“You remember what to do?” I ask, nervousness and excitement twisting in my stomach when we get to the witch trees.
“Sure. I just laugh when she hisses, stumble a lot because she likes clumsy people, and tell her she’s a sweet princess and it’s all going to be fine?”
I chuckle, despite myself. “Exactly.”
He nods again. “Cool.”
“Hola, princess!”
“Hola, darlin’.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Darling?”
“What?” Charlie crosses his arms. “What’s wrong with darlin’?”
“I don’t think she’s a darlin’. She’s not from North Carolina in the fifties.”
“Oh and sweet pea suits her so much better?”
We both glare at each other, until we hear Wayra squeak.
“Meow,” I squeak back, nudging Charlie. “You do it too.”
“That’s a ridiculous noise.”
“Just do it!”
“Meow!”
Wayra squeaks again and, when we round the corner, she is waiting by the fence. We both crouch and put our arms in. Her face is a beautiful soft grey, chalky in the early golden light. She immediately goes to Charlie and presses her face into his hands. He grins irritatingly. I snort.
“She’s a flirt.”
“She loves me! Don’t you, darlin’?”
Finally when she’s done with him, she gives me a cursory lick before running into the doorway, where she lies down and starts avidly licking her belly.
“Alright.” I stare at her for a moment.
“Alright,” Charlie repeats, his hands in his pockets. “You got this?”
I take a deep, steadying breath. “I’ve got this.”
“Where should I stand?”
“Just where you are. When I let her out, go down the human trail a bit and start calling her.” I thread the end of the ropes with her carabiner through the gap in the door. Wayra watches me out of the corner of her eye, her ears back, but she doesn’t do anything. She just grumbles as I fumble with the lock, but then it’s on and she’s up, clipped on, and waiting.
“Alright sweet pea. We’ve got this, right?”
She turns her head, ever so slightly, and gazes peaceably into my eyes, before hissing so savagely I start backwards a little.
“OK,” I laugh. Charlie laughs too, although for the first time a little nervously. I swing open the door, and the grey shadows of dawn still cling to the clearing. Wayra springs out, over the moon to be out so early. She goes like clockwork to the sentinel tree, where she noses around a bit before squatting to pee. It takes her a while, her legs stiff. After she’s peed, she thinks for a moment and then turns in a few slow circles. My heart is thudding so loudly, I am sure she’ll hear it.
“OK, Wayra,” I finally say, taking a deep breath. “We’re going to walk.”
Charlie agrees, at the start of the trail. “This way, Wayra!” He rustles some palm leaves, trying to catch her interest.
Wayra looks askance at me. She is frozen, unsure what’s going on, caught half between wanting to go onto her long runner, as she is used to, and curiosity about what the hell is happening. Please, Wayra, I pray. If we can’t do it like this, we’ll have to sedate you. Sedation in older cats is so dangerous, particularly here in the jungle. They can die from it.
I watch her. Maybe, I think, bracing myself for disappointment, maybe today isn’t the day. We’ll just have to try again tomorrow, and the next day. If a week passes and she still hasn’t done it . . .
“¡Vamos, chica!” I call. She looks at me once more, then races towards me, and I feel my heart jump, but she swerves at the last moment and leaps onto her runner platform, a new one we built last year, where she sits, craning her neck to see what’s making all this noise.
“Has she moved?” Charlie calls.
“She’s on her platform,” I call back. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Vamos, darlin’!” It sounds as if he’s picked up a palm leaf and is waving it at head height through some bracken. Wayra’s ears prick up. Steeling myself, I walk in front of her, holding out my hands. Then I unclip her from the runner and put her onto my belt. Her eyes turn black with utter horror and outrage. What are you doing? She snarls. It’s been a long time since I’ve been attached to her like this and I have to gulp, grounding my boot heels into the dirt so that I don’t see stars.
“Come on, love,” I beg. “We’re walking.”
She swipes the ropes.
“You can do this, I know it. If I can do it, you can do it.”
“¡Vamos, Wayra!” Charlie shouts.
Her head snaps towards the sound of Charlie’s voice.
