How to Walk a Puma

by Peter Allison

  ‘How?’ I said. The whole thing suddenly seemed so ludicrous that I burst out laughing. A startled bat devised a fitting punishment, lightening his load by relieving himself copiously onto my shirt.

  For some reason I have always found the idea of monkeys defecating in their hands and throwing it at observers (not uncommon behaviour in zoos) wildly amusing, and even nicknamed one of my friends ‘Poo-monkey’, so perhaps what I’d received was a deserved double payback. However, monkeys eat fruit and bugs, which make disgusting enough droppings, but a diet of only blood makes for even nastier excrescences.

  ‘Oh man, that stinks!’ Michael said.

  ‘I’m just glad it wasn’t Robert Pattinson,’ I replied.

  ‘Hey man, that’s funny, say it again!’ said Michael, swinging the camera towards me.

  Unfortunately, once more the moment was lost and my delivery was flat.

  As the months went by, fewer and fewer emails came in from the company, and I knew that they would move on to other potential projects. I wasn’t offended and knew much of the blame lay with me.

  Among what small disappointment I felt about it there was a nugget of delight. In the past I’d experienced failure by being a fool, but with television at last I’d found a field where I didn’t cut it because I wasn’t a big enough idiot.

  Beekeeping in the Amazon

  ‘Honey, what did he say?’ the woman asked her husband loudly, even though the man she was referring to was standing right beside her and understood English.

  ‘He said it was to the left of the tree,’ her husband replied, not very helpfully as we were in the rainforest and trees were pretty plentiful.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, apparently satisfied. Then, mouth agape, she raised binoculars to her eyes and began a hectic scan—up, down, left, right and back—but the bird she was trying to see evaded her.

  ‘Darn it, where has it gone?’ she asked, though the bird hadn’t moved.

  ‘To the left of the tree,’ I said mischievously, able to do so because I wasn’t guiding this group—hadn’t been a guide for ten years in fact.

  A man named Oscar was in charge of our group, and he’d been in the guide business for twenty straight years. The downturned lines set firmly into his face suggested he only smiled when paid to do so. I felt for him. There was nothing monumentally wrong with this group. They weren’t unpleasant. They weren’t overly demanding. They were just really irritating. Maybe I was prone to irritation because after eight months together Lisa had headed back to London, her year’s leave over, and I would not see her for another two months. In November I would visit her in the UK before carrying on with my South American journey.

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’ she’d shouted as she departed from Bogotá airport.

  ‘I’m going to do heaps of things you wouldn’t!’ I replied, mock perplexed. ‘Like pee standing up!’ The last sight I had of her was her shaking head, and not for the first time I wondered what she saw in me.

  •

  Oscar, the guide, bore the onerous responsibility of ensuring everyone enjoyed their stay at the beautiful Sacha Lodge, a property on the banks of the Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This patch of forest—an island of jungle surrounded by oilfields and logging interests—was only maintained thanks to tourist dollars, so keeping people happy was not just Oscar’s job, but a deeply important responsibility.

  This was the first time since arriving in South America that I had real work to do, but what lovely work it was! The owners of the lodge had been on safari in Africa and were impressed by African guiding standards. They’d asked me to spend a month at Sacha and let them know what I felt could be done better. I was grateful to be doing them this favour because the property was not only beautiful but fascinating, aswarm with different species of monkey and birds; it also contained two amazing structures that allowed you to climb above the forest canopy and look at animals that rarely or never descended, such as sloths and howler monkeys.

  At the same time I felt a bit uncomfortable about my role at Sacha: all the guides I’d been out with were very impressive and professional, but though I’d told them that I’d worked as a guide myself, none of them knew I was there to assess for their boss.

  ‘I realised today that working with tourists is like working with bees,’ I said later that afternoon to Dan, one of the guides who’d shown me around before I joined Oscar’s group.

  ‘How so?’ he asked, looking through a book of the region’s snakes to try to identify a species he’d seen earlier.

  ‘Most days are fine—you enjoy your job, maybe even love it,’ I explained. ‘But then one day you get a prick. And then after more good days you get another prick. And another. You can handle these, but over time the pricks accumulate, until finally your system can’t take it anymore and one day you discover that you’re allergic. And once you’re allergic you can never work with bees again.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Dan, clearly unimpressed by my analogy.

  I wandered off, still pondering my bee-sting epiphany.

