The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  Sammie too. She’s just as bad, going out at all hours whenever required. But with the lack of sunlight, the deficit of vitamins, her hair has started to fall out. I’ve watched Coco gently pull clumps of it away as they go through their daily grooming. She shrugs it off as a positive—at least she won’t have to worry about lice. But as the light catches her face now, there is tiredness engrained in every stretch of her skin. Her flannel shirt is sodden with sweat. Mud and cement cake her body. Her stomach is swollen from eating little but carbohydrates. These people aren’t built to survive here and yet here they are. They’re somehow connected to this jungle just as much as Sama has been ripped out of it. It’s all upside down and the wrong way round.

  “I think you should cut the judgement, Harry,” Sammie says, laughing. “She’s changed her flight, she’s staying, for Wayra. Has he told you, Frodo?” She picks up one of my rocks and inspects it casually. “He walks a jaguar but he’s still scared of a little old puma?”

  I stare at him. “You’re scared of her? Of Wayra?” I ask quietly.

  I’m terrified of her. I never understand what she’s telling me. I don’t know whether she wants me to come closer or go as far away as possible. I don’t know whether she wants to lick me or bite me, whether she’s growling because she’s happy or pissed off. I continue to feel like I’m risking my life every time I’m within a few metres of her. But . . . this guy? A drop of sweat, brown from the earth, trails down the middle of his torso. He glances at me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Yeah.” He shrugs. “She’s fucking scary.”

  Sammie nods. “True story.”

  I narrow my eyes. I think she might be joking, but Tom’s nodding too.

  “But she just . . . sleeps,” I stammer. She doesn’t jump on you, like I know some of the others do, or try to play with you the moment you lose concentration. She lets you sit down, she loves to be stroked. She needs a bodyguard, for god’s sake, to walk through the jungle! She hasn’t even touched me, apart from to put her head on my lap or lick my fingers. She . . .

  “She hisses. And grumbles,” Harry mutters. “And hisses some more. She sleeps for hours until you lose your mind, and then forces you to gallop back to the cage hissing at you again. She’s never happy. She never wants to play. You do one thing and she immediately wants you to do another. She’s terrified of everything but acts like a fucking bitch about it . . .”

  “She’s not a bitch!” I yell, my face suddenly scarlet. “Don’t call her that!”

  Harry just shrugs again and turns his back on me, picking up his shovel. “Wayra volunteers,” he mutters.

  I stand there speechless, wanting to throttle him. How dare he? He doesn’t know the first thing about her, or me. Finally, when no one says anything else, Paddy and Bryan pull me away.

  “She’s not a bitch,” I exclaim again, gripping Paddy’s arm.

  He gently pats me on the shoulder.

  Later, when we’ve barely made a dent in the rocks and I’m wallowing in the afterglow of a lunch of four different types of potato, I’m sitting on the patio watching some leaf-cutter ants. About a hundred of them have split off into three circles, one small, one medium and one large, and they are just going around and around as if they will do it until they die. I cannot understand what has happened to them.

  “Frodo.”

  I look up with a start. Harry is standing above me, looking uncharacteristically awkward. The sky behind him is the darkest brown I’ve ever seen. I gaze back and forth for help, but there’s no one else around apart from Teanji, nuzzling in the pockets of Osito’s school uniform. The boy is fast asleep under one of the benches. Harry rubs his beard.

  “So you’re going to come with me this afternoon.”

  I stare at him, trying to find the joke. But he just sits down quickly and puts what he’s carrying, Ru’s meat bucket and two machetes, on the bench. “A tree’s gone down on Ru’s trail and I need help clearing it.”

  “My help?” I squeak.

  He gazes at the ants, grinning lopsidedly as if he can’t quite bring himself to use his whole mouth. “I know. Shocker.” He rubs his beard again. It’s grown longer in the time that I’ve been here. The blunt edges of his fingers are dark with the stain of cement. I wonder if he’ll ever get it out. Finally he turns and looks at me full on, letting out a sigh. “You coming?”

