought there would be a resounding silence out here, but I was wrong. The jungle hums, speaking no language I’ve heard before.

  I slap at a mosquito on my neck and my hand comes back bloody. Another buzzes around my ear. I wave my arms, whimpering, spinning on the spot. The jungle is everywhere and, as I turn and see a monkey sitting on a signpost, I leap back with a yelp. He’s the size of a small child, hunched, with thick ginger fur. The signpost clearly says NO MONKEYS ON THE ROAD! in bright-red letters. He just stares at me. Yeah, so. What are you going to do about it? I’m not going to do anything. It’s about to get dark and I’m on my own in the jungle. I feel faint. Then I hear something else over the jungle hum. It’s a terrible rumbling, and a huge black pig suddenly catapults out of the undergrowth. She raises her head—a red bra clasped between her teeth—and locks eyes with me. I’m about to turn and run when a man bursts out after her, pulling sticks from his hair.

  “Panchita!”

  The pig spins and hurtles away. I hear the echo of her hooves until the green haze sucks her up and she is gone.

  There’s a forest—not even a forest, a small, scraggly wood—where I grew up. Once when I was eight, I tried to spend the night in it. My dad walked me there and left me, as requested. Later I found out that he didn’t leave at all, he settled himself around the corner with a packet of biscuits and a flask of hot tea. But I’d curled up in my sleeping bag with the alien scent of mud and moss in my nose, the hot thrill of fear coursing through my blood. I lasted ten minutes before I ran back home crying, my sleeping bag trailing under my arm, firm in the belief that the trees that crackled and brushed above my head were full of monsters.

  “¡Bienvenidos!” The man in front of me grins cheerfully. “Agustino. Soy el veterinario aquí.” He looks me up and down as if he’s not at all surprised to see me here on this road with this monkey, the acrid scent of a disappearing pig still in the air. As if random foreigners turn up here all the time to be greeted by such creatures. I don’t. I don’t turn up in places like this.

  Backpacking in Bolivia for three months was meant to give me the perspective I needed after quitting the latest in a long string of jobs. I felt like I’d been given a map of what my life should be, but I was off course. Too many jobs I’d quit, hoping each one would point me to the path of success. This last one, marketing at a high-profile travel company, had been the final straw. Backpacking would sort me out, surely. I planned to return transformed, like a millennial Elizabeth Gilbert, a person who rides roller coasters with arms in the air, makes good decisions, goes on dates with abandon, and knows what she wants to do with her life. A person who loves office parties, who doesn’t binge peanut butter at midnight on the floor of the kitchen and then can’t leave the house because she can’t find anything to wear that doesn’t make her look fat. Who turns up on the side of the road in a random place and doesn’t worry about it. Who can be a girlfriend and will at some point be a wife, a mother, and a successful career woman. Everything that I am not, but think I want to be.

  But it’s two months into my trip, and I’m tired of the shared dorm rooms that stin
k of beer and cold vomit. I’m still shy of the fellow backpackers who try to make friends and I struggle with the contrived tourist sites that sell llama steaks for more than the cost of a flight. It was at one of these that I overheard someone saying that if you went north, you could hitch a ride on a local boat off the path of the Lonely Planet. You could swing in a hammock, watch pink river dolphins and drink coconut milk. That sounded nice, I thought. So north I went and spent two weeks sitting on a muddy riverbank. Waiting for a boat that never came. Sunburnt, lonely, bloated from all the empanadas, washed out by the rains, I finally left to find an internet café where I could change my flight. I was giving up. I wanted to go home. But it was in that internet café, where—over cold pizza, sweaty beer and a pack of cigarettes—I picked up a flyer for a Bolivian animal welfare charity with a cheerful-looking monkey on the front. It said they took volunteers. So for no reason other than a desperate lack of purpose, and my inner voice goading me not to give up quite yet, here I am. I don’t even know what this place is, other than that there are monkeys and they’re supposed to look cheerful.

