The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

“Was he on the road?”

  I nod. Coco’s eyes flick away. Sammie holds him a little tighter.

  “You’re going to get hit by a car,” she whispers.

  “Suicidal monkey.” Jane leans back tiredly against one of the bunks. “Just what we need.”

  Coco continues to look down at his toes. There is mud caked under one of his nails and he picks it off slowly, then puts it in his mouth.

  “You can’t . . .” I hesitate, not sure how to phrase this. “Put them in a huge enclosure, rather than . . .” I look around uselessly and trail off. “Or release them?”

  Jane laughs bitterly. “We’ve got no money for a huge enclosure. No people to build it. New animals turn up all the time and each one needs a home. Right now, this feels like the best we can do.” She stares at Faustino, who sticks his tongue out at her. “They’ll never be able to be released. They don’t know how to be monkeys, and we don’t have the resources to teach them.” Then she turns to look at me. “Wayra will never be released either. None of the cats will.”

  I stare at a dried-up pile of poo behind the door. I can’t look away. Its edges are starting to crust over, turning the same earthy colour as the compacted dirt floor. In some places, I’m not sure what is floor and what is faeces. Wayra seemed so wild. Surely if they just opened the cage door . . .

  “Where did she come from?” I finally ask.

  Jane shrugs, turning around and digging her chin into the edge of the bunk. Faustino crawls over to her and lays one long arm across her shoulders. She reaches round, holding his hand in hers. “She was taken from her mum as a cub,” she says eventually, her voice dull, as if she’s told this story many times. Too many times. I wonder then how many volunteers like me she’s had to train. “Hunters would have shot her mum and smuggled her into the city to be sold on the black market. A street artist bought her, kept her in a little box in a loud, dusty place, and made her perform tricks. Baby Wayra. I just . . .” Jane visibly grits her teeth. “In the wild, she would have stayed with her mum until she was two. Instead she was kept on a chain, whipped and malnourished. Taught nothing about how to protect herself. It was only when she grew too aggressive that she was dumped here. She was ten months old.”

  I stare at Jane. I ask, my voice catching, “How old is she now?”

  “Almost four.”

  There’s a long silence as I think about this. I’m trying to think of something to say, but all I can do is imagine the puma that I saw today small and scared in a little box. I’ve been to zoos before. I don’t remember worrying about it. Worrying where the animals came from. But now I do worry. I start to feel sick. Jane turns back around with a sigh and looks at me.

  “You did well today.”

  I did well? Where was she, in some parallel universe? She smiles, the hazel in her eyes catching the candle that she’s balanced on the end of the bed.

  “You seemed calm, at least,” she says.

  I don’t tell her how much of a lie this is. I look down. There are blisters bubbling around the tops and edges of my toes, which have been getting bigger as the day has worn on. Now they look less like toes and more like pasty, overinflated buoyancy devices.

  “Oscar really needs to leave,” she continues. “He’s got a job lined up at home. We’ve been trying to find someone to replace him but . . . Wayra’s not the easiest cat.” Sammie snorts, and Jane shoots her a glare. “She needs people who understand her. The other cats . . . most are really happy here. She’s not. She’s . . .”

  “Special.” Sammie grins.

  The door bangs and Harry comes in. “Yeah.” He laughs. “Real special.” He’s still barefoot, spreading a line of mud and water across the ground.

  Jane glares at him. Then she leans towards me, saying quietly but not quietly enough for the others not to hear. “Wayra hates Harry.”

  Harry rolls his eyes. As he starts to pull off his trousers, he mutters under his breath, like a curse. “Wayra volunteers.” Then he glances at me. “Careful you don’t go crazy like this one.”

  Jane picks up an old boot and throws it at him. He’s too fast and the boot misses, hitting the wall with a dull thud. There’s silence for a moment, and then Coco and Faustino explode. Harry lets out a muffled curse as both monkeys leap onto his back, grunts of righteous indignation filling the little room. I fling myself out of the way and am about to yell for help when I realise that Harry is laughing. Sammie leaps in too and one of the monkeys goes for her, pulling her ponytail before jumping onto someone’s mosquito net like a trampoline, swinging off into the rafters and howling. Soon they are all careening around the room, pulling down nets, pulling hair, pulling beards, throwing missiles with their teeth bared.