  I hesitate. I want him to apologise, for today, for ignoring me for the last month. I could tell him no, I could tell him to find some other sucker to clean his trail. But also, this is the chance of a lifetime. To see another part of the jungle. To see Ru’s trail! I think this is the best apology I’m going to get, so I stand up quickly before I lose my nerve.

  “Fine,” I snap. “Do you know why they’re doing that?”

  He raises his eyebrows, then crouches on his heels to inspect the ants more closely. They’re dark red, their backs and pincers shiny. Some of them are carrying leaves that they’ve scavenged, as big as my thumb, but show no sign of tiredness despite having been trapped in a seemingly never-ending loop. Harry straightens and the tension in his shoulders is gone.

  “They’ve just gone fucking nuts.” He hands me one of the machetes with a laugh and starts to head off down one of the trails, beckoning me to follow. “No different from us really.” He looks back over his shoulder and winks at me. “Right?”

  It isn’t long before the thunder starts in earnest. The slim sheaf of sky has turned from brown to deep purple. Harry has led me away from camp, not over the road but out back, towards where the river is, and where most of the animals have their enclosures. It’s only Wayra, Sama and another jaguar—Katie—who live on the other side of the road. I look around, wide-eyed, as we walk. Broad swathes of patuju, young ones that are as light as cut grass, and adults, dark emerald, twice my height, stretch for as far as I can see. Cacao trees twist up out of the plants like black waves on an ocean. Most of the ancient forest was cut down decades ago, Harry tells me with disgust. They were replanted with these cacaos, although the plantation inevitably failed. This is what enabled the parque to buy the land. The chocolate forest remains, intermingled with the rest of the jungle, a ghost of failed economic development. There are still a few of the old trees left, though, trees that survived the cut, that would have been around before the road was conceived of, before even my great-grandparents were conceived of.

  The jungle becomes broader, darker, wider, taller, deeper . . . Perhaps it’s the impending storm but despite the stifling heat, I shiver.

  “How far is it?” I ask tentatively. I’m out of breath, exhausted from the morning’s construction, and Harry’s a quick walker. He’s been here long enough to know the trails like his own skin. We’re following the line of a muddy ditch, and it’s like walking through a slip and slide. The only way to keep upright is to grab on to whatever is nearest, which often (I learn the hard way) tends to be a tree covered in spikes, a tree covered in fire ants or, even worse, a tree covered in purple poisonous caterpillars. I only avoid them because Harry swings back and grasps my wrist just in time, telling me with an exasperated shake of his head that they’ll put me in bed for over a week.

  I find myself sticking close to him after that, his thick, musty, sweaty scent overpowering the other smells. My calves and thighs scream with the strain of keeping up.

  “You OK?” he calls over his shoulder. I’m trying to extract my boot from where it has got caught under a root. I can tell by the muffled laughter that I’m meeting his expectations perfectly. Why the hell did he bring me then, I think crossly as I finally get free, only to trip again almost immediately, narrowly missing falling face-first into a tree that’s more samurai than tree, its spikes so sharp they’re like the spikes you’d find on a medieval mace.

  “I’m fine.” I grit my teeth.

  He waits, leaning casually against a sandy termite mound, massive and sculptural as if it’s been created by an artist on LSD. In the jungle, I am realising, everything is the same, a
nd yet as I see more of it, it changes with each turn, each valley, each dip, each spin of my head. We’ve been weaving in between these mounds for the last few minutes and the one Harry has chosen is bigger than he is. It’s a city of mud, a million windows and doors, although it seems as if it’s been abandoned. Maybe all the termites are asleep, safe inside from the storm that’s coming fast.

  “Ru’s a bit further away than Wayra, right?”

  There’s a crack of thunder and I jump.

  I nod, smiling politely. “A little bit.” A fucking lot.

  “A few months ago this trail was swamp up to your chest. It was an hour’s walk then, every day.” He assesses me from his position against the mound, his blue eyes twinkling. “Maybe two for you.”