  The irritating people in his group were not just a problem for Oscar, they were upsetting me too; an idea had been brewing in my mind as I travelled through South America, and now, due to my bee-sting realisation, that idea was deflating at pace, making a raspberry noise as it zipped and withered and flew out the window. I was well aware my travelling days would eventually come to an end, and at some point I’d need to start earning money again. But I simply could not return to Sydney and plug away at a job I cared nothing for with the sole aim of getting ahead in life.

  It was clear by now that the TV production company wasn’t going to call back, and guiding was the only job I really felt qualified for. Sharing my passion for animals and the wilderness was perhaps the only work I was ever good at. Before arriving in Sacha I’d thought that maybe, just maybe, I would fall in love with the place, and be invited to come out of my long retirement from guiding and take a job there. However, as Oscar led us on another walk in search of the region’s astonishing diversity of birds I began to fear I had become permanently allergic to tourists. It wasn’t anything to do with Oscar, who was a great guide with sharp eyes and an encyclopaedic knowledge of bird calls. We ticked off species with the sort of names that make non–bird watchers roll their eyes—rufous-capped antthrush, white-browed wood-wren, short-billed foliage-gleaner and the quite lovely blue-crowned motmot. But my enjoyment of the sightings was tempered by my allergy to the woman who kept insisting she couldn’t see, or hear, what we were looking at or for. It had occurred to me at one stage that she might be partially deaf, or blind, and I briefly felt like a thorough bastard for holding her in contempt. But then her husband spoke to her in a low whisper which she obviously understood perfectly, so I went back to being irritated.

  Adding to my sense of frustration, I still hadn’t spotted a jaguar; I was told that while they might occasionally pass through Sacha, none of the guides had ever seen one on the property, and the closest I’d come was some big-cat tracks Dan had told me about that tourists had trampled over before I could look at them. But in all honesty it wasn’t the jaguar I was missing, really. It was more that I hadn’t found a life worth living. I’d hoped that South America would inspire me in the same way Africa had, and that I would find a place there that I could settle into for a while before the urge to travel overtook me again. So far, however, there’d always been a reason to move on. And while I’d follow Lisa almost anywhere, I knew that her base of London was somewhere I would stagnate just as fast as Sydney. Homelessness didn’t bother me as a rule, but I wanted at least the option of somewhere I could retreat to happily if need be.

  My musings were interrupted by Oscar calling, ‘Look! Leftie the light!’ in his broken English and directing his laser pointer off the trail with great excitement. I spun around in time to see a monkey pop into view. It was cat-sized, and entirely black except for a cute white patch around its mouth and nose from which it took its Spanish name of
beber leche (which means ‘drink milk’). More monkeys followed and soon the whole troop was crossing overhead, using branches as trampolines, their athleticism so impressive it almost felt as though they were showing off for our benefit.

  ‘Wow! Monkeys!’ the woman exclaimed loudly, and stood there slack-jawed, head back, watching their passage. With an uncanny similarity to my experience in the bat cave, the woman’s booming voice gave one monkey a big fright, and its bowels loosened in fear.

  If there was a God as vindictive as me the resulting mess might have landed in the woman’s mouth, but instead it only splattered her backpack. And despite the immediate rotten-fruit bouquet emanating from behind her she didn’t notice this either—or my mirth as I covertly chuckled away.

  ‘Nice shot, monkey,’ I whispered. However juvenile my pleasure, I was suddenly brimming with happiness, and I let go of my earlier worries. This was not Africa, I reminded myself, and to compare it to Africa was as foolish as measuring it against Paris. And to dislike this woman just for her rudeness to guides and general asininity was unfair and reflected far more poorly on me than it did on her. Perhaps I was so disdainful because I was afraid that if I didn’t find a worthy way to spend my life I might become like her. It was time to take all the joy I could from South America, to enjoy it whether or not I wanted to stay there long term, and live and laugh as much as possible in the extraordinary places I was lucky enough to visit.

  (And yet, a small voice nagged, it would have been even better if the monkey poo had landed in her mouth, right?)

  •

  And there was much to like about life as I lazed around in between activities at Sacha Lodge. Every day I was coming across new species of all forms of life, from anteaters to electric eels, and eating bounteously. In fact, my daily walks were proving no match for the amount I was eating, so I decided I should take advantage of the lagoon in front of the lodge and get some exercise more strenuous than mastication.

  Shaped like a half-moon, the lagoon stretched perhaps a kilometre either side of the lodge’s deck, its dark waters meeting the shore roughly two hundred metres opposite. A small grassy area on the far bank—cut occasionally by channels that drained the surrounding swamps and gave the lagoon its dark tea colour—gave way to tall trees alive with monkeys and birds.