  I rush for the door, managing to leave before I get squashed or bitten or slapped around the face. But when I’m safe, I stand for a while on the doorstep, listening to the grunts, the crashes and the laughter. When I was three, a friend of my mum’s, training to be a psychologist, needed an observation subject. She picked me, and much later I read the file she’d made. I’d been the shy child who’d played on her own, not quite understanding why everyone else was so loud. And even now, when I’m on the back foot, it’s my default position. I’d come travelling on my own, not because I thought I was brave but because sometimes—right or wrong—it feels safer to play on my own. But as I listen now, on the other side of this door, I think their game sounds wonderful. I’m too tired, too physically shattered, too itchy and my blisters too painful. The idea of going back in seems as remote as peeling off my own skin, but even so—I stay. Just listening. And when the tiredness finally gets me and I stumble back to my own dorm, to my own bed where there are no monkeys and no shit on the floor, I fall asleep to the sounds of their laughter.

  The next morning, I’m told that everyone works for an hour before breakfast, before going out to our assigned animals. For me, that’s Wayra. But right now, it’s still only six thirty, and I have work to do. My first task involves caring for one of the groups of animals that live around camp. There are birds in the aviary, for example, and more jungle pigs like Panchita—peccaries, I’ve been told they’re called, chanchos here in Bolivia. There are two baby chanchos who live in an enclosure behind the comedor. Then there are the howler monkeys, Coco and Faustino, and Teanji the tejón . . .

  I’m placed with a shiny-bald French drill sergeant called Gustave and six South American ostriches. Gustave calls them pìos, which is what Mila and Agustino call them, he tells me. In English, they’re rheas, in Spanish, ñandú. Their actual names, though, are Matt, Damon, Ben, Affleck, Patrick and Petunia. Petunia, the largest and most intimidating, despite my attempts to ingratiate myself, quickly develops a dislike for me and follows me wherever I go, trying to peck the buttons off my shirt. Their breakfast is a vat of vegetables, which I have to grate meticulously in a cockroach-and-mosquito-infested shack Gustave calls the animal kitchen. The grater is rusty and soon there’s more blood and knuckle skin in the carrots than actual carrot.

  “It’s a good thing,” I say, trying to laugh, “you told me that pìos eat meat as well as carrots.”

  Gustave’s face stays completely immobile. I quickly stop laughing.

  He shows me how to run the gauntlet with the food, dodging giant dinosaur birds while protecting my eyes and my buttons. They have wings like sails and curl their long necks backwards, like coiling rattlesnakes, before hissing in my face. My borrowed gumboots have holes in them, soaking my socks within seconds, and Petunia’s shit is beetroot purple, liquid as bad cow pats. The enclosure is enormous, large enough so that when I am inside it, I can’t see any of the edges and I get lost, panicking because I have Matt or Damon on my heels and I can’t find my way out. The birds in the aviary next door seem to find this hilariously funny. One macaw, Big Red, cackles with laughter, and his sidekick, a little blue parrot, screams, “Don’t do that!” whenever my boots gets stuck in the mud. Which they do, a lot, because it’s ankle deep and sucks and burps like the Bog
of Eternal Stench. I can’t believe how many different shades of mud there are. It blows my mind as I stare at the ground, trying to shovel poo, but the spade Gustave has given me is broken, cracked with no handle.

  “Will I . . . ,” I ask Gustave tentatively as I hang it up in the tool shed, a building almost as useless as the spade itself, barely a lean-to with sad, rusty equipment that—like everything—has seen better days. “Be working with the pìos for my whole month?”

  He laughs for the first time, spreading his lips widely to show strong, white teeth. The top of his head gleams in the morning sun. “You no like pìos?”

  Then he just wanders off, whistling infuriatingly, pointing me in the direction of a chalkboard, which, I’m told, is where I’ll find my second task, a caretaking job that rotates daily. Laura and Bobby: baños. I read this with a sinking, sick feeling akin to how I felt this morning when I put on my left boot and my toes met something soft and squishy: a scaly toad the size of two fists.

