The bids climbed, admittedly at the pace of a sloth, and I watched nervously as a Swiss girl of volatile temperament took the lead. She was predatory in her approach to men, and possibly had teeth in intriguing places, and I was worried that she might not accept there were some things I wouldn’t do, even for charity.
To my enormous relief a coalition formed to challenge her bid, and I was ultimately sold to a group of four girls, who immediately set about devising their plan for me in the twenty-four-hour period I would be their slave.
Adrian was also sold, and I watched his face deflate like a balloon when the Swiss girl made the winning bid.
‘Bad luck, mate,’ I consoled. ‘Can’t imagine the demands I get will be as bad as yours.’
First up for me during my twenty-four hours of slavery was cooking dinner, something I thought might well be more hazardous for the girls than for me as the only thing worse than my cooking ability was the choice of local ingredients. I had some desultory-looking vegetables, a disturbingly yellow-fleshed chicken, some curry powder and oil that looked less like that from an olive and more like that from an engine. Massages were also ordered and performed.
Then came the clincher. In keeping with the intended attack on the Roy Boys’ machismo—and being macho is not something I’m often accused of; in fact, as a soft Sydneysider I am so in touch with my feminine side it would be no surprise if I lactated—I was required, purely for my owners’ amusement, to wear a dress. And not just any dress. The small town adjacent to the reserve had a store selling second-hand and fancy-dress clothes, from which a pink and white chequered schoolgirl’s dress had been selected. It was garish, and tight in all the wrong places.
‘I think we need to talk about rugby a lot today,’ I said as I emerged in my gorgeous attire to the jeers and hoots of the other volunteers.
The new trainee, an Englishman named John, was starting with us that day. I began to explain to him some of Roy’s quirks, but he soon interrupted me. ‘You know I can’t really take in anything you’re saying while you’re wearing that, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Adrian, maybe you better go over it all. I’ll just go machete some vines or something.’
Maybe Roy felt some smug satisfaction at seeing me in a dress (‘Who’s got feminine features now?’ I could imagine him asking), but like most animals he wasn’t interested in clothing unless it smelled peculiar. He greeted us the same way he did every morning, and eyed John the trainee with a look I’d seen before.
‘Let’s see what sort of mood he’s in,’ I said as we approached the first hill on Roy’s trail. ‘Keep up if you can, John,’ I added, just as Roy bolted.
By now, Adrian and I were used to the footholds, and knew which trees you could grab and which you couldn’t. (With no guide to the area’s flora, we had come up with our own names for some distinctive species, including the Bastard Tree, covered in vicious spines usually concealed under beards of lichen. You only grabbed a Bastard Tree once.) John didn’t know the trail, and I heard him cursing in his English accent and a solid ‘thwap’ at one point as he slipped, but I had no time to turn as Roy was putting on a show and ran, ran and ran.
‘Not good,’ Adrian said simply.
Roy barely paused until we approached one of his hot zones, at which stage I became anxious that he was just getting his energy levels back up for some hard jumping.
He was. I wasn’t on lead, so Adrian took the brunt of it, but as the number-two guy my job was to be there and make sure that I got Roy off him fast, then lead him away until we were out of the area. But the moment I had him off Adrian he jumped me. Adrian pulled him off—and he went straight for Adrian again. We finally got him through the zone and had some respite for the next few minutes as he kept a pace just above leisurely.
Once he had the breath to speak, Adrian added to his earlier verdict: ‘Not good at all.’ I grunted my agreement, and trotted along behind him, offering words of encouragement to John, who was struggling to keep up with us.
‘Frankly I think it’s lunatic to go out every day into the jungle when there’s a very good chance that a puma will bite you,’ said John at the end of the walk. ‘I think you’re both mad.’
‘I don’t suppose I can argue with that while wearing this,’ I said, plucking at the stifling inbuilt lycra knickers of my outfit with one hand, and reaching for the machete with the other, in the hope of looking more butch.
‘You look like Braveheart’s gay cousin,’ John commented.
