The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  She gives a sigh and stands, turning her face away and dropping into a yoga stretch—a cat pose, then a slow, deliberate cow. I’m at the top of the rise, where over many days I’ve carved out a spot just for me. I can see the patted-down outline of my body. Wayra looks off into the shadows and I think she’ll settle down again in the shade, but once she’s stretched, she circles and pads up to the top, where she places herself down with another sigh next to me.

  My heart is beating so loudly she must be able to hear it. The scarlet-and-green hummingbird, collecting nectar from the flowers, must be able to hear it. Wayra has never sat with me before, not without Jane here to tell me what to do. Her face is turned slightly away from the light and her eyes are in shadow. She leans down with a very deliberate movement and starts to clean her paws, giving me time to take some slow, deep breaths. I think she knows what I’m thinking before I think it. Her back is to me, lying flat on one side like a half-flipped pancake, and I can see each of her individual hairs. I know now that her fur isn’t grey or white or tawny or silver. She is all of them, graded through the different colours, giving the impression that she changes colour as the light itself changes.

  Pumas hunt from above and behind, leaping onto your back to rip out your throat. You should never drop your guard. But Wayra . . . she’s sometimes so calm I think I could press my face against hers. And yet I’ve also seen how fast she can turn, how angry she can suddenly become. She could be on my back in less time than it would take for me to blink, although this whole month she’s never tried. I wonder how many months I’ll need, how many onion layers, before I don’t feel my heart in my throat every time she’s near. I feel easier every day, but I don’t know if there are enough days in the world for this to feel normal. I don’t know if I want there to be.

  “Está bien, Wayra,” I say, trying to be calm. “It’s all good.”

  She turns and leans towards me, as if to say: I know.

  Quickly I roll up my sleeve. She gives a grunt of satisfaction before starting to lick, pulling closer with one giant forepaw. I wince, because the pain of her tongue is so sharp, but I don’t move. She’s making a soft grumble and I hope this is OK. If the grumble gets louder, then I should move away, give her space, but I find it almost impossible to tell the difference between a good grumble and a bad one. I’ve got it wrong so many times, and when I do, she snaps or snarls at me, often missing my hands by millimetres. Jane laughs when this happens, telling me that if Wayra wanted to hurt me, she would have done it already. And I have to prove that I trust her. But I don’t trust her, and I just can’t hear what Jane seems able to sense intuitively.

  I clear my throat.

  Wayra continues to lick.

  “Wayra?”

  Her ears move ever so slightly. The hum of the jungle—like a single organism—sounds like an oddly soothing car alarm. Her eyes come up and meet mine, the line on a heart monitor, a single thread of amber that circles her pupil.

  “I changed my flight last night. I’m staying.”

  She pushes my arm away and rolls over onto her stomach, her paws crossed in front of her. She’s facing the lagoon, the end of her tail touching my boot. We’re sharing the shade of an overhanging banana tree. The water sparkles down below and she watches it. I’m relieved that she’s turned her attention away from me, and disappointed too. But as she puts her chin on her paws and closes her eyes, I think, by the angle of her ears, that she’s still listening to me.

  “Are you . . . listening?”

  She pretends to be asleep. I laugh, shaking my head.

  “Is it OK with you, if I stay?”

  She lazily turns to the side and rests her cheek on the ground. Her nose is scaled with an intricate pattern of dots that I’ve never noticed before. And there is a tiny piece of dried snot in one of her nostrils. Inexplicably, this makes my eyes sting. It is OK. Of all the spots at this lagoon, Wayra has chosen to settle next to mine. It took a whole month and she doesn’t use words as I do, but she knows how to make a point. I’m OK. She’s telling me she thinks I’m OK.

  “Thank you, princesa.” I sniff, trying not to make a big deal out of it.

  Wayra gives me a long, scathing look before getting up and walking away.

