All of a sudden instead of holding a hugely heavy slab of inert fur-clad flesh I was grappling with a tiger. Not a big tiger, and not actually a tiger as it happens, but it was the similarities rather than the differences that flashed through my mind as the thing came alive in my arms.
In a second it was thrashing around, arching its powerful body, raking claws down everything in reach.
The only thing in reach was me. I howled in pain as it ripped at my arms and my chest, and all I could think to do was to hold the beast tighter. I squeezed it against me with a strength borne of desperation, pinning us chest to chest with his legs splayed out all around me. He was still very dazed and couldn’t see well enough to bite so I was spared an unplanned tracheotomy.
Leonardo already had half of the beast inside the cage, and Toby was capturing errant limbs. I gritted my teeth, tensed my arms and pushed. I fell away backwards and the cat fell into the cage. Leonardo snapped the door shut smartly and it was over.
The ocelot snarled and writhed in his cage for a few seconds, then retreated to the back and snarled. Slowly, slowly, the growling faded to a soft rumbling broken by the occasional snort and violent twitch which shook the cage. He had succumbed to the ketamine once again.
I simply lay on the ground behind the truck, feeling the terror ebb away, trying not to analyse my injuries. Lines of fire carved diagonally across both sides of my chest. I could already feel the blood welling, trickling warm and wet down my ribs. Sweet Jesus, it hurt.
The cage was still. The beast was sleeping. The others turned their attention to where my sprawled form lay motionless in the dirt. Toby offered a hand to help me up.
“Man, that was close!” He exclaimed. “He didn’t scratch you did he?”
The End
Osita was a bugger. You think you’ve made friends with a bear – you build her a house, talk to her nice, feed her your sandwiches – and then as soon as your back’s turned she pulls the plug out of her pond and eats it.
This was the situation that greeted me as I stood in front of Osita’s enclosure on the morning of my last day. Less than a week ago I’d spent hours filling the pond with nice clean water, fending her off the whole time and trying to persuade her not to chew on the hose. It was a long, boring job, and I must have done it about a hundred times.
I felt betrayed.
“Why?” I admonished her as she approached the fence. “Why did you have to eat your Goddamn plug? If you’re lonely just tell me! I promise I’ll sit and talk to you. But please, stop eating your bloody plug.”
Osita looked suitably chastised. She poked her nose at me through the fence in that irresistible way.
“Okay,” I said, “I forgive you. Here’s breakfast.”
I braced myself for a struggle with the disintegrating padlock, but it seems I’d finally acquired the knack and it sprang open straight away. I unfastened the chain, drew back the bolt and opened the gate for what I suddenly realised was almost certainly the last time.
I had to stop for a moment as sadness overwhelmed me. In the long, cold evenings I looked forward to going home, to warmth and family, to sprawling on a sofa while my injuries healed and watching TV with my folks. But it was on the feeds in the mornings, with tendrils of mist still curling through the fields, the sun just warming up overhead, and the cacophony of animal calls celebrating the arrival of breakfast, that I realised how much this place had come to mean to me. And how much I was going to miss it.
Never more so than on that heartbreakingly perfect morning.
I even cried as I closed the gate on Osita, and watched her charge for the bowl of fruit and begin to shred it. She loved the apples. She even looked up at me for a second, in what my depressingly romantic soul dared to call gratitude. Then she returned to the serious business of flinging her food around the cage.
That was the end of the feed. Before long the refuge would be filled to capacity, distributing the food would take hours and be interspersed with escape attempts and inconvenient displays of affection. But I would be no part of it. Volunteers would come and volunteers would go, most of them being thrashed at chess by Toby in the process, and the heart of Santa Martha would beat on. But from thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world, I wouldn’t be able to hear it.
