The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  He coughs awkwardly and looks down at his boots.

  I swallow hard. I’m not strong. I worry, every day, that she’ll look into my soul and find me lacking. That I’m not what she needs. That someone better, braver, bolder could make her happier. I come back from a bad day, when she’s been so scared she hasn’t wanted to leave the runner, when she’s hissed at shadows and spent a whole afternoon desperately cleaning, when we’ve given her food and she hasn’t eaten any of it like she’s got stress-induced anorexia . . . and I haven’t been able to wash it off me. I’ve lain on the road chain-smoking, just because I can’t bear to go to bed and listen to her hisses echoing through my skull. In those moments, I’d do anything not to go back out there. But every morning, I find a way to do it. And when she licks my arm, it makes all the rest of it seem somehow more important and—at the same time—more bearable.

  I grin, elbowing Harry in the side. “So what you’re saying is that I’m stronger than you?”

  He snorts. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Frodo. At least I can walk without falling over.”

  I roll my eyes. “At least I’m not so dead inside I feel the need to fill my empty soul with every pretty new volunteer who gets off the bus.”

  He is silent for a moment. “Touché.”

  I laugh and then, suddenly, we’re kissing. I don’t know who initiates it. It might have been me, or not, I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. The rain falls and the thunder drifts. The night monkeys settle. The earth is warm underneath me and soon, I don’t care about anything but the taste of his mouth, the hot smell of his sweat, and the heavy, delicious feeling of his body on top of mine.

  A few weeks later I move next door, into the dark, dank room where the monkeys sleep. Jane helps me to move the hay mattress that has come to fit the contours of my body into Oscar’s old bunk. On my first night, huddled into my new bed, I’m delirious with happiness. Coco is snuggled against my chest and Faustino is hogging my pillow, pressing his soft, fuzzy bulk into my face. A photo of Wayra that Mila has printed out for me is pinned to the wooden window frame. I can’t sleep because I’m so hot. The monkeys are perfect hot water bottles. My sheets and skin are orange from their sweat, but somehow these things only make it better. The next morning, we go to Wayra and spend the whole day at the lagoon. The storms keep coming, making the smells different, the world wetter, hotter, closer. She comes up to the top of the bank and turns her angled cheekbones in our direction. A low, panicky grumble turns into a high, contented moan, and then a snore as she lays her head to rest on the ground between our boots and the new, young shoots of patuju that have sprouted up overnight.

  I sit at the cracked, back table in the comedor and laugh as loudly as anyone when Bobby finds a papaya shaped like Coco’s face, makes a crown for it out of leaves, and enthrones it up in the rafters. Jane and I go out at dawn to rake Wayra’s trails and the sky is golden around the edges. I learn how to hold a machete without it slipping out of my hands and hitting Jane in the forehead. I don’t push my worries into my stomach. Everyone’s hair is messy, everyone stinks—the animals don’t care, so why should I? The constant hum of social anxiety has gone. I smile only when it’s honest. My brain is silent, filled with just the hip-hop beat of the jungle and the soundless conversations I have with Wayra. For the first time in my life, my bowel movements are normal! I don’t do laundry. I wear the same clothes and press my nose up against them, committing to memory their mouldy, crusty smell. They have Wayra’s grey fur caked around the sleeves, orange patches around the shoulders, where Coco and Faustino sit, blue feathers in the pockets from Lorenzo. I cannot imagine the tight tailored suits I used to wear, the smart leather bags I carried. When I come home from work to find Mila squeezing a lump the size of an apple out of a girl’s back, thousands of jellied spider’s eggs exploding across the patio, I elbow my way in to get a better look and offer to hold the tweezers.

