The farewell party had been epic. I’d staggered back from Quito resolving to die messily in my bunk, only to discover that Johnny had picked today to recruit one of the most feared individuals in the known world; el dentista had come to Santa Martha.
Now I’m all for a bit of karma, so even in my weakened state I had to appreciate the irony; the dentist, bless him, was terrified. His eyes were wide and he couldn’t take them off the inert form of the jaguar, lying on her side on Johnny’s dining table. I’d arrived just in time to help anaesthetise the immense cat, and cradling her head in my lap in the back of Johnny’s truck had been made even more surreal by the fact that I was still wearing my shiny shoes and my last going-out shirt. Both were now liberally coated in drool. Yet standing there at the head of the table while the dentist fumbled with his tools was a crowning moment of weirdness. It looked like any moment he would brandish a carving knife and start serving up big-cat-of-the-day.
Leonardo and Mark had pried open the jaguar’s fearsome jaws, looping string around each before tying them off to the table legs. As if she hadn’t seemed threatening enough already, she now seemed frozen mid-snarl, her impressive fangs bared beneath staring, hate-filled eyes. Whatever the dentist had done to end up in this predicament, I never found out. The poor bloke looked like he was about to shit himself. I sincerely hoped the jaw strings were securely knotted. I had a feeling that when released they’d snap shut like a steel trap. Anything inside at that point probably wasn’t coming out again.
One of the jaguar’s fangs had sheared off, leaving a truncated stump with a blackened end. The dentist rather reluctantly took up a miniature electric drill with a disc attachment, span the disc a few times, mouthed a brief prayer and reached into the Jaguar’s maw.
It was then, as the grinder sang and the tooth enamel screeched, that my breakfast decided it wanted out. The sickening squeal of metal blade on bone was biting into my brain. I squeezed sideways through the crowd, backwards through the door and made it as far as the kitchen sink before I heaved, heaved again and spewed semi-digested blueberry pancakes all over the plug hole.
Nancy was standing two feet away, half an onion forgotten on her chopping board as she wrinkled her nose in disgust. Luckily for her she hadn’t been washing potatoes.
“El Dentista?” She asked.
Johnny found me in the kitchen, cleaning up my mess. The way he clapped me on the shoulder, in that ‘don’t worry, it can only get better’ way, I could tell that things were about to get worse.
“Let’s go catch that spider monkey!” he said.
Absolute bastard, I thought. He wasn’t at all blind to my condition. He was just enjoying it too much.
The spider monkey in question had a gigantic overbite. One of four current residents, he’d been rescued from yet another illegal circus and was long overdue for some dental work. But that didn’t mean he was going to come quietly. Now, most monkeys are smart little critters. Not so, spider monkeys. They are smart big critters. Unfortunately the rest of his group knew exactly who we were after, and they weren’t keen on making it easy. They had the drop on us from the start. We started out with nets, but they soon took those off us. Our last batch of spider monkeys had been so affectionate we’d had to pry ourselves loose from their hugs or risk wearing a live monkey for hours at a time. But we’d left them at Amazoonico months ago, and their replacements weren’t nearly as tractable.
All of a sudden, Overbite made a break for it.
“MONKEY!” I shouted as he swung out of the door and onto the path. The chase was on.
He skipped off down the path with incredible speed dodging round the corner and heading for freedom as though he’d thought of nothing but this moment for years. I bolted after him, grabbing the edge of a cage to help swing me round the corner. The monkey was a good way ahead of me, and far more manoeuvrable. But I was faster on the straight. I accelerated down the narrow corridor between enclosures, and was closing the distance between us when he reached the steps down to the main road through the farm. This was my chance – if he paused, if he found the stairs confusing, I’d be on him. But no. Being a monkey, he didn’t have much use for stairs. He just jumped.
He made the ten foot leap to the ground with ease, landed on all fours, and scurried off down the road. Pounding along behind him I had less than a second to make the choice. If I slowed to negotiate the stairs even part of the way down, it would all be over. Once he reached the trees by the first bend in the road he’d be gone for good.
Time was up. I reached the top of the steps at a dead run and launched myself over the edge.
In the seconds I was airborne my entire life flashed before my eyes. I seemed to have spent a disproportionate amount of it chasing monkeys.
Somehow I landed on my feet, with bone jarring force. I was only a step behind the monkey – my leap had taken me considerably further than his – but my body was moving too fast for my legs. I managed to push off with my feet at the same moment I started to fall headlong on the ground. The result: I bounced forwards another metre, sailing high above the form of the fleeing monkey, then crashed to earth and flattened the fucker.
The impact knocked the stuffing out of me. It temporarily turned the monkey two-dimensional. Pain shot through me. I felt like I’d fallen ten feet onto a small primate. For the monkey it must have been like being beaten around the head with a banana tree. For a split second neither of us could move.
He recovered quicker than I did. Amazingly he wriggled out from under me and leapt towards freedom, just as I, still lying prone, reached out with both arms and caught him.
And when I say caught, that is exactly what I mean. I had both hands around him at the same time. In no way did that constitute restraint.