I was worried that John might quit, and leave us without a substitute. Two days later he did, limping off with a sprained ankle, and once again it was just the three of us on the trails, Adrian and me plagued by fatigue and footrot, Roy unfazed by anything except when we managed to block his attempts in the hot zones.
Soon afterwards we had a scorchingly hot day, the sort that raises beads of sweat on your brow at the mere thought of action. Despite the knowledge that we’d perspire so profusely that it would stream down our legs and fill our boots, Adrian and I liked these days. The trail was exhausting enough for us in these conditions, but Roy had to do it wearing a fur coat. He generally ran little on these days, taking the shortest trails and, most welcome of all, jumping far less than usual.
True to form, though, Roy defied our expectations and took off early, maintaining a punishing pace. My feet squelched in their rubber tombs, and mosquitoes, trying to bite me, instead drowned in the rivers of sweat that flowed over my body.
Roy kept running and eventually we crossed a particularly slippery part of the trail, sliding and skidding to keep up before dropping down to one of the most picturesque sections. It was a creek bed with a series of small falls and crystal-clear pools. Ferns acted as parasols overhead and the jungle rang with constant cries of alarm from monkeys as Roy passed through. Roy would often stop to drink here, and on some days pause for a rest, settling gently into one of the pools.
Today the heat had finally taken its toll on him and he decided to linger for a dip. I gently scooped up some water into my hands and trickled it over his head and ears until he flicked his tail, letting me know he’d had enough.
The sound of a small motor approached, incongruous in such a setting. On occasion we heard trucks on the nearby roads as they carried their loads of lumber (and with it the sad promise of more habitat loss and therefore stranded animals) to the nearby mill, but this was a different noise. Then suddenly, from down the creek came a flash of green and purple, zigging beelike before zagging away, almost too fast to see. Finally the hummingbird came closer, and to my utter delight it hovered, wings whirring and making the mechanical sound within inches of Roy’s head, directly over his upturned face. It held itself there then scooted to Adrian, where it paused briefly, before repeating the performance with me, fanning my face with manic wingbeats. Then with a whirr of wings and a pop of colour it was gone. It was such a rare moment, something so hard to explain, so beautiful and wonderful and unexpected. A jewel in time.
‘Wow,’ I said, to Roy, to Adrian, to myself.
‘Nice,’ said Adrian.
Even though Roy usually showed his hunting instincts by flushing out and chasing ground birds on the trail, he didn’t react to the hummingbird at all. He just stood up, shook himself like a dog, spraying Adrian and me in the process, and set off again, refreshed enough that he made a half-hearted jump just along the trail. But my mood couldn’t be dampened, and I felt an unfamiliar flicker of enjoyment.
‘Good boy,’ I said to Roy, and to my surprise, I meant it.
The Last Temptation of Roy
Over the next few days something strange happened: Roy’s hot zones went cold. At the approach to each hot zone an anticipatory noise like the zinging of violins would start in my ears, but Roy just strolled on through, not even glancing back at us to see if we were lagging behind enough for him to wreak havoc. Normally he was diligent in checking our whereabouts during the hot zones—if we weren’t right by his shoulders and ready to
grab his collar he rarely missed an opportunity to turn and bite.
Each day someone would ask Adrian and me how Roy was behaving. His reputation at the park was that of the adventure cat, but for two and a half days we had to disappoint them by replying, ‘He’s turned into a puppy. Just quietly walks the trails.’ I started patting him when I had the chance, and even bent down and bumped heads with him on occasion, smiling when he returned the gesture. It was as if I had passed a test, and we now had a bond impossible to imagine two weeks before. Whether all the early jumping had been intended to assert dominance, or to try to drive me away, I couldn’t know. Regardless, I was glad for the reprieve, and spoke to Roy in softer tones, using the word ‘bastard’ a lot less often when talking about him to the other volunteers.
But of course it couldn’t last.