With nothing more to do but pack, and maybe a few tearful good-byes to say, I was at a bit of a loss. After a meagre breakfast, noticeably lacking Mel’s traditional offerings of pancakes and thick porridge, Steve and I started to trawl though our stuff, choosing what to keep and what to leave. It felt good to sacrifice jumpers and jeans to the cause. Covered in ten kinds of shit, most of my clothes wouldn’t make it past customs let alone be allowed on the plane. It also felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind, keeping a link alive to prepare for my eventual return. I couldn’t face the thought of not coming back.
Every few minutes I lapsed into daydreams, discovering a blood stained belt that set off a memory of cow dissection or a shredded sock that put me in mind of Machita. Toby had already assured me that he’d keep the little dog out of trouble, though he hadn’t explained how. Maybe while he was in England he’d also attained omniscience.
Every item I touched reminded me of some unbelievable story or embarrassing accident. Those memories set off others in turn. It was about this time I realised that living and working at Santa Martha had been the single most important experience of my life. I was going to miss this place more than I’d ever missed anything.
Packing turned out to be a very short process. I made a pile of good stuff and left it on a shelf in the dormitory. I made a pile for the bin and binned it. I drew in all the strings, straps, tapes and webbing on my rucksack to compensate for its lack of contents. I laid out my last ‘good’ clothes to change into before I left, at which point everything I was wearing now would probably crawl through the lounge, out the front door, across the porch and into the bin on its own.
I had no phone. I had no socks. I did have the skin of one small cow sticking randomly out the top of my bag, a last minute gift from Johnny that I hadn’t known how to refuse. Who in the entire world (including Ecuador) would ever need the carefully cured, hairy hide of half a calf? The mind boggles.
I wandered outside to check there was nothing I’d forgotten. Holey wellies. The most comfortable hammocks in the world. My little dog! She came chasing around my feet, yipping furiously. She was blissfully unaware that I was about to abandon her to the fickle fortunes of life on the farm. Poor beast, she was very nearly as stupid as she was cute, and she was cute right to the verge of utterly adorable. I growled at her and chased her around the porch for a bit, until she found a plastic bag floating around and let that chase her.
A lone item of my underwear was still draped over the wall. I’d consistently forgotten about these pants every day for at least two weeks. They’d been on the line for a week before that, soaked with rain every morning, dry by midday, ignored all afternoon and frozen solid each night. They’d been a barometer of my last few weeks at the centre and they weren’t in the best condition for it. Mouldy and torn, stained by leaf and exposure to the elements… well, they’d been a little stained to begin with.
Then an idea struck me. A plastic bag, pair of good cloth underpants… and an opportunity to pay a last visit to a close friend. I ran down the path to the side of the milking shed and switched on the water pump for the hose.
I would plug that bear’s pond if it was the last thing I did.
“I was looking for you,” Toby mentioned as I strode happily back through the gate to our house. “I’ve got them photos you wanted.” He handed me a CD Rom full of memories.
“Great! Thanks man, I was hoping you’d get round to it. My folks will go nuts when they see some of these!”
“Yeah, there’s some of mine, and there’s Mel and Mark’s photos on there too. All the best ones. So…,” He glanced around. I could tell he was groping for something to say. Of all good-byes this was going to be b
y far the hardest. Toby had been my mentor and my best friend. He’d led me full-tilt into every mad, terrifying experience I’d had – then left me in the middle of most of them and fucked off to Quito. I couldn’t imagine my life without Santa Martha, and I couldn’t imagine Santa Martha without Toby. I couldn’t even begin to thank him and start saying my farewells. Instead I decided to relate my latest piece of genius to him.
“I filled Osita’s pond. I couldn’t believe the bloody thing was empty again. But I made a new plug again, and I think it’s holding!”
“Sweet. What did you use?” Toby asked.
“Well, I got some plastic bags and all that, and you know that pair of minging pants I was going to throw away?”
A look of horror crossed Toby’s face. “Oh mate, you didn’t…”
“Yeah, I used them! Thought I’d leave my mark on the place, you know.”
“You fucker! When she pulls them out I’m gonna have to find them and pick them up!”
