I shake my head.
“How long’s it been?”
“Almost a year and a half,” I say, my voice quiet. A year and a half. I look down at myself with a wry smile and trace the ridges of scars along my arms. Love bites, Mila calls them. Those first ones, from quarantine, were the worst, the only ones that needed stitches. The rest are just scratches, some barely even leaving a mark.
“Do you think you’ll keep coming back?” I say softly.
“I don’t know.” She turns to look at me, the notes of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” drifting down from Tom’s bunk as he quietly plays his guitar. Paddy and Harry have gone silent. I can smell the scent of warm cake wafting through the window. Sammie smiles at me. “I had a pretty good life before, you know?” She laughs. “I was prom queen in high school, can you believe that? That was a really big deal back in Florida. Look at me now!” I look at her. Her hair has started to form dreadlocks, it’s so matted. Her nose, just poking out of the covers, is grey with dirt. “I was on track to a decent job. I was going to live by the beach. I had a boyfriend! My parents were over the moon. Shit. Now they think I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. That’s what it felt like when I was back there. But when I’m here? It feels like I’ve never been saner. You know?”
I nod. That’s exactly what it does feel like. Despite how much I miss my family. Despite the cold. The sweat. The bugs. The long drops. Despite the awful, awful fear and worse—failure—I feel every day when Dolf and I turn down the track between the two witches, my arms burning with a canvas of barely healing bites and scratches. Despite all of that. Sammie grimaces. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. She understands. Every single person in this room understands, every person in camp.
I turn over, shuffling down into the pillow, when I jump, feeling something moving in the bottom of the bed. Suddenly Morocha’s wild head of black hair pokes out from beneath the blanket. Her pink face gleams. She knows she’s not allowed in here! Morocha uses Santa Cruz as her own private toilet. She’s meant to be learning about being outside. But Sammie just grins guiltily, and Morocha gives a soft, pitiful chirp, wrapping her long gangly arms around my neck.
It’s late July when the cold finally ends, and the heat comes back with a vengeance. It’s so hot, my bones feel like they’re baking. I wear tank tops over thin cotton leggings. These slowly migrate down my thighs because, without noticing, I’m thinner than I was. My body has more angles, more bones. I’ve emerged out of winter, a bear rubbing her eyes in the sun, and it feels like there’s a whole world to play for.
“¡Vamos!” Mila exclaims, one particularly hot, heavy Saturday. “Let us go camping, no? A la laguna. ¿Con el sol y amigos perfectos y Wayrita y Vanesso y todo los gatitos, no? We bring all the cats, no?” She giggles like a girl, a rare, precious moment where she seems to have no cares in the world. We laugh back, me and Sammie and some of the other girls who’ve lasted the winter. Ilsa and René, two tough, hard-working yet particularly filthy Australians, Ally, chain-smoking and swearing her way down the road as she drags her tent and backpack behind her. Of course we do not take the cats, but maybe we do . . . sometimes I think Mila takes them everywhere.
We head south, over the river, towards a far-away place called the Laguna Corazón. We don’t make it there of course. Everyone but Mila and Sammie are extremely unfit. Cats like to sleep. Most of us spend all day on our butts, waiting for them to get up, and the most energetic thing we do is shovel pasta into our mouths.
As the sun gets lower and Mila reluctantly admits defeat, finally letting us pitch our tents in a patch of brambly scree, she takes us down one last trail. When the trees part, Sammie reaches out and grabs my hand. Rocks. Rocks! Giants, at least as tall as the canopy. Taller. Five of them, ten, I’m not sure.
“Fuck me!” Ally mutters.
I brush one of the rocks with my palm. I feel soft, sandy skin. I don’t know how long this rock has been here. Since the dinosaurs? Facing the other rocks, as if from a conference that happened millennia ago, and in the dying light, they all shimmer gold from the inside out. Somewhere there’s the faint tinkle of waterfalls.
Mila goes first, scrambling up the side. The rest of us follow soon after, trainers desperately scrabbling against rock.