There was a section of Roy’s trail I’d long dreaded, for two reasons. At that point the trail split, and Roy could choose to take a long detour, extending the punishment of our daily routine by several kilometres. There was also a sharp drop in the trail at this point, which required perfect timing and great balance for a human to negotiate, two things genetics sadly withheld from me. To handle the drop I had to make sure I was right behind Roy, because he managed it with ease and then tended to take off at a sprint as soon as he touched the ground. If the rope pulled tight while I was in mid-air I was likely to be pasted onto a tree—again. Failing that, I would often launch off the drop weak-limbed, landing floppily, and miss the tree a metre or so down the path that could be used as an anchor.
While missing this tree usually just led to some mad skating, uncoordinated cartwheeling of legs, and inelegant flailing at imaginary handholds until I collided with the next tree on the path, on this day my feet shot forward from under me and I landed heavily on my backside. The ground was muddy and slippery from the previous evening’s rain, and I soon began an uncontrolled slide down the trail. Sometime during this slide, my shorts split at the seam. Roy had stopped his initial sprint and settled into a fast walk when he saw movement beside him. It was me, sliding right past him—a scene way too tempting for any puma to ignore.
‘Hi Roy!’ I said in as even a tone as I could muster with my shorts torn open, mud filling my underpants, and a puma eyeing me in delight. Naturally, he jumped on me.
Roy’s teeth on my leg stopped my slide, but due to my prone position he hit me higher than usual, the thigh rather than the knee. I quickly realised how much more painful a tooth into muscle is than a tooth into bone. Usually when he bit me I would maintain a calm voice, so as not to excite him further. But unable to manage such self-control, I shouted out something that is rude in most languages, and shoved at Roy’s head; however, with my leg flat to the ground I was unable to remove his paws.
Adrian rushed up and grabbed the lead, allowing me to stand up and remove Roy’s paws. As he did so often after jumping, Roy sprinted, and only then did I see that there was barely a metre of free cord between Roy and me, the rest having somehow coiled itself around Roy’s body. Yanked out of Adrian’s hand the rope pulled tight, but I was already running. Roy turned, frustrated at my slow pace, and jumped me again. Thunder cracked overhead, drowning out my curses (by now I’d completely forgotten about remaining calm). This time he hit me low, pushing me over, which sent us both into a spin during which one of his claws dragged down my calf, taking my boot off with it.
Adrian caught up to us in record time, and grabbed at Roy’s cord, managing to free one loop that had formed around his body. The other loops pulled tight though and I found myself being dragged by a half-crazed puma once again. Soon, frustrated at the shortness of the cord, Roy turned to jump on me again, but this time I nabbed his collar and dragged him along the path, loosening the coils of rope from the various places they were wrapped around him.
My three-quarter-length shorts had started the day in no way mistakable for couture, but by now they were shredded, the seat flapping, the section below the left knee hanging by threads. It was one of the few times that Roy had drawn blood, and I could see a small bloom of red through the remaining fabric.
‘Roy didn’t like me falling over. He seems to blame my leg,’ I said, as thunder rumbled again.
A breeze kicked up and Adrian and I both checked the glimpses of sky through the canopy while keeping pace with our perturbed puma. Black clouds had gathered overhead, and an ominous swirling of foliage made it impossible to ignore that a drenching was on its way. We’d been rained on before—only natural in a rainforest—but the heaviest rains of the year were due to start soon, and this was setting out to be a potent warm-up act. Roy’s fur stood on end as if electrified, and with the next crash of thunder he glanced back at us with an expression that suggested he thought the sound was our fault. Specifically, my knee’s.
As the first fat splats of rain hit the canopy above, then burst through in a torrent, it became obvious that as far as Roy was concerned, yes, the rain was my knee’s fault. After nearly three days of casual and pleasant trails I had been jumped three times in half an hour, and was starting to feel my existing wounds tugged in uncomfortable directions. The pelting rain made the trail slippery even for four-legged Roy, a plus, but for the first time on one of our trails I felt cold.