  I spend a lot of time on the road with Mila and Agustino, and the kids as well before they’re sent to bed. Osito and Juana play stupid games, running up and down the tarmac, finding frogs to hide in people’s boots. Germáncito—he wants to play too, but thinks he’s too old for it. López flirts insatiably with Mariela, who does her homework in the fumador and ignores him. I spend time with the other long-termers too: Katarina and Jane, Paddy and Bry, Tom, Bobby, Sammie, Harry. We laugh together, sharing cigarettes and stale packets of chocolate, watching the stars shoot across the blackness, talking about the dorms Panchita and Teanji have broken into, the food they’ve stolen, the volunteers they’ve harassed, the infinite minutiae of what each of our cats has done that day. Once it gets late and the others go to bed, if we’re not too tired, Harry and I walk together. When we get far enough away, we kiss. His beard scratches my face and the sweaty, dark smell of him clogs my nostrils. I remember what he said about Wayra and I convince myself that I’ll never ask him to be anything more than this.

  Soon though, and I don’t remember when or how it happens, I start to sleep in his bed. More than I do in mine. It feels as inevitable as a wave that’s taken me down a tributary. I can’t find it in me to find my way back. Even with the cloying heat, the single bunks, the four other people in the room and the two monkeys who cuddle between us and make it impossible to do anything other than just hold hands, it’s been so long since I’ve slept with someone else that I grow reckless with it. Jane warns me. We sit in the comedor by candlelight, eating peanut butter out of a jar, and she tells me not to get attached. I brush her words away. I don’t feel scared. I’m terrified every day, of course—of Wayra, snakes and spiders, getting lost, hurting myself—but for once, I’m not scared of myself, of the bad decisions I might be making. There are no decisions to make. Weeks pass and I cuddle into the hot crook of Harry’s arm, one or other of the monkeys snuggled on our pillow. I listen to the rise and fall of their chests, and I imagine that this can go on forever. I have forgotten that nothing lasts forever.

  The jungle withers and the forest becomes more brown, yellow and beige than green. The moss and fungus that I thought would never stop growing ceases, curls up, is sucked back into the dirt, leaving only cracked leaves and sticks to cover a hard, hot and parched earth. I’m approaching the end of my three-month extension. It’s September. I think I might miss my flight back to England. I’ve already told my parents I’m thinking about staying longer. They’re trying not to be too worried, I think, when I tell them I have no plans to book another flight, when I tell them I’ve overstayed my visa, when I say it’s fine. They can hear how happy I am.

  We’re doing construction three mornings a week. Sama’s fences have sprung up like the vivid mushrooms that emerge out of nothing. It still feels endless, Bobby practically crying as another day goes by and it’s not finished. Sama grows more upset too, pawing the ground, biting the bars, as if someone has told him that we’re going slowly on purpose. How can I leave? We’re tying the end of the top roll of fencing now, having to make our own ladders out of the forest as we go. If only we had a few machines, a few more skilled people. I hear Mila, whispering through the fence. “A few more weeks. Only a few more weeks, mi amor.”

  Despite the time off for construction, every day Wayra seems calmer, more at ease with me. It’s hard to say why I think this, it’s subtle, but I’m beginning to read her subtleties now. I see it in the length of time she looks me in the eye, in the firmness with which she licks. The less she hisses. The more she walks. The more confident she is away from the runner, the more affectionate. The frequency of times she sits next to me rather than by herself in the shadows, the less time she spends licking invisible dirt obsessively off her paws, the more she eats, the more she spends in silence rather than making the low grumble that has become so familiar I hear it when I’m asleep. I don’t think to worry about whether she’s getting too attached to me, to us. Because if I do, I’ll have to think about the fact that at some point, flights and visas and money will combine, and both Jane and I are going to leave.
At some point. But it’s not going to happen yet. And so I don’t think about it. I don’t think about anything at all, other than this moment.

  Leaves crunch beneath my boots. Jane and I are heading back to camp. It’s late and hazy patches of yellow sky are quickly turning to bronze. Wayra caught a jungle rat, but she couldn’t kill it. Had no idea how. In the end, Jane cut its poor, fractured throat with her penknife. Wayra then carried it around proudly for the rest of the day, burying it and digging it up, bringing it over to show us as if each time she dug it up, she couldn’t believe her luck.

  We put her back in the cage just as dusk began to fall, that time when the edges of the world begin to crinkle. The sky is eerie. I mop my brow, catching the sweat before it falls into my eyes. Jane, fanning herself with her hat, suddenly looks up.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “Coooeeee, coooeeee, coooeeee!”