  This monkey does not look cheerful. He’s crawling towards us, grabbing Agustino’s trousers and pulling himself up by the seams until he’s cradled morosely in the man’s arms. I’d thought the vet was around my age but now I’m not sure. He’s got lines around his eyes, which are dark brown and gentle, and black hair that is wild and unkempt. He’s short, a little overweight, with a round face that I can’t help but like. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a piece of cheese. The monkey howls with delight, grabs the cheese and stuffs it into his mouth. Agustino looks at me sheepishly. He kisses the top of the monkey’s furry head. “Coco not meant to have cheese, but only thing that get him off road. It is too dangerous for him here. Too many cars.”

  I gaze back and forth down the empty road, and nod weakly. The threat of too many cars seems ridiculous. We are at the end of the universe, and even the tiny, local bus that I arrived on is a distant memory.

  “Come!” Agustino sets off at a quick trot, swerving onto a thin, winding path. Coco climbs up to hang tightly around Agustino’s shoulders. As he bobs up and down, small hairy fingers gripping Agustino’s collar, he blows a long, loud, and deeply depressed raspberry.

  “Yeah,” I mutter under my breath, “you and me both.”

  It’s heavy and humid, the air hazy as we vanish, just like the pig did, under the canopy. I trot to catch up, my rucksack slamming against my shoulder blades. I repeatedly brush my hands across my face as things buzz up my nose, into my mouth and my ears. Branches, sharp and insistent, catch my hair, bloody my skin. The track is dark. I can hear not just the pitch of mosquitoes but birds too, bugs and crickets, something ominously large in the undergrowth. The noises close in and I can smell dirt, damp, rot.

  We walk maybe five minutes, although it feels like much more, before Agustino finally stops and turns.

  “Welcome to el parque!”

  We’ve come out on the edge of a clearing, surrounded by huts and dilapidated buildings. A few people mill about, some locals, some foreigners, a splatter of mud, clothes and gumboots thick with dirt. Agustino starts waving his arms and calling, high-pitched and cheerful, “Samita!”

  A girl peels off from the others and starts towards us. She, also, is carrying a monkey. He is a twin to Coco, although where Coco has an impressive red beard, this one has no beard at all, as if it’s been chopped off around his chin. As soon as the girl is close enough, Coco launches off Agustino. Somehow the girl manages to catch him in her stride and, as the two monkeys jostle jealously for space, grunting angrily at each other, she doesn’t break pace. She just leans forwards, holding out her hand.

  “I’m Samantha. Sammie.”

  The smell coming off her is phenomenal.

  I’m making a broad assessment. My situation is alarming. The monkeys are wondrous, but . . . there’s an overwhelming smell, a bit like a wet T-shirt that’s been wrapped in fish and left to fester in forty-degree heat. And there are other animals, too. The monstrous pig is spread-eagled across the mud, snoring, oblivious to the people having to step over her. I know it’s the same pig because the lacy bra is next to her like bounty. There’s a racoon-type creature making a loud, aggressive beeping noise, his tail at a right angle to the ground, working hard to dig underneath the door of one of the buildings. It’s also the way the jungle just hangs over everything, shutting out any semblance of light or space. I haven’t come far from the road. The sky was turning red there, now I cannot see the sky. The air is dark and dusky—as if I could brush my arm through it and it might move like smoke.

  “I . . . uh . . . ,” I mumble.

  Sammie raises her eyebrows. She’s a foreigner, like me—American, I think. She’s about my age. She’s short and a little stout. I think she might be pretty. It’s hard to tell. The mud is everywhere, caked into her thick clumps of hair, her clothes, her skin. There’s a rusty, wicked-looking machete hanging from her belt. She rubs sweat off her forehead with her stale, wet sleeve and laughs. She’s got a manic laugh. It reverberates off the trees, making her seem bigger than she is.

  “Don’t worry,” she tells me.

  “I’m not worried,” I say quickly. It’s a lie. I’m very worried.

  “Do you have a headlamp?” she says over her shoulder as she starts to walk, beckoning for me to follow. “We’ve got no electricity, no hot water.”

  What do these people do, I wonder frantically, without electricity and hot water?

  The two monkeys are clinging to her neck, and they are eyeing me dubiously.