  That evening Paddy and I take it upon ourselves to hitch into the village. He’s staying too, Bryan as well, both of them as besotted with their cats, and this place, as I am. We climb the sheer black rocky cliffs behind the rows of huts, the surface so rough it grazes our hands and knees like sandpaper. We laugh absurdly when we almost topple down massive crevasses and reach the top just as the sun starts to disappear. From here, Osito has promised us, we’ll be able to see everything. And as the edges of the sky turn orange, like it’s on fire, we stand on the lip of an outcrop that has probably been climbed by the people in this community for more years than I can fathom, and stare, utterly speechless. Santa María is a pinprick of speckled lights among trees that go on and on and on like a carpet of moss across an entire world. The jungle sweeps for as far as I can see until it disappears under a layer of pinkish haze. Far away, I can just make out the faint curve of a mountain ridge. I’m on another planet, where no humans have ever stepped. I’m a giant, overlooking a smoky emerald sea, and at the same time I’m an ant whose head is about to explode. The rocks that we’re standing on are knobbles that sprouted out of the roots of the earth before time itself was even a concept. There are silvery flashes of water. The long, winding river, and lagoons. Wayra’s isn’t the only one, of course. I can see ten or fifteen other lagoons from up here, spread out across the horizon, glowing in the early evening sunlight. Maybe there are pumas at each one, watching the daylight fade.

  The next morning a cool breeze blows through the window and a shock of water hammers against the tin roof. It’s so loud I can barely hear Katarina snoring underneath me, Paddy in the bunk opposite at a slightly higher pitch. Mila, who shares our room too, has just gone, out to walk cats before anyone else wakes. I hear her low knock next door, Tom’s quiet answering grunt, the thud of his feet as he gets out of his bunk, the rustle as he gets dressed. Then, a few minutes later, their two sets of footsteps as they set off into the jungle. Tom—awkward, gentle Tom, more at ease with Faustino and Teanji than with anyone else—is the one that Mila takes with her when she’s working with the most troubled cats. I wonder where they’re going this morning. Then I sigh, staring into the cobwebs. What they do out in the jungle, with cats that I will never get to meet, is something magic, secret and private.

  Silently, I roll out of bed and pull on my clothes. No one else is awake. Early morning—this is the only time when camp is still, as if no humans live here at all. This is magic too. My boots are full of water but I push my feet in anyway, letting the cool liquid ooze out through the holes. The sky is leaden and the forest smells clean and hot. This is rain with a steamy heartbeat of its own, picking up the mud and ants and mulch and carrying them away in rivulets, then rivers. A cacophony of drops hits the leaves, thousands upon thousands deep, like I’m in an amphitheatre and all around me, stretching for miles, is the sound of drummers. Already the ground is flooded. Streams make moats around each of the buildings.

  Panchita sprints towards me, covered in dripping compost, and rubs her snout ecstatically against my thighs. I give her a scratch and then head for the aviary. Teanji scurries after me, beeping. I pull back the curtains that shelter the birds, unleashing hoots of greeting. I say a quick hello to Lorenzo, who rolls onto his back, oblivious to the scathing looks from the other macaws. I say hello to Big Red, who cackles, I say hello to Dontdothat, who shrieks, “Don’t do that!” and then I go round to let out the pìos. Petunia and Patrick sprint out of their house but the others stay inside, wrapped up warm. I collect armfuls of young patuju shoots, food for the monkeys, birds, pìos and tortoises. Teanji beeps from his favourite spot up on top of the aviary door, ready to terrorise volunteers when they start trying to enter with bowls of food.

  I leave my
finds in the animal kitchen and make a bee-line for the long drop. I meet Sammie on the way, heading in the same direction.

  “Poo race, Frodo?” Sammie asks as we fall into step.

  I grin. “What’s a—”

  “First one to finish is the winner!” Sammie starts to run, elbowing me out of the way. It takes me a few seconds to calibrate, but then I’m running too, laughing. The path’s slippery and we both end up falling, giggling as we grab on to each other’s sleeves. Sammie finally gets free and then she’s launching for the new long drop, which Bobby and Harry built just a few days ago to stop the old one filling up too fast. But like many things constructed here, quickly and with little money, it’s ill advised—it’s too close, separated from the original by not much more than a few feet and a flimsy wall that’s already starting to be eaten by lines of hungry termites.

  Breathless, I pull open the door to the old toilet, nod a hello to Hagrid, who is spinning rapidly, and undo my jeans. Through the holes in the wall, I can see the edges of Sammie’s face. I feel a surge of shame but then she just turns and waves.

  “I heard you’re staying then?”

  “I’m staying!” The toilet armadillo scratches around beneath my feet.