In far less time than it takes to tell the monkey writhed around in my grasp and sank his fangs into my hand.
“ARGH!”
The monkey switched his attention to my other hand and bit down harder.
“Arrrr!” I shrieked. I let go with the recently bitten hand, but I had no other options – I had to grab him again or lose him. He was flailing wildly with all four limbs, scratching the shit out of every bit of me he could reach. As I tried to grab his neck he bit me again, puncturing the thick leather glove easily and scoring my vulnerable flesh. He bit down again and again, faster than I could even register the damage.
I lay on my belly, flat out on the floor, both arms outstretched in front of me and both hands wrapped around a furry blur of teeth and rage. There was sod all I could do – without my hands free I couldn’t get to my feet, and without standing up I had no way of controlling the monster. So I lay there and swore at the fucker as he bit me over and over. If you asked anyone else, they’d probably say I was doing a fair bit of screaming and howling too. There came a moment of clarity amidst the agony, when I realised that I had succeeded where the others had failed; the monkey currently taking chunks out of me at high speed was exactly the one we’d been hoping to catch. We’d scheduled him for dentistry on account of his massively overdeveloped overbite… Of course this made me much happier about becoming his chew toy.
Eventually I got my feet under me. Capturing his head was easy at that point. “Now try and bite me ya bastard!” I bawled. Slowly the pain of my various injuries began to make itself known. My knees and legs were skinned from high velocity impact with the ground. There was a monkey-shaped section in the middle of me that was relatively undamaged – everything else was beat to buggery. Every bite was throbbing and most of them were oozing blood. I figured I’d been bitten about twenty times, with the nastiest set of incisors I’d ever seen on a creature this size. I was still shaking from the shock. I turned the thrashing monkey’s head around so I could stare him in the face. He screeched and hissed and flailed. I had to resist a sudden urge to drop kick the lanky git into the milking shed.
“You-are-so-fucking-lucky!” I growled at him. “Why don’t I see if the vet will cut your balls off while you’re a
sleep eh?” Desire for revenge coursed through my blood. An unscheduled castration was never going to happen. But Leonardo would understand. Surely he’d let me shave a rude word into him?
Just for once I wished someone else would be the Monkey Man. It was a singularly painful occupation.
Disaster!
A few days later we inherited an even more fractious creature – a brand new ocelot with crisp black markings and fierce eyes. She was another recent rescue from the back yards of the rich and famous, but obviously hadn’t been incarcerated long enough to break her spirit. You can take the cat out of the jungle easily enough, but sometimes the jungle doesn’t come quietly. Waking up from a hefty ketamine trip to find herself in yet another strange environment, the cat had made a few vocal complaints as we went about our morning rounds. Now she was growling continually under her breath, a rumbling, threatening sound like a gigantic motorbike idling at the lights. Every so often it exploded into an ear-splitting roar, of the kind you usually only hear once – in the split second before being torn apart.
Feeding her was nerve wracking. Because she was an unknown quantity, and now mindful of the dangers of feline HIV amongst other diseases, Johnny had chosen to keep her separate for the time being. I agreed totally. The thought of letting her loose into the existing ocelot enclosure, only to watch her tear through the semi-tame residents in a fury, was too horrible to contemplate.
We’d been building a grand new ocelot enclosure on and off for weeks now, with no danger of it approaching completion. And now there were only four of us. I was desperately worried that I’d have to leave before the thing was finished – a disaster on two fronts, since I’d convinced myself that my quality control was the only thing stopping Jimmy from building it out of gaffer tape. Until the new pad was ready, our latest arrival would be staying in a rather small cage designed to house monkeys. The cage was comfy enough, with a dirt floor and a few logs scattered around for interest, but the distance from the door to the back wall was not great. So it was with trepidation, to say the least, that we few hardy souls made a ring around the door as Steve opened it to fling the cat’s dinner inside. The job was over in seconds, the catch fumbled back into place, and the ocelot was glaring at us from behind her favourite log, her growl unrelenting.
We left her to it.
It was later that afternoon when the real difficulty presented itself. The ocelot, given a day to herself to explore, had chosen to settle in the middle of the cage while she took brunch. Once there she must have decided the spot was more comfortable than the hollow behind her log and so she stayed. So when we approached with our rakes and shovels to clean out her space, she was already in it.
There was no way around it – we had to at least attempt to remove the remains of her meal before they began to decompose. But this was a dramatically more involved operation than Steve had performed earlier, when the door had been open only long enough to fling a dead bird inside. The small, square portal was at ground level, on the right hand side of the cage front. Access was in one way only: head first on hands and knees. Well, assuming I didn’t want to go in backwards. It would put the cat, with her decidedly dubious temperament, within a metre and a half of my unprotected face. She had formidable claws and teeth that would mess me up as easily as she had dismembered that chicken. And my only defence would be a flying head butt. I mentally added a full set of American Football armour to my ideal work outfit.