“You can do it,” I repeat, in a whisper.
Her eyes grow and then, suddenly, she’s off. It takes my brain a few moments to understand and by the time it does, I’m running. We speed past Charlie, I just have time to register his startled face before he’s gone. I think she’s so shocked to be out, to be down the trail she’s seen people arrive from for the thirteen years that she’s been in this cage, that she just runs, and once she starts, she doesn’t stop. I am so unfit I can’t breathe, but I keep going. Over our immaculately clean trails, past the lime tree, past the pink-flowering bush, we are almost at the fork to Amira before she slows. I hear Charlie close behind. Wayra spins, perhaps realising she doesn’t know where she is. I jump to the side.
“Go in front,” I choke out and Charlie does, skirting past her without hesitating. She watches, her ears back. Remembering this after all these years. Remembering her bodyguard.
“It’s OK, darlin’,” he soothes. “It’s OK.”
She doesn’t hiss. She just starts walking again, slower now but still at a good trot. She is silent. She doesn’t question the fork, she just follows, her eyes wide, her ears going in every direction. Charlie looks back at me over his shoulder.
“Are you crying?”
“No!” I sniffle, wiping away a tear, grinning so much I can’t quite see properly.
“You’re the worst runner in the world.”
“I think I might puke.” I laugh, gripping my side.
“Please don’t.”
“Look at her!” I whisper. “She’s so brave.”
She keeps on walking, not looking left or right, just forwards. We’re approaching the opening to the road now, and here she falters. This is the most dangerous bit. The trail intersects with the road for about five metres before swinging back into the jungle again. This is the place where, once upon a time, I stood before a pile of rocks next to a disgruntled Bryan, having no idea that the enclosure we hadn’t even started building would one day lead me here.
“Go forwards,” I instruct Charlie. “Go past the road.”
Wayra sniffs the air, testing it, scared now, and turns her head back to me uncertainly.
“It’s OK,” I whisper. “It’s OK.”
She almost breaks into a run again after Charlie, doesn’t even look at the road, just a quick fearful dart of her head, and then we are past the danger, back into the jungle. I’m crying again but it doesn’t matter, she just keeps going at a fast trot, totally silent, not even a single hiss or a grumble. This is a good walk. This is a perfect walk. The sun is just coming up, peeking over the canopy, giving the lagoon to our left a pinkish glow.
“We’re almost there!” Charlie croons as the trees part and the fence of her new home comes into sight. Then she does stop and I stumble backwards so as not to tread on her tail. We are on the long north edge, and in order to reach the doors we have to skirt left, around the corner of the high fence. I think this might be difficult, but when Charlie goes left, she hisses, just once, at the fence, before following him. I truly think she is just so shocked at being somewhere she doesn’t know, that it hasn’t quite registered in her brain yet.
“That’s right, love,” I whisper as she goes around the edge, following Charlie through the open doors. I follow right behind her. Charlie hangs b
ack, I hear him closing the doors behind us and then I’m fumbling with the carabiner at her collar, she is still walking, not sure where she is, I pull the carabiner up and round, and then before she even knows it, she’s off.
She stands uncertainly, looking around. The enclosure spreads all around us, left, right and in front. We’ve cleared this first section a bit, about the size of her old runner area, and there’s a raised wooden bed filled with fresh hay, a tepee we’ve made out of palm leaves, some logs for scratching. Other than this, outside of this open clearing, the patuju plants start, thronging first and then thickening, turning everything dark grassy green. There is a knotted patch of bamboo on our left, a clump of massive palms in front of us, ferns, fanned and silvery, thin red trees next to them, a huge bronze mapajo tree, more patuju . . .
I reach behind me, reaching for Charlie’s arm, and grip it hard, thinking I might fall over if I don’t.
“Are you OK?”
She spins. She gazes at us. She sees us, she sees me, further back than I should be if I was still attached to the ropes, if she was still attached. I watch her calculating the distance, her limbs strangely, doubtfully angled, I watch her understanding, her green eyes widening, turning black, then her pupils falling to pinpricks.