  I scowl. “Well, I can’t think of anything worse than walking through swamp for an hour every day.” I know, though, it’s not just an hour. That’s just the walk out there. The cats’ trails flood too, so there’s no respite for the volunteers working with animals in the flooded sections of the parque. They’re in swamp all day. I don’t think I would have lasted. I definitely wouldn’t have extended. That’s why I was so surprised at Harry’s vehemence earlier. Wayra might be emotionally hard. But she lets you nap all day! Your feet are dry! She’s a ten-minute walk from camp, tops! I shudder, looking around and trying to imagine what would have happened if I’d been assigned a different cat. And then, for the very first time, I wonder if Mila did it on purpose. Whether it wasn’t just that Wayra needed someone but that Mila clocked me on arrival. Did she think: Maybe this strange, shy girl might be a good match for a cat like Wayra? I smile at the thought.

  “You don’t really know yourself until you’ve spent months in the swamp,” Harry says quietly, pushing himself off the mound. I watch as a cascade of tiny mud balls fall to the ground. I roll my eyes, trying to remind myself that this is the worst kind of macho bullshit and I shouldn’t be impressed. The wind has started to pick up and the jungle has gone quiet. We walk on, the only noises the creaking of the branches, the rasp of my laboured breathing and the crack of my knees. I stare at Harry’s back. At where his jeans are tucked into his dark-blue boots, the rip along the arm of his shirt, which I think may once have been red but is now a mouldy brown, at the line of taut muscle along his neck. There’s a spikiness that seems to make the air around his broad shoulders warp, like it would hurt if I tried to touch him. Warning bells should be going off but they’re not. I’m too caught up in how it feels when his eyes twinkle at me. Over the electric hum in my belly, it’s hard to hear anything else.

  After we’ve been walking in silence for another twenty minutes, más o menos, Harry stops abruptly. We’ve come out in a small clearing. We are surrounded by a thick brace of bamboo, the colour of dark wine bottles. I open my mouth to ask where we are but Harry stops me, putting his finger to his lips.

  “Ru’s just through there,” he whispers, his whole countenance changing, the spikiness melting away. His eyes gleam as he points through the bamboo, and I squint, hoping to catch a glimpse of the enclosure. But the bamboo is just too thick. I won’t get to meet Ru, but on the other side of that jungle lives an animal that Harry has spent every day with for the last six months, that made him leave his job, his life, his home, that made him fly across the world more than once. It’s been driving me crazy, wondering what that creature must be like to have elicited such commitment from someone like Harry. As we keep going, there are signs of his presence everywhere. Paw prints in the mud, larger than my hand. Trees with deep, oozing claw marks, patuju barrelled over, scrape marks in the dirt.

  When the air starts to feel different, Harry pauses. There is a spark in his eyes that makes me catch my breath.

  “Have you ever seen the river?”

  “No,” I whisper. I’ve been dying to walk out here to see it, since the first moment last night when I saw the twist of its spine from up on the rocks in the village. Río San Pablo—it twines north through forest after forest, meeting human settlements here and there, meeting with other rivers, the Beni and the Madre de Dios, to become the Madeira and then, eventually, the Amazon itself. But here it’s still minor, a slow-moving offshoot that marks the border of the parque on the southern edge. Bobby told me he canoed it once. There were so many twists to it, it took him an entire day to get from Santa María back to camp.

  The river that I see though, as Harry steps back with a full two-sided grin, feels anything but small. It’s fifteen metres across at least, and the wind is roiling to make sharp, pointed waves. The water is coffee-dark, and there’s a track that takes us down to a long beach, paw and footprints layered among one another. At the edge there’s an old, battered canoe, tied fast to the bank.

  “That’s where we sit together sometimes,” Harry says, pointing, grinning.

  “In the canoe?” I exclaim. “With Ru?”

  He nods, full of that certainty which I find so startling. I gulp, looking back at the broad expanse of water. Some part of me suddenly feels that I’m not meant to be here. I’m trespassing. This is Ru’s. Maybe he knows we’ve come here, from all the way back behind that brace of bamboo, and he’s pacing the fence even now, smelling my uncertainty on the breeze.