First off, I gave the broom handle a go, probing the nearest corners successfully from outside the cage door. But the chicken corpse was in no-man's land between the two of us. I’d have to have at least my head and shoulders in the cage to get the angle and leverage right. Whilst waving a big stick practically under her nose. No matter how I looked at it, I could only see pain in my future.
When Mark volunteered I felt guilty and cowardly in equal measure, but more relieved than I dared let on. Mark was the logical choice after all; his control over animals was almost hypnotic, his confidence unfailing, and his testicles carved of the same stuff they make aeroplane black boxes out of.
“I wonder if my travel insurance covers acts of abject insanity?” He quipped. He crouched in front of the cage door, open all this while with seemingly no interest in it from the cat. Slowly, calmly, he crawled inside and stretched out a hand for the debris.
There was just the slightest warning twitch from the ocelot. An instant later it pounced.
Mark came flying back out of the cage like a jack-in-a-box released. His yell drew a shocked echo from all of us. Almost instantly the cage door was slammed shut and fastened as Mark sat stunned on the dirt.
In his hand was a dead chicken. Or most of one. Drawing on reflexes neither of us had known he possessed, he’d sprung out of the way at exactly the right moment.
His hat on the other hand, had not.
The ocelot, so lithe and deadly, had made her kill. Mark looked horrified as the cat shredded the wide straw brim and started to gnaw on the remains.
“That was my favourite hat!” was all he could say.
“You’re okay though?” I asked him, rather more concerned for his well-being.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” he confirmed. “But… that was my favourite hat!”
A few tactless souls amongst the observers were already starting to see the funny side. I was one of them.
“We might be able to get it back?” I offered.
“How? She’s eaten it! I don’t fancy your chances of getting anything off her.” Mark climbed to his feet, dusted himself off and gazed forlornly into the cage.
“It’s made of straw,” I pointed out.
“So? I know you weren’t too keen on it, but I really liked that hat!”
By now I couldn’t help myself.
“Yeah, but she can’t digest straw. She’s gotta take a shit sometime!”
Mark muttered something under his breath as he stomped off towards the house.
“What was that?”
“You’re a cruel man,” Mel chastised me.
“Not true!” I protested. “Honestly, I think a trip through an ocelot’s digestive tract was exactly what that hat needed. It might even improve the colour!”
And Then There Were Three…
The first few weeks of on-off work on the new ocelot enclosure had produced an extremely long fence that was about as stable as my mental condition, which is to say not very. As the project progressed we’d been forced to shore up the entire hillside, after days of arriving in the morning to find all our fence posts had slipped halfway down the slope. We’d removed so many trees as potential escape routes that the soil was losing the will to resist gravity. Terraces and stepped foundations stopped it escaping into the valley below, but used up most of the available materials we’d earmarked to build the place. So, predictably, we’d augmented our less-than-formidable defences with crap recovered from demolishing the cage of the euthanised ocelot – a bunch of soggy, splitting boards and chicken wire that would be hard pushed to restrain chickens. At last Johnny had come good with another load of the green plastic coated fencing mesh, and we’d happily reinforced the entire structure. Jimmy had welded together a monster door that looked fit for a W.W.II concentration camp and we’d back filled, and back filled, and back filled… endless days of forcing our solid steel homemade wheel barrow uphill through the stump-cluttered remains of the undergrowth, bringing load after load of earth from the landslides that had plagued our initial excavations, all the way back to the top of the enclosure where we needed it to bury the foundations. It had been tough and tiring, and (inevitably), bloody. Would it hold? None of us would have bet much money on it. But then I daily showed up at the jaguar enclosure expecting to see a jaguar-shaped hole in the fence and so far I’d been disappointed. Though on the upside I’d also avoided being killed and eaten by the beast for my part in her incarceration. So there was an air of triumph on the day Jimmy announced himself satisfied. I would be happy enough if I never saw that wheelbarrow a
gain.
The next morning there was a flash in the sky and a deafening sonic BOOM! And Toby stood in the driveway, his cape fluttering in the breeze. Strong and tall like the heroes of old (though somewhat skinnier), he strode through the entrance way and cast his luggage upon the ground. Twice halfway around the world he had flown, and yet seemed unchanged by the ordeal. He glowed with health and vitality, which could mean only one thing – whilst in England he had consumed the entire fruit and vegetable harvest of a medium-sized country. And probably got laid afterwards.
“Alright mate! How’s things?”
“Ah, Toby, I’m so glad you’re back,” I told him. “Things are great!”
And they were.
I introduced Mel and Mark to him, thought it seemed a bit pointless; as ships that pass in the night, they were. Mel and Mark were leaving that same day. It was often this way at Santa Martha; the timings of comings and goings coincided, causing a day of bittersweet emotions that never failed to surprise me with their potency. Though I hesitate to use the phrase (and certainly beg their forgiveness for doing so), Mel and Mark had been like parents to me during their stay. Not that they were dramatically much older than me, more that their combination of calm, rational experience and generous, caring spirit had given me strength and comfort to draw upon throughout the daily hardships that made life here so overwhelming. Losing them to their callously prearranged travel plans would have seemed a doubly harsh blow were it not for the Return of the Tobi.
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