Then she’s running. In no particular direction, she just runs. My hand flies to my mouth. The jungle rustles and then she’s gone.
We hear her, hear the forest collapsing under the burst of her paws, her body, her muscles, but we don’t see her again for many minutes. Slowly the two of us inch backwards and sit on a big log by the doors.
“How long did that take?” I finally whisper.
He lets out a long breath and I see his throat working as he tries to swallow.
“Ten minutes,” he says very quietly. “Just ten minutes.”
I half laugh, half sob, half I don’t know what. It could have taken all day to get here. More than that. “She did it.”
“She did!”
“After all that.”
“And I thought I was going to see you get fucked up!” he exclaims, laughing, sounding extremely relieved.
“She didn’t even hiss.”
“She . . .” He hesitates, just as she bursts out of the patuju in a blur. She runs so fast, for a split second I don’t quite understand. She’s running differently, she looks different, she’s . . . Then I get it. She’s running without ropes. She’s running without ropes and without a fence cutting her off at the corner. She’s just running. I remember the first time I ever saw her, and how she’d looked squashed. Outside of the cage, on the trail, she’d looked huge. Expanded. This is like that, only a thousand times more. I watch her, my mouth open, unable to move, unable to process, but Charlie is grabbing my arm, pulling me up. She’s sprinting towards us. Her eyes are wide, disbelieving, thrilled. My heart thuds with adrenaline, a free puma coming straight at us, but a few metres away she slows, then she’s headbutting my legs. I put my arms down to block in case she’s planning on jumping, but she just starts licking. I immediately sit down again, and she pushes herself into my chest, licking, licking my arms and hands. Then she begins to purr. Normally whenever I’ve heard her purr, she cuts off quickly after a few moments, after she remembers that the world isn’t so great. But now she just keeps going, reverberating through the top layer of my chest and into my heart.
“Oh my . . . goodness!” The words come out kind of garbled.
She moves on to Charlie and licks him too. She continues to purr, purr and purr and purr. She stays with us for another few minutes, precious minutes, before leaping away, disappearing again. She goes, comes back, goes, comes back. After a while, her sides heaving, exhausted, she sniffs the fence, licks some branches, scratches a tree log, before lying down in some wet leaves a few yards away from us and putting her head on her paws, leaning a little to the side, her cheek just touching the damp earth. And she just continues to purr.
“I’ve never heard her do that,” I finally say, not quite believing that this is real, this is actually happening, she is lying in front of us not on a rope, with more than half an acre of jungle that is now hers.
“Is she . . .” Charlie hesitates, as if he doesn’t dare say it.
“Saying thank you?” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
I just stare at her. I stare and stare, unable to speak, unable to even think past the fact that she’s done it, we’ve done it, it’s over, we’re here.
“This . . . ,” Charlie finally says, searching for words, “is amazing.”
“Yes,” I agree, laughing dizzily. She falls silent and eventually falls asleep in the sun. The two of us sit on the broken log. Finally I pull out my phone and dial.
“¿Hola? ¿Laurita?”
“Nena,” I whisper.
“¿Sí, todo bien?” Nena’s tone is strained, stressed. “¿Qué pasó?”
I put my head in my hands. “Nena. Wayrita está en la nueva jaula.”
“¿En serio?” Nena exclaims, the phone crackling.
“Sí.” I nod, my legs starting to shake.
“Oh, Laurita,” Nena whispers. “¿Ella es feliz?”
“Sí.” Relief, shock, pride, disbelief. It clamours so loudly I can barely hear anything. I can barely hear my own words. She is happy. Happy. “Wayra es feliz.” And then we both burst into tears.
EPILOGUE
It is early 2019. There’s a tree in her enclosure. It’s right in the middle, in the places I never went to with Sama, the places I never saw. We walk there, Wayra and I.
She purred every day, in the beginning. For months, she played every day too. She was blissfully, gorgeously happy. Recently, the world has started to leak in again, I think, and her pain is coming back. Sometimes she hisses at nothing, sometimes she growls. But it’s sometimes. It’s not always. It’s not like it was. She’s not like she was.