  My head snaps up.

  “That!”

  I stare dumbly into the trees. “Was that—”

  “Three cooees.”

  “What does that mean?” I hold my breath, listening. Without phones, without radios, cooees are our only method of communication. One means “Be quiet.” Two, “I’m lost.” Three . . .

  “Emergency.”

  We both start running.

  The moment we emerge onto the road, we see a crowd of people, shadows against a queer sky. They are by the fumador looking north. There is an odd smell that I can’t quite place. Mila and López are just swinging off the motorbike, hair ruffled, dark ashy spots across their foreheads.

  “Hay fuego,” Mila snaps. “Hay fuego en la montaña.”

  Smoke, I realise as my heart drops. I can smell smoke.

  It takes half an hour, walking away from camp, not towards the village but in the other direction, before we see the line of the mountain ridge on the horizon. It’s dark now, and roadside hawks sit on the tops of trees, screeching. The sky is a sooty orange and there is a hush over everything apart from a low crackling that I may or may not imagine. The top of one of the mountains is red, flickering ever so softly. Harry silently takes a cigarette from me, and we pass it back and forth. We stand in clumps, twenty-three of us in all, and watch as the line of fire across the sky grows. There are no stars and I know there’ll be no moon. There’s a scarlet glow over Harry’s face, making him look like someone I don’t know.

  “I don’t understand,” Jane finally says, her arms around Mariela. Mariela is crying.

  Agustino runs his hands roughly through his hair. “Four years ago, these months were very dry, like now. Las montañas quemadas. Farmers over the mountain, they set fire to their fields, because then they’ll grow more, ¿sí? And they have to grow more. But it spreads. It didn’t happen again, because there’s been more rain every year. But this year . . . not much rain . . .” He stops, looking back towards camp.

  “And there weren’t any cats on that side of the road back then,” Harry finishes, his face white beneath the red. He rocks forwards on the toes of his old boots, needing to move. His hands pull into fists. A shiver runs down my spine.

  “So what . . . ,” I start. “You think it might—”

  “Spread?” Agustino’s jaw tightens.

  López looks up at the sky. Tom follows his gaze, his light-blue eyes crinkled with worry.

  “Sí, el viento . . . ,” López murmurs, his dark-brown eyes clouded. I stare at him. He’s gotten taller since I’ve been here. Every time I look at him, he seems bigger. It was his birthday a few weeks ago. He turned seventeen, and we cracked raw eggs on his head and pelted him with flour. A Bolivian birthday tradition. He’s almost an adult.

  “The wind.” Tom grimaces. “Soon, it will pick up . . .”

  “But then what happens to . . .” I trail off.

  Mila gazes back down the road as if she can see through the trees, right to their cages. Everyone is very still. I watch the hollow in Agustino’s throat working as he tries to swallow.

  “Are there people who can help?” The question comes from Nicole, a nurse, a new arrival just this morning. “Like, the government?”

  Mila says quietly, “They won’t help.”

  “There are volunteer firefighters in town,” Agustino says, his head bowed. “If it burns here . . . maybe it burns in other places. I will ask, but I don’t think they’ll come.”

  I gaze at Agustino and Mila. “It’s just us?”

  Agustino’s head falls further. The gold in Mila’s eyes has disappeared.

  “Siempre somos solo nosotros,” she says. It’s always just us.

  The sky has started to bleed, leaves of ash raining, turning white as they fall. Robert, a scout leader who’s been here a few weeks, is the first to speak.

  “It’s just the eastern side of the road, right?”

  I look around and see people nodding.

  “Camp side is OK,” Robert continues, “because there’s the river to protect it. Then we’ve got the road, which is a natural firebreak. So we’ve just got to cut our own firebreak behind the cats at risk. That’s—”

  “Sama, Katie and . . .” Harry looks first at Jane, then at me before he says her name. “Wayra.” I take a deep, shaking breath, and Jane and I reach out, our hands gripping each other so tightly I feel our bones move.