At the top, none of us speak. We find ourselves on a ledge, thirty, forty metres above the ground. The other rocks are turned to face us, dotted through a canopy that stretches as far as I can see. The sun drops, and streaks of what was pink become red. There is a haze, turning darker by the minute, that looks like smoke. A forest floor goes on and on and on. Somewhere, I know, there’s the road. The headlights of trucks crawling along it. Somewhere is the village, where the generators will be turning on. I imagine I can hear the tinny chords of Doña Lucia’s eighties pop CD, still the only one she owns. I imagine too that I can hear Iskra calling. I can see Sama, asleep with his old white chin on his paws. Wayra pacing, the others spread out through the bobbled, mottled mist. Closing their eyes, pressing up against their fences as wild cats weave past outside. Claimed by and claiming this land, land that once, when this rock first formed, was free.
I don’t know what that word means anymore.
Free is a green that stretches forever with no ending. Free no longer exists.
I think about Sama. About him trapped in his small box, and Sama now, not with real space, as he could have had, but with more space than the people who knew him ever thought possible. The sun on his face, the pride in his eyes.
We sit in a row, the tops of our arms knocking, the scent of our sweat and the syrupy mould on our skin intermingling with the gritty, dry earth. What are the others thinking about? Home. Work. The jungle. Their friends and families, so far away. This family. The animals. Sammie, with Vanesso. Is Ilsa thinking about Leoncio? The puma she’s been working with since 2006 and will continue to work with until both of them grow old. Is René thinking about Juan and Carlos, the two baby pumas? She met them a few months ago, and they’ll be her best friends until Juan dies of a parasite, and then it’ll be just her and Carlos. For Ally, it’s Amira. One of our female jaguars, who arrived while I was away. Ally, like me, came thinking she would stay a few weeks. Now she’s changed all her plans. She will change her life, leaving her home, her family, her job, her boyfriends, just so she can be here, so she can take Amira out of her enclosure, so Amira can be wild for a few hours each day.
We are starting to feel it, in the way our faces won’t stop turning towards them, the way our hearts beat when they are near. The rock is rough and cold, and we are silent, church silent.
“Mila,” I whisper. I don’t know who Mila is thinking about. All of them, perhaps. Everyone. I stand by what I said to Tom, what feels like ages ago now. That all of it, all of them, is so much to hold in your head. Too much. But then . . . what is the alternative? The world out there feels completely blank. Everything is flattened, two-dimensional, and can’t compete with this, can it? Where everything is in technicolour. The jungle that used to horrify me? When I walked down a trail I didn’t know, I felt like the blood of my brain was seeping out of my ears, popping like a machine gun, the unfathomable number of heartbeats rewiring and undoing my body. Now, as I look out from these old rocks, it is the opposite. My body is being remade.
Mila turns her face towards mine. The evening shadows light her up, a gleaming golden bronze. I could never suggest building Wayra a bigger enclosure, not to Mila. There are too many others who need it first, who need it more, who have homes that are so much smaller, who can’t even come out of their enclosures at all. The birds. Iskra. Juan and Carlos, still in quarantine. We haven’t finished Yuma’s yet. Rupi’s enclosure floods every wet season so that he has to walk around it on a system of platforms if he wants dry feet. His paws bloom with fungus for months on end. Vanesso . . . his cage is about to fall down around his ears. Sammie is organising a fundraiser for it right now. But if Wayra can’t have an enclosure . . . and if she’s going to kee
p on going round and round and round on the same trails . . . I stare out over the mottled green.
“We have to cut her a new trail.”
Mila looks at me, sharp eyes tracing the lines of my face. A face that, when I look in the mirror now, I struggle to recognise. When she speaks, the gentleness in her tone is hard to stomach.
“She will get too scared, Laurita.”
I stick out my chin. “She’s scared now! She needs something. Some kind of freedom, even if it’s not the kind she deserves.”
Mila is quiet. “Say you do this for her,” she finally says. “And she likes this new trail. What will happen when you leave? What will happen during next wet season, when we have no volunteers again and she wants to go on this new trail, but her volunteers are not able to take her?”
“I won’t leave!” I say quickly, too quickly.
Mila laughs bitterly and doesn’t answer.
In the end, I just say hopelessly, “Can we try? Please.” Wayra has the shortest trails of any puma in the parque. I have to give her something. The sun starts to melt across the horizon.
Mila sighs. “Who will cut your new trail, Laurita? Me?”