  “We should keep going,” I say quickly, turning away. But Harry catches my arm and I stop, staring into his face.

  “Wait.”

  I glance back at the river, the canoe trailing desperately in the hard current.

  In England, I used to feel like that canoe. As if I were swimming against something I couldn’t fight. I was going round and round and everyone else I knew seemed to be OK with it. None of my friends were talking about the fucking loop we were all in, like those insane ants.

  I couldn’t see how to get out. I couldn’t see how to make it stop.

  But now Harry’s hand on my arm feels like the cutting of a tether.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “To cut down a tree,” he says softly. “What else is there?”

  I know full well what else there is. I’m about to answer when there’s another crack of thunder, a flash of lightning, striking the darkness as if someone has set off an emergency flare. The skies open. Harry grabs my hand, pulls me up the bank until we’re under a cacao tree. Its branches rattle wildly.

  “These trees,” Harry yells over the storm, “during cacao season when the pods come out, they turn the jungle orange, like it’s on fire.”

  I stare upwards as the rain cascades down. The gods have upturned their bathwater, and it smells like that too, hot and heady. It’s been stewing for days. I hold out my hands, feeling the hard patter of it against my skin. Within heartbeats I’m drenched. I pull my arms in, under my shirt, and we huddle down, our backs to the trunk, which has been warming all day and now gives out delicious heat. Harry nudges me and points upwards. In the branches, only a few metres above us, two little black creatures are huddled. Their eyes are big and round as polished brown stones.

  “Oh!” I mouth. Night monkeys! I’ve never seen night monkeys before. They’re notoriously shy but they’ve come here, just like we have, for shelter. Lightning sets off the sky again, so close that I can feel the reverberations in my spine, and the monkeys’ eyes widen with fear. Mine do too. Fear and awe and disbelief that I’ve somehow found myself at the heart of a forest I can imagine once spread its roots across the entire expanse of South America.

  “You cold?” Harry asks.

  I’m shivering, my shirt plastered to me like an extra layer of skin. I nod and he puts his arm around my shoulders. His beard is dripping and it tickles my cheek. When I laugh, he looks down with a grin, and then leans his head back against the trunk. I nestle against his arm. We watch the rain. I can’t even see the river now. It’s all shrunk to a pinprick. The world is just me and this guy and this tree.

  “Are you really scared of Wayra?”

  He growls under his breath. “Sammie loves to bring that up.”

  “So you are?”

  He
sighs. “I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t.”

  “But . . . you walk a jaguar.”

  “Yeah, so? I’m scared of him too. If you’re not, there’s something wrong with you.” I sense that this isn’t it though, so I wait. And after a while: “But Wayra . . .” He pauses, thinking. “I’m sorry I called her a bitch. I haven’t worked with her enough to be making claims like that. But . . . And don’t let this go to your head, you’re still a clumsy idiot, but I do respect anyone who finds a way to work with that cat.”

  I twist my neck to look at him, but he just looks away, out at the rain.

  “Never tell Jane I said that.”

  I continue to watch him.

  “It’s not so much that I’m scared she’ll hurt me. It’s more . . .” He takes a deep breath. “She’s just in so much pain. I can feel it on me, you know? I come back from a day with her and I can’t get it off my skin. She’s so different from all the rest. Jaguaru . . . Ru is always having fun. Yeah, he had a shit life but now . . . he’s happy. He loves walking. He loves the jungle. He loves his trails. He loves his volunteers. It’s tough, it’s long days, sometimes he’ll want to run for miles around his trails, sometimes he’ll jump on you so many times you forget what’s up and what’s down, but all he asks is that you trust him. Your instincts do the rest. But Wayra . . . I feel like she needs more. More than what I can give her. She’s unpredictable! She’s in her head. It’s all thinking. It’s all about her. You’d never even consider sitting on the ground with another cat! Or giving any of them a bodyguard. Fuck. Someone walking in front, it would be a nightmare. They’d just treat that person as a toy. But not Wayra. It’s all about her confusion, inability to feel safe. You have to be pretty strong to be able to handle that.”