She limps as we walk, favouring her front right paw, trying not to put weight on her back legs. Stiff in the musty wet of another dying summer. The cold will be here again soon, bringing the winds that rock trees out of their root systems, that make us pull on our beanies and fleece jackets. Then the fires will come again, nightmarish, the dread of smoke on the breeze across Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay . . .
Now, though, it’s still wet hot. There’s an underlayer to the air that smells autumnal. Falling leaves scatter the earth around our feet with bruised purple. Wayra and I walk down the paths she’s made for herself, she is inches behind me, which is how she likes it still. She wears no ropes, or collar. I feel a slight tingling between my shoulder blades, the whisper of a puma stepping on my shadow, but it’s no more than that. Mostly, it feels like walking with a friend.
When we reach the middle, I look up into the branches. I don’t know the tree’s name, but I know its canopy spreads like a weeping willow’s, knotting a thousand times and enclosing this tiny clearing with its carpet of violet and gold. I can hear the high ee ee, ee ee of a bird, the resonant shriek of another, piercing the morning with its car alarm. The tree’s bark is the colour of honey. The limbs are thick, sturdy, wrapped in mossy spots and whorls that are rough when I touch them. There are still scratch marks from Sama around the trunk. The leaves are dark green, almost black on the bottom, and they feel like wet paper when I hold one in my hand.
Wayra, who’s standing by my side, so close I can feel the heat of her fur on my thigh, the thump of her excited heartbeat, is looking upwards too. I know that soon I’ll have to bring Oso out here with his machete, and we’ll have to cut some of these branches down. It’s not safe for her to be climbing, not good for her arthritis, but . . . not yet. Not now. Now her eyes are swollen with the early light, the sky still pink. I can smell citrus. Her nose is wet, her ears, dipped in charcoal, turned towards the noise of the birds. The monkeys will be coming soon, capuchins, squirrel monkeys. I feel a rush of heat, a tingling up my spine, a sense of just being gloriously, luckily, wildly here. With her.
Suddenly her tail quivers and she�
��s up. She’s in the top branches, the tree rattling, five metres above my head, ten, and I step back so that I can watch her. I’m here because she says it’s OK. My heart thuds with alarm—Please don’t fall—and respect as she leaps blindly, perfectly, through the canopy. She’s covered Sama’s scratch marks with her own, over and over like a language, like a claiming. I’ve touched them too, pressing my fingers into the scars.
She stands, poised between tree branches, her tail juddering, her mouth wide, indescribably content, her eyes and mine pulling upwards into a pale pinkish-gold sky that is just starting to rain, pattering against our faces and the leaves that are papery thin, dark bottle-green like glass.
I wish I could end this book here.
I want to tell you that the parque is thriving. That we’re inundated with eager volunteers. That all our staff are from the local communities, and that those strong links have balanced out our work, making it long-lasting, sustainable and hopeful. That all the animals are healthy, in fact that nobody gives us animals anymore at all, because the trade in illegal pets has plummeted. That I don’t fly anymore. That deforestation is over, climate change isn’t happening, Australia hasn’t been on fire, the Amazon and communities across the Global South aren’t being destroyed by mining companies looking for minerals for mobile phones, oil companies aren’t setting up new pipelines, multinationals and governments aren’t turning the forests into monocrops . . .
Inti Wara Yassi means “sun,” “star,” and “moon” in Quechua, Aymara and Chiriguano-Guaraní. “The parque,” as I call it here, is Sanctuary Ambue Ari, one of three sanctuaries run by Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), a Bolivian NGO, founded in 1992. Back then, Bolivian volunteers started working with miners’ families in La Paz, up in the country’s highlands. They hoped to give the young people in those families a sense of purpose, teaching them life skills while also showing them the beauty of their country. Along the way, the volunteers and the young people encountered deforestation, slash-and-burn agriculture, and wild animals in cages. So together they set up the first-ever sanctuary for rescued wild animals in Bolivia. That sanctuary was called Machía and it’s where Nena, one of CIWY’s founders, now lives with her spider monkey friends.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 30