  Bobby is the guitar player. I’ve heard him waxing lyrical about this place so much that I’ve already taken to avoiding him, his guitar, his corkscrew-curly ferally wild hair and the T-shirt he’s been wearing since I arrived—by the smell of it that he’s been wearing since last Christmas—which says brightly: “SMILE!”

  “Yeah,” he drawls, holding a bucket of shit-covered toilet paper and leaning against the wall in the fashion of someone who has all the time in the world to chat, while I am desperate to get these baños cleaned as quickly as possible so that I can Just. Sit. Down. “I work with Rupi.” I haven’t asked. I don’t care who he works with. “He’s a jaguar. Jaguarupi.” Bobby laughs, puffing out his chest as if I should be impressed. I am, kind of, but I’ll never admit it. I stare at the lumpy pile of poo I’m scraping off the floor. Coco watches with concern from up in the rafters. I think—I hope—that it’s his but I can’t be sure.

  “Rupi’s my best friend.”

  I nod politely. The poo oozes a little as I try to pick it up.

  Bobby’s eyes focus somewhere in the middle distance. “I love him.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I don’t know who I was before I came here.” He hesitates, then laughs out loud again, so loudly Coco jumps. Bobby starts to wheeze and slaps his thigh. “I mean, I was a carpenter. Working for ‘the man,’ you know.” He laughs again. “But like . . . you know. Now I can’t imagine a life without Rupi.”

  “Right.” The poo is nearly off. I smile and nod.

  “It’s just his energy. He’s a jaguar, but he’s patient. He could kill us. He weighs ninety kilos!” Again, laughter. Slapping his thigh. “But he doesn’t. He’s so happy to let us walk with him. Proud almost, you know. Dignified. Have they told you he grew up in camp?”

  I look up. “In camp?”

  “In camp.” He grins. “There wasn’t anything here then. The dorms were the first things they built when Nena and Juan Carlos bought this land. They’re the guys who founded this whole thing. In the nineties, with two rescued spider monkeys, two capuchins and a squirrel monkey, they started their first parque in the cloud forest near Cochabamba. It was the first-ever sanctuary for wild animals in Bolivia. Then in 2002, they raised the money to buy this land. There were only a few volunteers then. And López, the kid who walks around in sunglasses . . .”

  I nod. I’ve seen López—he’s about sixteen—sitting on the camp motorbike, wearing cool black sunglasses, his arms crossed imposingly over his wiry chest. Mila told me he used to live on the other side of the country, but when his dad died, he had to move away to live with his sister and find a job. He needed to support his mum. It was when he was looking for work that he met Nena and Juan Carlos. He was eleven. They gave him books and helped him go to school. Eventually, he started living here, and learned how to work with the animals.

  “Well,” Bobby continues. “Rupi was one of the first cats to come. He and López grew up together, roaming free with Panchita. That was before there was the money to build enclosures. Everybody just wanted to rescue animals, you know, and give them a happy life?” He puts a lot of emphasis on this last word, swinging the toilet paper bucket much too close to my face. “Imagine it!” Bobby sighs dramatically, leaning back against the wall. “A baby jaguar, a kleptomaniac pig and an eleven-year-old. Best friends.”

  I can’t imagine it. It’s a true fairy story.

  “Does he remember him? Rupi?” I ask quietly.

  Bobby grins. “I didn’t know jaguars could smile, before I saw Rupi and López together.”

  When I was eleven, we had a class guinea pig called Agatha. I was terrified of her. She peed on me and bit me, and I dreaded the days when Mrs. Connell would carelessly drop her into my lap. I didn’t even consider that Agatha probably feared those forced, chilling encounters just as much as I did. Slowly, I chuck the poo into the bushes and watch as it settles, smeared, across the heart of a pretty pink flower. Vaguely, I wonder what would’ve happened to me, if I’d been brought here at the age of eleven and been faced with a jaguar. But then I look up into the blinding blue sky and I just think tiredly, trying to wipe beads of shit off my hand: Only twenty-nine more days to go.

  After breakfast, back at Wayra’s cage, I’m too hot, too tired, too bitten and too sore to do anything other than what Jane tells me to do.

  “Rub patuju over your face.”

  She points at the hard paddle-shaped leaves around the clearing.

  OK.

  “It’ll make her like you.”