  “Good. Means you’ll get to be part of team construction.”

  I pause, mid-wipe. “Team construction?”

  “Yeah, we’re starting this morning.”

  “We are?”

  I hear her door slam and a whoop of joy. “The champion keeps her throne!”

  “Shit.” I quickly finish and scurry outside.

  “Well played.” Sammie winks as she sets off back towards the comedor, whistling a tune between her teeth, saying over her shoulder, “We might make a long-termer out of you yet!”

  I’m left standing stupidly on the path, not knowing what to say.

  Bryan and I hover next to each other, neither of us liking the look of the scene in front of us. The rain has stopped and now I’m just wet. Bobby is jovially handing out hessian sacks, standing upon a very large pile of rocks. We’re just off the road, a few minutes past Wayra’s witch trees. Thick damp grass covers the ground, drying quickly in the hot sun, and there’s the start of a winding path heading off behind the rocks. Otherwise it’s patuju, palms and banana trees. I think I can just see the start of a lagoon, not Wayra’s, a different one, hidden by a brush of ferns.

  “I’m not happy about this,” Bryan hisses as Bobby claps his hands and does a little dance. There are about twenty of us clumped about the clearing, each of us holding these ominous sacks. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “This season’s first day of construction!” Bobby exclaims. “Cheer up Bry, it’s going to be a long, gruelling slog. You’ll hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.”

  I gaze longingly back along the road towards where I know Wayra is waiting, probably wondering why we’re so late.

  Our first task is to carry the pile of rocks to the site that we’re going to be building a new cage on. Even Paddy looks daunted. I fall into the middle of the crowd, eyeing the pile, and when I gingerly pick up my first rock, the size of a baby’s head, I whimper as I place it into my sack. Bobby helps me hoist it onto my back when it’s full and I sway, thinking for a terrifying moment that I might just topple over. I enjoy an unexpected flash of the mysterious lagoon, get a whiff of mandarins, then the reality of what we’re doing slams back in and the bush crowds over us. I lose sight of the road and pretty soon I can focus on nothing but my feet, the painful rubbing of my thighs and the crippling sack gouging into my spine. The ground is pitted, the undergrowth punishingly sharp, the air dusky and bug ridden. We walk, and walk, and walk. In reality it’s not far at all, not much more than a quarter mile, but to me it seems we just keep going deeper with no sign of slowing. I’m used to Wayra’s trails. They are short and wide and well managed (we rake them three times a week to keep the jungle from reclaiming them), and even though sometimes they still catch me out, I feel I’m starting to understand them. This is different. This is like the clock has been turned back and I’m a new volunteer again. Like I’m eight years old and I’m in a forest at night. Sometimes I lose the path altogether and it’s only the muffled voices, in front of me and behind, that keep me from losing my shit.

  Suddenly I hear a new sound, a sound that doesn’t seem right. It’s a crash and a rumble, not the normal jungle conversation that burrows in the back of my ears. This jars, but I can’t stop. My bag is too heavy. I’ll lose my grip and it’ll collapse. But the noise gets louder and harsher and then, just as I think I need to stop, to look up, to find out what this is, I barrel into Paddy, who’s in front of me. Bryan promptly slams into me. My sack spills to the ground and I jump back, rocks cascading around my ankles. I open my mouth to curse but when I look up, I see what has been causing the noise. Paddy is backing away, into me.

  In front of us is a cage. It’s small, less than half of Wayra’s, made of reinforced red bars, a hard shock against the softness of the palms behind, the jungle that my eyes have become so used to. It’s set in a clearing not much bigger than the cage itself. Inside is what seems to be the largest animal I’ve ever seen. A jaguar, dark orange, lathered with black rosettes that make his definitions hard to see. His eyes are amber, his body low, compact. He’s ramming his head, which is bigger than mine and rounded as a pit bull’s, against the bars. This is what’s been making the high-pitched crashing. All three of us take quick steps backwards. The jaguar snarls.

  “Go!” Katarina, who I now see sitting on a log on the other side of the cage, hisses. “Keep moving.” She’s got Bobby’s guitar in her lap. I know sometimes the cats enjoy listening to music, but I can’t imagine this cat enjoying anything. I struggle to pick up my sack, fear making me useless. His muscles bunch and his eyes go black. Katarina murmurs, just as we do with Wayra. “Está bien, Sama. Shh, chico. Shh.”

