The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  I don’t answer Harry. An empty enclosure, the size of Sama’s, is like gold dust. There’s a long list of cats who might benefit from it, who might be a better fit than Wayra. There are so many unknowns. Maybe such a big change would terrify her. Maybe it would be the worst thing I could do for her. But then, maybe she would love it. I can barely imagine what it would be like. She’d be able to run, for more than ten metres at a time, without a rope on her neck. She would have space. Space! I would be able to take her collar off.

  Harry closes his eyes. Sammie picks up her unlit cigarette and starts again to twirl it between her fingers. After a while, I fall asleep to the sound of her fingers, and to the rats, who are rustling in the rafters.

  The next evening we go into the village to play football. The place has swollen over the years, increased by traffic and development, but things—at the same time—have gotten worse. With the weather more extreme, crops have been failing, the shop shelves emptier. On the surface, there’s a glow of electricity and investment. They have a cancha, an impressive outdoor sports court. Teenagers flock to play football there and we join them once a week, led by Oso and Jhonny. Despite Oso and Jhonny’s skill level, which is high, we always lose. Oso watches now from the goal, his head in his hands, as volunteers flail uselessly about the pitch. I sit in the benches, happily eating an ice lolly that I’m sure is one percent mango, ten percent ice, eighty-nine percent sugar. It makes my teeth hurt.

  “You’re not playing?” Charlie collapses down, taking a break from the game, shaking his hair like a wet dog and covering me with beads of sweat.

  “I have no desire to sweat any more than I am already, thank you.”

  He flashes a winning smile at the local eight-year-olds behind me, busy plaiting my hair. The girls all put their hands over their mouths, giggling wildly.

  “Did you give them full disclosure before they touched you?” he asks, turning back to the game. “This may contain lice, grease, hasn’t been washed . . .”

  “Hey! I washed my hair yesterday.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Or maybe the day before . . .” I grin, passing him the end of my ice lolly. “Are we winning?”

  “No. I think Oso’s head is about to explode.”

  I nod. “How was Ru today?”

  “You mean how was Harry? He held it together.”

  “Good. And Ru was . . .”

  “Yeah. He was OK! Happy to see Harry, definitely.”

  I cannot help but smile with relief.

  “Harry told me lots of stories, about the old days.” Charlie grins.

  “About Ru?”

  “Yeah, sounded amazing, walking him. I wish I’d been here.”

  “You were still in nappies then.”

  “Yeah.” He miserably takes a big bite, getting mango all over his beard.

  I stare at the teenagers running rings around our team. Finally, after a long pause, I say, “Do you think Wayra should move into Sama’s cage?”

  Charlie looks at me with surprise. “Do you?”

  I gaze at my feet. Finally, I just say, “If Nena says yes, would you help?”

  He puts my sticky ice lolly back into my hand. “If I said no, would you still be my friend?”

  I laugh, tension releasing in my chest. “No.”

  “Then I’ll help.” He turns, winking at the girls and eliciting another peal of giggles. Then he nods towards the court and stands up, stretching and extending his hand to pull me up off the benches. “Come on, it’s over. Look, Oso’s about to cry.”

  I stand on the road by myself, the moon just a thin sliver of a single edge. At first the stars fill up everything, the Southern Cross, Orion’s Belt, a gazillion flickers I can’t name, which make up the Milky Way. Here it’s called Willka Mayu, or the Sacred River. Some of the stars move, shooting into the darkness trillions of miles away. Oso has told me that Quechuans animate the dark shapes behind the stars. They see animals, in the absence of light. And these dark-space animals live in the Sacred River, watching over their living, breathing animal counterparts below. Oso told me that this world, the one that lives and breathes, the one that he and I stand on, is represented by the puma. This makes a strange kind of sense to me, as do those dark-space animals. I never used to see anything behind the stars. Just blackness. Now I see Mach’acuay, the Serpent, with their undulating shadow. I see Urcuchillay, the Llama, and Atoq, the Fox at the Llama’s feet. I see Hanp’atu, the Toad.