“Oh yeah! Sorry man, I hadn’t thought of that,” I lied. “They weren’t too badly stained you know. And they got washed every time it rained – for, like, the last three weeks…”
“If that bear eats your stinking pants and gets really ill, and dies of arse-poisoning, it’ll be your fault,” he informed me.
“I tell you what,” I offered, “if that bear eats my pants I’m gonna go home and write a book about all of this. And I’ll call it That Bear Ate My Pants!”
And I did.
Epilogue
My last night in Quito had passed in a whirlwind of rum drinking and hands restraining me every time I attempted to approach the dance floor. Quito, I was reliably informed, had yet to recover from the last time I’d been let loose. Apparently my birthday party had gotten a bit out of control. I’d ended up dancing on the bar in one of our favourite clubs, stark bollock naked. Alice had been there, as had some of her students – one of whom, she told me, had been unable to eat a sausage ever since.
Fate had shown a cruel side in allowing me to become able to have full conversations with Lady just before I had to leave. As a consequence I’d grown closer than ever to her. I’d even made the mistake of allowing her to plan a ‘surprise’ for me. Visions of some deliciously sordid sexual activity had evaporated as she’d eagerly dragged me out of bed at crazy ‘o’ clock in the morning and led me off into the maze like side streets of downtown Quito.
The surprise was a culinary treat to which she had wanted to expose me for a long time, and thus far I’d been fortunate enough to avoid. ‘Ceviche’ was a dish of inedible raw seafood chunks in a disgusting spicy brown sauce. It looked like someone had overdosed on sushi, then developed chronic diarrhoea when only my plate lay between them and the toilet. And you know what? That’s exactly how it tasted too.
Oh yes, ceviche was a surprise all right. It was also a bloody expensive one that she had insisted on paying for. Which left me in the awkward position of having to choose – either refuse to eat on the grounds that the plate in front of me contained nothing I considered edible, thereby upsetting Lady, or force the stuff down, projectile vomit for ten minutes then pass out in a puddle of sick and die of botulism, which wouldn’t make me popular with the restaurant owner.
I chose to split the difference. I ate some, then bolted to the loo and spewed my ring, before returning to inform Lady that it was interesting, and that I’d now had quite enough thank-you very much. The taste, however, stayed with me.
WHY?? Why don’t women understand? How hard can it possibly be? What do we want for a ‘surprise’? SEX! Even if we’ve just had sex… then it’ll be that much more of a surprise! And much less hassle than an early morning crusade through grim, grey streets to sit in a dingy cafe choking down half the cast of Finding Nemo covered in shit!
I survived, though the event remains fixed in my memory as one of my least pleasant experiences in Ecuador.
I said a passionate good-bye to Lady at the airport, and told her fervently not to wait for me, on the grounds that it was likely to be a very long time before I had the chance to return. (”I unnerstan,” she responded in English, “I wait for you!” “No, no,” I explained, “I said don’t wait for me.” She favoured me with a smile that broke my heart. “I unnerstan! I love you too! I wait for YOO!!”)
Comedy and tragedy entwined – the moment was too much for me and I cried like a ten year old girl. I hadn’t dared embarrass myself in front of Johnny or Jimmy and somehow I’d maintained some semblance of composure even when a suitably firm handshake had marked the end of my adventures with Toby. (I’d shed a few tears once out of sight around a bend in the driveway of course, and I have it on reliable authority that Toby did the same – not that either of us will ever admit it. Being men.)
Lady, I think, appreciated the display of emotion more, and reciprocated in kind. We clung desperately together; I sobbed into her hair and she sobbed into my chest. We parted a soggy mess, keeping fingertip contact even when we were too far apart to see each other through the tears.