  I do it. She probably could have told me to take off all my clothes and rub myself in peanut butter, and I would have done that too. The patuju sticks to my clammy skin, stinking of me. When I poke the leaves through the fence, though, in some bizarre parody of a mating ritual, Wayra hisses from up on her high platform, her “throne,” and I drop the leaves, pulling my hand out with a yelp.

  When I glare at Jane, she just shrugs.

  The days find a rhythm, a pattern that I hate but also cling to. I wake in a pool of sweat. My back aches and I get perpetual tension headaches from grinding my teeth through short snatches of sleep. I pull on the same rank clothes. I grate. I clean poo. I sweep whatever I’m told to sweep, then eat breakfast alone while listening to Mila reel off daily anuncios, mostly toilet and/or faeces related. Don’t let Faustino steal people’s underwear and then bury it behind the baños, don’t let Coco spy on people in the baños, don’t leave the door to the baños open or you’ll find Panchita bathing in shit and Faustino eating soap with a beard of white bubbles.

  I’m dizzy with exhaustion on the walks out to Wayra. Every trail, every step, every turn of my head is a new experience that I’m so unused to, my senses so unprepared, that part of me just wants to curl up and never open my eyes again. The other part never wants to shut them.

  I watch Jane or Oscar clip Wayra on, I wait for her to lie down in some arbitrary spot that makes no sense to me, I flinch at her unpredictable, totally unfathomable growls and find myself losing my mind with I don’t know what—anticipation, awe, respect—when she’s silent. I spend five, six, seven, eight hours whilst she sleeps being bitten by ants, poisonous caterpillars, mosquitoes, horse-flies the size of acorns. I pray that Wayra doesn’t notice me, particularly when I have to creep away to shit in the dirt, my stomach a seething mess of anxiety, bacteria and water, and then I leave at the end of the day disappointed that she hasn’t noticed me. I shower with water so cold it burns. I watch my blisters swell, then pop in a mess of blood and pus. I hobble down the road and watch the stars fly. Fireworks that have lost their colours, let off ten thousand million miles away. I crawl into bed, trying and failing to find a comfortable dip among the lumps. I listen to rats getting up to important, busy work. I consider packing my things but just the idea of this is too exhausting. And so I escape into an old, mouldy copy of The Lord of the Rings, which I have found like a gift underneath one of the tables in the comedor.

  Jane has said Wayra needs time to trust people, but from where
I stand, Wayra doesn’t care one way or the other whether I’m there or not. Sometimes she gets swept up with her walks, sometimes running like that first day for a few moments, or for a few minutes, but mostly she’s just pissed off. She’s pissed off in the cage and she’s pissed off outside of it. She’s pissed off when she’s eating, she’s pissed off when she’s licking. She’s even, sometimes, pissed off when she’s sleeping. And I’m nothing, just a tiny dot stuck amongst other dots, trying to breathe in a place that makes no sense, that lets eleven-year-olds hang out with jaguars, that lets people like me hang out with pumas, pigs hang out with monkeys, birds hang out with tejones, in a forest that has no end, until of course it does end, when it reaches some village, or town, or city, then the mountains, the Andes on one edge, the salt deserts on another, and I suppose the ocean after that, then the stars.

  I’ve been in the parque five days and the only thing that’s keeping me standing is the guarantee of a half-day off, just a half-day, once a week on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s a magical, wonderful-sounding thing. On top of that, I’ve been promised that on Sunday, I’ll be assigned another pre-breakfast animal task. No more pìos! See ya, Petunia! I have no more buttons left and I’m having to tie my shirts closed with string.

  It’s Friday, work has finished and I’m on my customary trip to the long drop. Shadows criss-cross the ground and Sammie is chatting with Harry, leaning against one of the shower blocks. Harry’s carrying a candle, wrapped in nothing but a towel, oblivious to the mosquitoes hungry for his blood in the early evening.

  There’s a social hierarchy in the parque, and it didn’t take me long to figure it out. The staff are all Bolivian: Mila, Agustino, the cook—Doña Lucia (who travels in every day by motorbike)—and the kids (youngest to oldest: Osito, Juana, Germáncito, Mariela and López). During mealtimes, they locate themselves on the front table in the comedor. They chat in rapid Spanish, or Quechua, and are generally very intimidating.