  “A firebreak?” Mila frowns. Juana and Mariela have both migrated to her and she has her arms around them both, their faces squished painfully against her chest.

  Sammie translates quietly. “Un sendero de fuego.”

  Bobby grimaces, rubbing back his hair so violently it’s as if he’s trying to rub back the jungle itself. “It would need to be huge. Fifteen feet wide and a foot deep, at least. We’d need to cut everything. Trees, plants, roots. God.”

  Robert nods, almost apologetic.

  “There’s six hundred hectares of jungle on that side. So we’re talking a trail . . .” Bobby hesitates, calculating. He’s wearing, I suddenly realise, the same T-shirt he was wearing that very first day we met. The one that used to make me so mad. Now I could kiss it. He’s calm, working the problem out in his head, when I’m just hearing the white noise of panic. “Seven kilometres, más o menos.”

  “That’ll take weeks!” Sammie scoffs. “And would it even work?”

  Osito and Germáncito are gazing between us all, trying to follow what’s going on. Even though the English is too rapid, their shoulders are set, determined to take on whatever. Agustino places his hands on their shoulders. Osito lets him, but Germáncito ducks away.

  Robert grimaces. “I’ve seen firebreaks work. The wind’s blowing away from us, but if it changes and the fire crosses that dry desert of grass—it’s called the curichal, right?”

  Agustino nods.

  “Well.” Robert bites his lip. “That curichal, the dry desert, is like a tinderbox. And it’s between those mountains and your land. You won’t have a chance without a firebreak.”

  Agustino is walking back and forth now. “If the fire spreads, we can move Wayra and Katie, but . . .”

  Our faces curdle, all at the same time.

  “What would happen to Sama?” Katarina glares accusingly at Agustino, as if she thinks he’s suggested something unconscionable. No one answers her. We watch the flames, and eventually Tom puts his hand softly on Katarina’s shoulder.

  The next morning we start as soon as it gets light. López goes ahead with the chainsaw, bashing through raw forest. Osito, Germáncito, Bobby and Agustino follow with machetes. Then come Mila, Harry, Robert, Sammie, Tom and a handful of others stronger than the rest. Behind come the dregs, tiny black flies sticking in our eyeballs. We carry rakes, spades and pickaxes, chopping back what the others are forging. I am blistered, bruised, spiked and crawling with ticks. Fire ants catch in my hair. I brush an acid-green caterpillar with my left shoulder, which swells up and burns for days after. By the time Mila calls lunch, I’m encrusted with sweat, dirt and blood and we’ve cleared less than a hundred metres. Th
e sky burns ochre.

  We only see our cats in the evenings, but we hear them crying. Rupi and Ru are loud enough to hear from camp, chuffing in distress. We eat our dinners in silence. We can hear Sama and Katie calling as we work on the trail. It makes us work harder. When I go to feed Wayra, smoke clings to her clearing. She looks up at me with wide, fearful eyes. It’s the first time in months that I haven’t spent every day with her. I feel bereft, as if I’m floating, and it makes it worse that I have no idea whether she understands this at all. Jane and I bring down wheelbarrows of wet blankets to hang around her cage. I don’t know if they stop the smoke from choking her. I offer to help Katarina do the same with Sama, but she tells me he’ll just pull them down and shred them. His enclosure is not finished. He’s stuck behind his bars, with nowhere to hide but a wooden house. If the fire hits, we’ll have a choice: open the door—letting him out, but breaking the law and risking him killing someone—or leave him in there to die. We rake, cut and wait. Rake, cut, wait. Our trail grows like a highway. We scour it to the dirt, exposing fresh lines of mycelium, secret dark homes that bugs have built under the illusion that they’ll never be disturbed, and root systems that blow my mind. But even after all that, palm trees still meet across the divide, desperate as lovers. Branches fall where they’re not supposed to. And every day, new patuju grows.

  Animals watch us with wide-eyed panic.

  The wind holds.

  The mountain smoulders.

  About three days in, Harry, Sammie, Katarina, Tom and I stand on the road.