The rapidly closing airport doors very nearly deprived me of a hand. Rubbing my wrist and cursing under my breath I followed a somewhat embarrassed Steve into the check-in hall. He was kind enough to stay silent and allow me my moment of reflection. Lady was gone from my life, perhaps forever – there’s more than just half a planet of cold water separating England from Ecuador after all. Life back home would be very different. The whole mindset that I’d developed over months of living in this simple, beautiful place would be no match for the frantic pace of Real Life. It was likely to be a rude awakening, and I was dreading it. Money and timekeeping, worrying what people thought of me and the need to maintain an ‘image’ – all these concepts, happily forgotten due to their comparative irrelevance to a scruffy volunteer living on a farm halfway up a mountain – would come crashing back around me with shocking speed. I could fly out of Quito with a handful of dollars to my name and jeans that were more holes than fabric, but in London I’d be hungry and thirsty and cold. And I’d look like a tramp.
Maybe if I sat outside the airport for long enough I’d make enough cash for a coffee. That made me smile. But always my thoughts turned to Lady. So radiant, so excitable… absolutely gorgeous, and completely beyond my reach. Maybe she always had been.
The airport was a mecca for seekers of crap kitsch. And they must exist, these people, or how else would the shop owners be able to eat? How many ‘Pilsner’ baseball caps and strings of authentic wooden beads (made in China) would they each have to sell to feed their families? Well, not too many since the prices in the airport were even more ridiculous than the products themselves, but that still leaves a bare minimum of crap which must be purchased by some complete tool to ensure the continued existence of said crap (and those that pedal it). Who does it? Was there just the one lunatic, pushing a supermarket trolley full of poorly carved wooden parrots, whilst doubtless wearing a bright woollen poncho and carrying half a dozen carpets? Whoever it was, they had a lot to answer for.
“You getting any souvenirs?” asked Steve.
I fixed him with a glare.
I was in a philosophical mood as I climbed from the featureless concrete airfield into the waiting plane. Technology! Metal staircase! After all my exploits at Santa Martha I half expected the ground crew to prop a knackered ladder against an ailing donkey and offer me a leg-up.
The lights of London awaited me, cold, hard, impersonal. England was inexorable in its approach. My old life was waiting to swallow me up, spit out the new bits and chew me back into my previous shape. Behind me the wildness of the volcanic mountains faded into the distance. There was a tearing sensation as the plane roared out over the ocean – it seems that without noticing it I’d inadvertently left part of my soul behind. Ecuador had come and gone. But it had not left me unchanged. I resolved that when real life started to swamp me I would be ready. Before I sank back into the morass of consumerism, of thoughts dominated by wanting and buying and working and paying,
before the life I had lived previously managed to sink its claws into me, I would do… what? Anything! I didn’t really want to go back at all. I mean, what was there to do for me at home after Santa Martha? Sit behind a desk? Buy a new phone to organise my life by, some smart black trousers and a few crisp white shirts to iron?
I’d lived without a phone for longer than I’d have thought possible. I didn’t need the most expensive branded designer clothes any more – I was wearing my favourite $10 jeans from Machachi market on the flight home as they were the only thing I had left that my balls didn’t hang out of. That was something I’d achieved in the last three months; shameless promotion of crotchless work wear! Strategically Vented Trousers I could call them. They were bound to catch on.
What else? Well, I could cut a tree in half with a single blow from a machete, and drink a litre of battery acid without flinching. Useful skills if I considered going into investment banking.
I’d become much more mature. Ha! No I hadn’t. But I tried the idea on for size until I realised that coming up with a suitable ‘mature face’ probably wasn’t sufficient grounds for proof.
I was physically much stronger. Still skinny but with muscles now, and I was a whole lot tougher. I’d been bitten, clawed and mauled by more species of life than most people can name. Blinded, electrocuted and very nearly shot. I had no fear of seeing my own blood any more.
That was it – I had no fear! Well, I was worried that Machita’s life expectancy had just dropped dramatically, and I was a little concerned when I saw the pilot kicking the tyres of the plane – but I wasn’t scared. Not of people and not of any situation I could imagine (short of having to introduce myself to a Miss World contestant). I suddenly recognised the confidence within me, as compared to my abject terror upon arrival. I felt powerful – I could go anywhere, do anything! I was, if not bullet-proof, then certainly jaguar-proof! How many people could say that? “I am one tough puta madre,” I told myself.
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