  I listen to the toads and frogs now, conducting their nocturnal symphony. Mila used to say that the louder they get, the more likely it is to rain. I don’t doubt it. There’s a light breeze now that smells of rain, pulling my braided hair off the back of my neck. I brush away the mosquitoes who homed in the moment I got here, like wasps to a bright mango ice lolly. I pace and wave my hands desperately, slapping at the wobbly backs of my thighs. It doesn’t do much good, but it helps me from losing my shit. I stare at my phone for a long time, and then I pull up her number.

  “¿Hola?” The line crackles, reception terrible anywhere but some indiscriminate place on the road that seems to change every day.

  “Hola, Nena,” I say, shoving my hands underneath my T-shirt and clasping the phone in the crook of my shoulder.

  “¡Laurita!” Nena exclaims. She’s probably still out in the jungle, her spider monkeys, dark as those shapes in the sky, curled up in the branches of the trees. Morocha too. She’s there now, in those trees, with other monkeys just like her. Nena’s face, her black hair caught up in a brightly coloured scarf, gleaming in the starlight, the phone cradled in her hand.

  “Nena, ¿todo bien?”

  “Sí. Y tú, ¿cómo estás?”

  “Bien. Todo bien aquí. Pero . . .” I hesitate, not sure how to get this right. I feel the heavy weight of the dark spaces between the stars watching me. I can almost feel their breath on the back of my neck. “¿Podemos hablar de la jaula de Sama?”

  There is a long pause, and then I hear her nod. “Sí.”

  “Entonces.” I take a deep breath. “¿Qué piensas de esto . . . ?”

  Charlie and I stare up at the sky. It’s a groaning, freezing cold. Four months have passed since that phone call with Nena, and I’m a month short of my leaving date, a date that can’t be extended, not this time.

  “Are you sure tomorrow’s the day?” Charlie asks, bouncing up and down on his toes.

  I gulp. “We can’t wait anymore.”

  “It might rain.”

  “It might.” I look at him, my eyes stinging. And I grin, so wide my cheeks hurt. Tomorrow, if all goes well, we will walk Wayra into Sama’s old enclosure. It will be the first time in over two years that she will walk with a person on a rope. Charlie and I separate, waving to each other, as I head down her trail. And as I round the corner, moving a little faster, skidding down the bank, I call out:

  “Hola, Wayra!” There’s a familiar swelling in my heart. She squeaks at my approach. She has two volunteers who take her out on her runners every day. My routine is too erratic to be with her permanently, I need to be in the office or training volunteers on other animals. But I try to see her a few times a week, even if it is just to feed her. She is always happy to see me.

  “Hola, sweet pea,” I murmur, kneeling down by the fence. I push my hands inside and she squashes them in her excitement, making me wince. Her face has become more ruffled as the years have gone by, her bones more fragile, her fur less well groomed. But she is always perfect. She meows again and I meow back, rubbing her chin. I let her lick my fingertips and nibble at the dirt under my nails, before she races off with a half-hearted hiss and waits, swishing her tail by the door. Her head is all over the place. Up, down, left, right. She hasn’t been out today. Her volunteers have been busy with their rakes and machetes, cleaning the trail on the other side of the lagoon, the one that will take us all the way to Sama’s.

  As I let her out, I try to work out in my head how many times I have walked down the trail to this
cage, how many times I’ve clipped her onto this first runner. A thousand. Two thousand, I don’t know. I try to remember every detail, holding each one. The grass-green excitement in her eyes as she tracks me coming. The twitch of her pink nose. The massive sweep of the silvery-grey branches of the mapajo tree, right in the centre of this huge new runner area that stretches over seventy metres and is almost fifteen metres wide. There’s a lake-type pond underneath the tree, which she sometimes likes to lie in, chest deep in mud, her white chin brown with swamp, simple happiness in the lines of her muscles. It’s getting shadowy, the clouds lowering, and I think she might want to play. Her head is still bobbing, her eyes a little silly, her mouth a little open, her tongue lolling. Instead of picking up a palm leaf, though, which would have been the signal that it’s playtime, I go to her instead and crouch just inside the cave of patuju that she has settled in. She immediately leans forwards and begins to lick me, pulling at my arm with her sandpaper tongue. When she is done with one, she switches to the other. When she is done with that, she starts on my hands, and then back to my fingers, and then my fingernails, which are her favourites. As she licks, I run my other hand over her back, her ears, her throat, neck, chin, searching for ticks. I find one, a swollen purple one under her lip. It takes a few tries and a few hisses, but eventually I get a good grip and twist him off, his little legs flailing. The moment he’s off, Wayra’s searching my hands. I hold the tick obediently on my palm and Wayra takes him in her teeth, chewing. After swilling the little creature around on her tongue, I see her swallow. Then she looks at me, satisfied.