Then I saw Roy shiver. He curtailed it as quickly as he could, but the shiver made him seem a little vulnerable. While I wouldn’t have dared admit to it outside the small circle of Roy Boys, at that moment his attempt at bravado was just a tiny bit cute.
‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘he’s just bitten me three times but I think I’m starting to like him even more!’ The temporary break from violence had allowed me to feel closer to him, and somehow the return of his abusive behaviour didn’t change that. Since I’d stopped focusing on my own pain and stopped blaming Roy for it, I could see that Roy jumped merely because he was excitable. He loved these walks, and had no way of expressing himself other than by being a puma. He was more trapped between worlds than I had ever been, and could not be blamed for behaving wildly.
The rain dissipated within a day, leaving behind treacherously slippery trails that even Roy took slowly. By now Adrian and I were exhausted, battered, and plagued with the strange rashes that come from being constantly wet. Our feet emerged from their boots each day prune-like and peeling, a ghastly white and sore to the touch. We were near the end of our month at Parque Machia, and both of us were keen to move on to somewhere else. We needed trainees, new Roy Boys.
By a happy quirk of fate, within two days two new potential candidates arrived; following a trend, they were both Australians.
‘So do you guys pat him?’ asked Courtney, one of the new trainees.
‘Not so much,’ Adrian answered.
‘Hmmph,’ said Courtney, and I knew that just like me a month earlier, he was imagining that by the end of his stint he would have Roy on a string, and that they would have become great buddies. The truth is that I did pat Roy, but not often, and only when we were in the safest areas. Affection usually generated excitement, and excitement led to jumping, so love was limited between us, even with the new respect and fonder feelings I had for Roy.
‘Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.’
It only took Courtney one turn on lead to shake his confidence. Roy’s crazy face was unsettling enough, but just like me, Courtney wasn’t prepared for the shock of actually being bitten by a puma. And Roy went after him, jumping him often and with a degree of venom I didn’t recall experiencing during my own training, only a month before.
‘You know what,’ said Courtney after a few days. ‘I’m not interested in being his buddy anymore. I just want to make it through the month.’
I grinned broadly at this. Courtney looked at me questioningly, so I explained that I’d experienced exactly what he was going through,
and presumably so had any number of Roy Boys through the seven years Roy had been at Machia.
I left Machia just as the rains arrived, coming down with a fury as they had on the day when everything was my knee’s fault. I was glad to get out before the rains hit too hard, making the trails unmanageable, but I also felt wistful to be leaving when I’d only just begun to have fun with Roy. I had started to respect as well as like him: he was a real puma.
There were other reasons for my regret, too. No longer at the mercy of his attacks, all I could think of was how vulnerable Roy was. I had no idea how much time Parque Machia would remain running before the drug growers’ road—stemming from the desire for cocaine in far parts of the world—shut it down. And I worried whether the supply of Roy Boys, never strong, could continue to trickle on. Strange as it would have seemed to me only a week before, on the day I left it wasn’t just raindrops wetting my cheeks.
Not the End of the World
After returning to the Gomezes’ house to recover from Roy’s attentions and rediscover the joys of Marguerite’s pisco sours, I found myself needing to recuperate from those beverages as well. This took me to not-too-distant Buenos Aires, where I had a wonderful reunion with my sister, Laurie, who was visiting Argentina from Australia. I also met Laurie’s friends Freddy and his wife, who invited us to dinner at their house in Buenos Aires, an occasion that inadvertently led me to the destination for my next journey.
‘Do you think Argentina is more like Switzerland or Ethiopia?’ Freddy asked at some stage of the evening.
I thought of the famous story of the Argentinian football players stranded after a plane crash who resorted to cannibalism in the bitter cold, I thought of condors soaring over the high Andes, I thought of fine Argentinian wine and the slopes where the grapes grew. Switzerland seemed the obvious answer, but even on our short acquaintance Freddy struck me as the sort of person who enjoyed trick questions, so I chose Ethiopia.
How to Walk a Puma Page 4