  Once we’re past the cage, the jungle rises back up, a mesh of speckled trunks, lofty patuju and lianas hanging from the upper branches and shielding the cage, and the cat. Under my feet are leaves of every different purple. There is still a trail but it’s thinner, cut quickly with a machete.

  “Jesus,” Bryan exclaims.

  I’m speechless. But as we follow the path, I manage to stammer out what Katarina has told me, lying in our bunks at night. This is Sama. He’s the cat Katarina works with every day, and she cries when she tells me about him, her dark head shaking in the shadow of the candlelight. He came to the parque when he was young. Not here, but to the organisation’s other sanctuary on the other side of the country. They hoped to release him, because in those days release seemed a viable option. They found him a territory in Brazil and he went through a form of rehabilitation. He was given live prey, isolated from humans, taught to fear them. Then the government changed their minds. His release was called off, just like that, because without governmental support a release cannot go ahead. Sama’s life had shrunk, decided on paper by people who didn’t know him, somewhere at a desk far away. Now here he is breaking his teeth on the bars, trying to fight his way out of a life sentence. He’s older now, eleven, but jaguars in captivity can live up to twenty-five.

  He isn’t like Wayra. He can’t come out of his cage. He’ll never be able to. It’s taken two years to raise enough money to even start to build him something vaguely adequate. It’ll take us more than six months to complete, using two hundred metres of fencing three times over to make it high enough to be secure, barbed wire, stone, cement, months of digging, carrying, pulling, securing . . . and Sama will be stressed throughout, not understanding. When he’s finally released into it, he may have at best half his life to experience it, at worst, less than a quarter.

  In one of the hostels when I was travelling, I saw a jaguar skin, pinned up high on one wall. I didn’t think much about it then. I do now. It had the same black markings, the same yellow ears with spots to mimic eyes, the same white belly, the same long tail with the black patch of fur on the
end. It’s luck that Sama is here and not there. That Sama has twenty or so humans building him a new home, when he could be on a wall somewhere, stuck in some museum, on the floor in someone’s dining room, eyes cut out, stomach slashed, claws taken. And it’s luck too, luck of an opposite kind, that Sama’s not free as he should be.

  Bryan brings me back to reality.

  “Mila thinks we can build something to hold an animal as aggressive as that?” he hisses. “Has she not seen Bobby’s attempt at a new toilet?”

  When I think I literally won’t be able to walk anymore, we find Tom, Harry and Sammie, filthy, dripping with sweat, standing over a tarp of half-mixed cement, looking like they’re having the time of their lives. Harry, shirtless, is leaning cheerfully on a shovel. His skin is shockingly pale, the result of months under the canopy, rarely seeing direct sunlight. He nods to his left where there’s an emerging pile of rocks.

  “On there?” I say, my arms shaking dangerously.

  “On there.”

  Paddy, who hasn’t been here quite long enough to have lost his orange glow, optimistically empties his sack. “Now what?”

  Sammie pats him kindly on the back. “Now you do it again.”

  I cannot help but let out a long groan. I cringe as my mediocre offering lands on the pile with a sorry thunk.

  “How many rocks was that?” Harry laughs. “Two?”

  “Six!” I blush, glaring at him.

  Tom shakes the sweat out of his eyes and goes back to stirring the cement. “Six is six more than we had before,” he says philosophically.

  Tom is strong and short, the muscles in his back and freckled arms brawny. His beard is wildly curly. A golden, almost reddish blond. He’s got an ungainly large head, and his neck is so broad, I’m not sure how he moves it at all. But he’s got a sweet face. And I’ve noticed how he struggles to make eye contact with anyone apart from Faustino. His grey-blue eyes meet mine for just a moment and then flick away shyly, back to the cement. It’s easy to see the toll the jungle has written on him. Like Harry, there are gaunt hollows in his cheeks, a concave dip beneath his ribs and shadows under his eyes. Despite that though, he’s one of the only long-termers who always waves, always says hello, no matter how tired. And I’ve never seen him say no to any job—however ridiculous—Mila asks of him. Even if it’s going out at midnight with her deep into the jungle, just to give one of the ocelots some probiotics.