  “That’s so disgusting, chica.” She’s the only princess—the only puma—I know who insists on eating ticks.

  She doesn’t care. She goes back to licking my hands. When she’s done, I leave her to complete the process on herself. First her front paws, then her chest, then her white belly, grumbling a low contented moan. I walk to the sentinel tree. Last year, it started leaking a gelatinous orange ooze, seeping into mounds around the roots. When I prod it, it wobbles like brains. Oso told me, when I asked him to come and look, worried that the tree was dying, that the jelly can cure cancer. I touch the bark, warm and silky under my fingers. I’ve known this tree for over a decade.

  “Hey, love,” I whisper, turning back, wiping my eyes with frustration. Stop fucking crying! I laugh at myself. Wayra has stopped licking, half on her back, her tail in her mouth, and is watching me suspiciously. I walk back quickly and sit down next to her. We are in a patch of fallen seeds here, bright-red and black ones, and the earth is still slightly damp, seeping into my jeans. The moment I am still, she goes back to her licking.

  “Wayra,” I say quietly. “Tomorrow, you’re going to a new enclosure.”

  She ignores me.

  “You’ll never come back here.”

  She continues to ignore me.

  “I need you to be brave, OK?” Wayra gives a low grumble and spits out her tail. Her eyes are huge, pupils tiny pinpricks. Then she yawns and sniffs some wet leaves above her head.

  After I’ve put her back in and she’s happily gnawing on some chicken, I go to the lagoon, just for a few moments, and sit at the top of the ridge to watch the colours turn. It’s getting dark later again. I love that about wet season. The long days, the early mornings. Dry season is nearly over. We’re meant to be in fire season. There are fires every year, but recently the bad years have been falling in cycles. One year on, one off. Last year was terrible. With no rain and no swamp at all, massive swathes of jungle were crackling by mid-June.

  Pachamama, the Andean earth mother, is important in Bolivia. About sixty percent of the population identifies as Indigenous, belonging to thirty-six recognised ethnic groups. In 2011, Evo Morales—Bolivia’s socialist, Indigenous, longest-serving president—and his government created the Law of Mother Earth, controversially giving legal rights to all nature, equal with humans. Morales is outspoken in his criticism of industrialised countries and their failure to adequately tackle climate change. However, despite grounding Pachamama at the heart of his politics, industrialisation continues apace. His government has offered the parque barely any financial support, while still relying on us to take many unwanted animals who would find no homes otherwise. And worldwide, in just one decade, a conservative estimate is that corporations have destroyed over fifty million hectares of forest, largely in the production and use of palm oil, soya, meat and dairy for profit. More of the Amazon is sold off, and the world becomes hotter, drier, wetter, sadder and stormier.

  We wouldn’t have survived last year if it hadn’t been for teams of local volunteer fire fighters—los bomberos—who poured in to help.

  This year, though, with one of the worst wet seasons in this area in living memory, most of the jungle never having dried out, swamp still up to our waists, there have been no fires. Not here.

  I pick up a handful of sandy toffee-coloured dirt and sieve it through my fingers. The familiar capuchin troop, babies all grown up, sits on the big tree across the water. A pair of night monkeys, eyes huge, are hiding in the bamboo above my head, I can hear them rustling. I watch the black shape of a caiman glide past and laugh, the noise startling me a little. The amount of time I’ve spent in that water is certifiably insane. Hours, hours which have probably added up to days, weeks of my life, trying to convince Wayra to go swimming. But she hasn’t been in in years. Maybe she’s finally decided that she doesn’t want to get her legs bitten off. I don’t know. I still go in. And she just gazes at me from the bank, quietly judging, head on her crossed paws.