“I will!” I hiss. We’re doing construction every day. We’re trying to finish Iskra’s enclosure, Yuma’s, something for Darwin, Morocha, a place for the four tejones who have turned up, maybe for Teanji too since he seems hell-bent on injuring a hapless volunteer in flip-flops. We need to get the fire trail up to scratch, who knows if there’ll be fires again this year, and when will we get going on the aviary? “I swear, I’ll get up early. Dolf will help.”
“I will too!” Sammie pipes up, listening from the other side.
“And me!” Ilsa, René, the rest of the girls. I feel a flush of warmth.
“Shit!” Ally exclaims, squeezing my hand. “I’m in. But only”—she holds up her finger warningly—“if you swear not to let Dolf use a machete anywhere near Mila.” Ally pokes Mila in the side, and she laughs. Mila’s face relaxes as she shakes her head despairingly. Last time Dolf used a machete, it flew out of his hand and wedged itself in a tree, inches from Mila’s ear.
Later, when we’ve climbed down off the rocks and the sun has disappeared entirely, leaving just a canopy of stars and blackness, I go to sleep in my tent with Sammie. I can’t quite bring myself to smile. Not after what Mila has said. What I see her saying silently to all of us volunteers when she looks into our faces. You’re going to leave. I can never forget it, and neither can you. Sometimes accusingly, but mostly just . . . true. Even after I fall asleep, I think that her words, spoken and unspoken, stay in my mind for a long time, long into my dreams.
It takes a few weeks but the first chance I get, I’m out there with Dolf and the girls. Osito and Germáncito come too, excited for the challenge, and their wicked machete skills halve the work. Dolf optimistically calls the new trail, once it’s done, spreading before us gleaming and glorious, the Paradise Expressway. We all share a celebratory snack of fresh motoyoé fruit, picked by the boys. The fruit is tart and lemony, and as we hang our legs over a tree at the lagoon, everyone laughing, Osito trying to hit Dolf with old, rotten fruit, I try not to be anxious. I try not to imagine being stuck out there, a long, long way now from the cage, and I try not to let Mila’s caution dampen things. The trail is beautiful. We’ve added more than a mile. It’s new jungle for us, for her. Maybe she went there when she was free, north of her cage and runner, but not with us. Never with us.
The next day I’m walking in front of Wayra, Dolf with the ropes behind, and when I veer off, onto the start of the Paradise Expressway—new, strange, uncertain—my heart beats wildly. I see her eyes cloud and—for a second—I hesitate. Fear flickers over her face. She looks tawny, ochre with a yellowing sun. Confusion. Then the rest. Excitement, incredulity. A flash of stubbornness, but it’s only a flash. It’s overtaken by something that jams into my stomach and makes me feel as if I’m flying. Trust. Broken and built between us so many times. She raises her head, meeting my gaze. And then we walk. She doesn’t grumble or growl. She is silent, she is awed.
About halfway round, we reach a sunlit tree, massive and old and fallen along the right bank of the trail, and she lurches up it, scampering, almost pulling Dolf off his feet. I realise I’m laughing. I realise the tension has melted off me, just as it has her. She’s relaxed, lying across the tree, her paws hanging, her eyes wide and raised to the gorgeous beauty of the shards of sky. I see Dolf out of the corner of my eye, a daft grin on his face too. The salty taste of sweat and happiness sticks on my lips. She turns, turns again, casting a pose that sends a long shadow across the ground. Not a princess. A queen. Her silvery fur glistens, the light catching patches of her, criss-crossed with shadows.
“I love you,” I say quietly, my voice breaking.
Her neck arches into the sun, catching a sweep of gold. We both watch an eagle soar across a patch of sky. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to say it out loud. She turns to me and flicks her tail mildly, agreeing. I knew you loved me, ages ago. She puts her cheek on both her paws and gazes at me. There’s a marvelling look in her eyes. A questioning look. Far away, the eagle disappears, lost within the clouds.
There’s a full moon just coming up, its face swollen and pale, hard as a penny. It’s so light on the road we don’t need torches and when Sammie stops walking, the lines of her face are stark, almost blue. I can hear the frogs. The nightly chirp of the crickets. The soft touch of a breeze. The dark blackness of the trees on both sides is solid, unflinching. A shape, not too far away, slithers out of the shadows. A snake perhaps, or a lizard. Sucking up the last heat still caught in the tarmac. Sammie’s turned away though, so she doesn’t see it. She’s turned away from me too. For a moment, she’s very still. Then she bursts into tears. She’s weeping, inconsolable—loud, ugly tears spilling down her face. The curve of her cheeks, pale now in the darkness, gleams. Her thick hair shakes as she cries, her strong shoulders shuddering. I gaze at her. I don’t know what to do. It looks like her heart is breaking.