  “La Paz’ll be your dorm,” she says, helping me put down my rucksack by a long brick building that might have been, at some point, white. There are four doors, peeling with old green paint, and hung with signs. SANTA CRUZ. LA PAZ. BENI. POTOSÍ.

  “La Paz is a nice one,” she continues as I rummage for my torch. “Only three people in there at the moment. Showers.” She points to a wooden shack just visible under the trees. “Flushing toilets, but don’t use them if you know what’s good for you.” She makes air quotes around the word flushing, and Coco grunts as if in agreement. She looks down at him affectionately. I wonder how long she’s been here. Years? It said two weeks was the minimum on the flyer . . .

  “We call this the patio.” She optimistically indicates the clearing, which is more of a muddy sort of crossroads, the pathways lined with loose brickwork. In the centre are a few sad-looking benches and a lopsided standing tap. Sammie points off to the side. “Comedor, where we eat.” A rectangular wooden construction, with no walls, just green netting, presumably to keep out the bugs. Candles have been lit inside, spreading dancing shadows across the ground.

  “Behind the dorms is Agustino’s clinic,” Sammie continues. “If you get injured, go there.”

  “To the vet?”

  “Agustino’s a whizz with a scalpel.” Sammie laughs, loudly. I flinch. Just one night, I say to myself. I just need to survive one night. I can leave in the morning.

  “If I shouldn’t use the flushing toilet . . . where should I . . . um . . .” I trail off, blushing red as the monkeys’ fur.

  She turns and points off into the darkness. “Long drop.” Then, leaning against the wall for balance, she casually lifts one of her gumboots, tilts it upside down, and a long stream of brown water pours out onto the ground. I stare at it, horrified.

  She winks impishly. “Swamp.”

  My mouth falls open. “Swamp?”

  Then, with a wave, she just wanders off. The monkeys turn their heads to watch me, their eyes shining in the now near-pitch darkness. The gloom is so thick it’s like I’ve been swallowed. For a moment, I stand alone in the screaming darkness. In the mass of whirrs and pulses and beats, I cannot quite work out what to do. Then my stomach makes an unpleasant lurch and, with little option, I set off recklessly down the path-not-really-a-path that Sammie indicated, a slightly less-dark space between other dark spaces in the trees. My torch beam
hits branches, making them shine white like ribs, like dead bodies stacked and slotted on top of each other.

  Within a few minutes, I’m surrounded on all sides by thick foliage. The “path” is a dead end, the long drop a shed at the end of it. I drag open the rickety door, my heart thudding, pull down my jeans and hover over the cracked seat of what is less toilet, more infinity hole. The smell is so bad I gag. There’s a noisy plop as what I expunge hits something soupy, far below. My knees hit the back of the door and I read the message that’s been scrawled on it. El lugar perfecto para meditar, pensar, soñar, amar, compartir, escuchar, hablar y estar. This is the perfect place to meditate, think, dream, love, share, listen, talk and be. I snort. Someone has a sense of humour. I think my relationship with insects is pretty normal. I don’t like them. I once locked my bedroom door and slept on the sofa for a week because a house spider crawled across my pillow. But now on the edge of this seat is a mass of grey cobwebs. Lines of termites etch the walls. I turn, not meaning to, but I can’t stop myself. I look down the hole. There’s movement. Writhing. Shit and maggots. I scream. A spider the size of a teacup is crawling lazily up the seat, black with yellow fangs.

  I’m out the door, my jeans not even done up. When I get back to the patio, thankfully there’s no one there to watch me pant, folded over painfully as I nurse a stitch in my side. It brings back memories of school, when we’d be made to run desperate laps around the block, high-vis vests shining stark against the wintry evenings. It was an ambitious all-girls school, and these runs were a chance for us to assess who was at the highest level of Darwinian survival of the fittest—training for later, when we’d compete again as lawyers, doctors, city folk, commuters with soft hands and softer briefcases. Even then, I knew this type of competition might not be for me. I kept on trying though, going round and round, my face the colour of a tomato and stitches searing up my side, as girls giggled and the cold English damp got into my bones.