  She’ll never come back here. And I wonder if I’ll ever come back, sit on this bank, touch the dirt, watch the monkeys, watch the caimans, watch the family of turtles sunning themselves on their log. The edges of the beach have changed over the years, it’s larger than it used to be, the vines and bamboo tamed, we’ve cut down a few dead trees and there is more space to see the sky. Will I come back and will it feel small? Will it feel like a happy place or just a place where she was stuck, where we were all stuck? The sky is red now. I pick up a dark stone, split down the middle, the inside the colour of caramel and melted milk chocolate, and hold it in my palm, feeling its trapped warmth. Then I throw it, with a heavy plop, into the water, and watch the ripples spread outwards.

  By the time I get back to camp, the red sky has faded to black.

  “You OK, Frodo?” Sammie eyes me carefully as I step into the fumador. She has come back, just for this. She’ll only stay a week. But I’m grateful she’s here. So very grateful. A candle is going on the ledge, fluttering gently.

  I nod, wiping streams of tears off my cheeks.

  Charlie turns to Ally. “Do you think she’s going to start crying before the walk tomorrow, or during?”

  Ally makes a face. “I’d say both.”

  “Fuck you! This is very emotional!” I sniff, laughing. “Moving home is one of the most stressful things anyone can do.” I look at Charlie. “Are you ready?”

  He jumps up, rubbing his hands together. “I’m an empty vessel. Fill me with knowledge.”

  “Ropes?”

  He holds up the ropes that I made earlier, two ropes five metres long, one thin, one thick, attached together at one end with an automatic-locking carabiner, copies of her old walking ropes. I hold them for a moment, remembering the feel. Then I take them both and clip the ends to my belt.

  “Who’s going to be Wayra?”

  “Oh me! Me!” Ally jumps up and grabs the carabiner.

  The four of us troop onto the path.

  Ally, on hands and knees, leaps at Charlie, hissing and spitting. She catches him off guard and manages to topple him to the ground.

  “No más, Wayra!” Charlie yells, legs flailing.

  “Guys!” I snap. “This is serious.”

  They both stand up, grinning, sheepish.

  “Alright, Charlie, go in front. Wayra always has someone walking in front.”

  “What?” Charlie, rubbing his shin, looks around f
or confirmation. “Always? That’s nuts. None of the other cats—”

  “That’s Wayra.” I shrug.

  “OK, cool. But am I going to get fucked up?” He looks at Ally pointedly.

  I look down at the ropes. “If anyone’s going to get hurt, it’ll probably be me.” I take a long, shuddery breath, feeling the emotion bubbling inside me together with everything that has passed between me and Wayra over the past ten years. Quietly I touch the raised scars along my arms. It’s been two years, two long years since Wayra and I walked together. By rights, I should go in front. She knows me better, doesn’t know Charlie at all. But . . . this will be her last-ever walk. I never thought she would get to walk again. And this is my mission. I can’t ask someone else to take the ropes. “This”—I nod to Charlie, indicating that he should start walking—“is how you walk with Wayra . . .”

  Charlie and I meet on the patio at five. It’s still dark, but I want to walk the trails one last time, to do a final rake of any last leaves, covering the scents of any wild animals that may have prowled during the night. There’s no one else up as we set out, just Bruce, keeping an eye on us from the back of the truck in case we’re planning on giving him any unsolicited attention. I have my backpack, full of snacks and water in case Wayra decides to lie down in protest. I have my head torch, I have the ropes slung over my shoulder, I have an extra-thick shirt, in case things go badly. We walk in silence. It isn’t raining but the clouds are hanging low and dark, blocking out the stars. The frogs are quiet but I can hear the crickets in the grass and the occasional hoot of an owl. The tall white trees sway on both sides of us.