“They’re going to shut him back in that shitty aviary!” She sobs, choking. “They want to take away his freedom! They’re going to do it, aren’t they?”
I press my teeth together hard enough that pain reverberates up my jaw. A group of volunteers have organised themselves into something called VAPTOL. It stands for Volunteers Against the Preferential Treatment of Lorenzo. They’ve been campaigning for a few weeks, but it finally reached its peak tonight when Lorenzo almost took the lead member’s ear off, just because he tried to help Sammie off with her boot. It would make me laugh, if I didn’t want to scream instead.
Sammie bends her knees, then collapses into the grass. It’s wet, a little bit dewy. I pass her a cigarette, but she just holds it in her shaking fingers. “Are they right?”
I sit down slowly across from her, brushing my hand over the tarmac, checking for more snakes. I find none, but it’s warm and reassuring, and I curl my fingers around the loose gravel until the tiny flakes dig into my palm. I used to be afraid of Sammie. And now, she might be the closest friend I’ve ever had. I stare at her, at the ugly tears running down her muddy face, a crumpled wet mess on the grass. I probably have Wayra to thank for this friendship. Over and over, she’s taught me that maybe it does hurt to get close to someone. But also, maybe, it’s worth it. A million times, it’s worth it.
Is it worth it for Lorenzo? I picture him flying ecstatically around the tallest trees. His wings pump like bellows, a gleeful squawk shattering the beautiful blue. I picture him curled up in Sammie’s shirt, right by her heart. Warm and cosy after a day on his own scavenging palm nuts and his favourite fruits. Refereeing a game of volleyball, twirling impatiently from high up on a branch, his pupils contracting at each throw of the ball. Chasing Sammie down the road, shrieking unstoppably, almost sailing into the side of a logging truck, and the hours of work we have had to waste trying to get him into bed every night. The rest of the macaws desperately shar
pening their beaks on the aviary fence. Crazy Eyes dancing for attention, for even a hint of the life Lolo’s got. Finally I see Sammie getting on a plane and Lorenzo, lost and alone, searching for his beloved mate amongst the empty faces on the patio.
Is it worth it? Is it right?
I don’t know.
The next morning when I wake up, I hear a yell coming from the direction of the aviary. When I get there, still pulling on my boots, I stop short. There is a small crowd of people standing as I am, speechless. Mila is inside, tears running down her cheeks. She’s in the cage at the furthest corner, near the back. Cage five. It’s where Dontdothat lives with a trio of tiny sweet-natured parrots called Pica, Pico and Picky. I see Big Red peering blindly through the fence, cocking his head from side to side, dancing anxiously. Romeo and Juliet stare in too, very still. Lorenzo watches from outside, his expression unfathomable.
“What . . . ,” I begin, but don’t finish. I can see that cage five is empty. I can also see that there’s a hole in the side of the fence, towards the back near their night enclosures. It’s not a hole made by an animal. It’s straight, rectangular. It’s been cut. Cut by a person. My hand goes to my mouth as comprehension dawns. This is where the aviary backs onto the jungle. It’s the point where someone would come in, using our trails. Fishermen, poachers, illegal loggers. Someone who knows our land. We’ve been finding empty shotgun cartridges on some of the trails for months now. Cigarette butts by the lagoons. Empty beer cans by Vanesso’s cage. I look at Mila wildly. Her hair is a mess, her face pale. Agustino is standing very still with his hand gripping Osito’s shoulder. Both of them look like they’re going to be sick. I think I’m going to be sick.
We search the market. We search the village and we search the town. We search the streets for any sign of Dontdothat, Pica, Pico and Picky. Mila and Agustino suspect they’ve already been sold and we will not get them back, but over the next days, weeks, months—every time I turn a corner in town, I expect to hear the jibbing shriek, “Don’t do that!” or see the soft little wings of three perfectly green Amazonian parrots, one with a V-shaped blue tuft around his neck. But there’s nothing. Mila and Agustino are right. There’s no sign of them at all.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 22