  When I first saw the lodge I was surprised at its position by the lagoon, thinking it would be heaven for mosquitoes but hell for anyone with blood in their veins and skin to be punctured. However, Dan explained that the water from the swamps was rich in tannins leached from decaying leaves, and was thus too acidic for mosquitoes to lay their eggs in. As a result, the deck overlooking the lagoon was unspoiled.

  Following my resolution to take up swimming, I stood in my swimmers on said deck eyeing the diving board mounted at its edge. Raised a mere two metres above the water’s surface, it was still high enough to trigger my fear of heights, and I started making excuses to myself not to use it, which were quickly countered by the voice of rationality. What if a stump was hidden underneath the water? (They had all been cleared long ago, doofus.) What if an enormous caiman had just moved in? (No enormous caimans have been seen here for years, you wimp.) What if I landed on an electric eel? (Eels are nocturnal; be a man and get on that board!)

  That rational voice was a bastard, but his arguments were irrefutable, so I took a few swift steps up the ladder to the board and launched myself off the end, my body arched, my hands held out in front just as my swimming teacher had taught me many years before, breaking the surface tension with my fingers before the rest of me plunged through. My swimming teacher may have been happy with the dive had she seen it, but unlike me she didn’t have testicles; I was less impressed, as they somehow got slapped hard enough that I felt them in my throat. Clearly I should worry less about animals in the lagoon and concentrate more on my own poor form.

  Once my testicles had recovered from the dive, I resolved to take full advantage of the lagoon and go for a swim each day. I planned on building slowly until I could swim to the other side and back, around four hundred metres all up. Not so great a challenge, but on my first attempt I wasn’t even halfway across when I felt my legs lagging, and my head sinking lower with each stroke. I was doing breaststroke, my bobbing dome unintentionally mimicking the monkeys that watched from the far shore, dipping their heads up and down as they tried to figure out what that strange and inelegant blob was in the lagoon.

  Wisely deciding to avoid the embarrassment of needing rescue, I swam back to the swimming platform just as one of the guides, a perpetually upbeat chap called Gustavo, began setting up rods for his guests to go piranha fishing.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ one of them shouted at me in an American accent.

  ‘Nah, Australian,’ I replied.

  To be honest I wasn’t sure how wise it was to be in the water at the same time as the bait (chunks of chicken that the wise piranhas were experts at nibbling off the hook without ever touching the metal), and hauled myself out rather nimbly.

  The next day, in spite of the ever-present piranhas, I was determined to make it at least halfway across the lagoon before turning back. But just as I launched myself off the board (this time arching my back sharply like a cocked eyebrow to avoid the indignity I’d suffered the day before), I spotted a head bobbing up and down on the other side of the lagoon, not far from the grassy patch. It was the head of an elderly man staying at the lodge, and he had made it to the other side. Being ruled by testosterone is a pain in the arse sometimes: there was now no way I could only go halfway.

  I began my slow breaststroke, feeling the fatigue almost immediately as my muscles complained at such abuse two days in a row. Relief followed as they warmed and momentarily stopped their whining; there was even some joy as I got further than the previous day’s capitulation point, but then a weary leadenness set in.

  The water was surprisingly warm, the tropical sun maintaining it at a bath-like temperature. But only to a point: when tiredness made my limbs droop down to maybe a foot in depth the water suddenly became startlingly cold, jerking me back to proper form. This was a far better way of maintaining style than my old teacher’s method of hauling my backside up by the pants anytime I relaxed, giving me a wedgie in the process.

  The old man swam past me, heading back towards the lodge, giving a merry ‘Ciao!’, my reply a gasped ‘Hoo!’—the only sound I could manage at that point.

  Somehow I made it to the other side, where I trod water a while, then steeled myself to head back; as I set off the deck looked ridiculously far away, a moon landing of a swim. While I splashed and dog-paddled I distracted myself by listening to the birds around the lagoon’s edge, doves cooing, the rasped call of hoatzins interrupted by the odd clapping of wings as they lifted off inelegantly. Kingfishers dipped into the water for prey then beat their catch against branches before swallowing it, and from somewhere unseen came the maniacal, funky-rhythmed call of a wood-rail.

  Gustavo (‘Call me Gus. Only my mother calls me Gustavo, and only then when I am in trouble’) was with new guests when I finally got back. Shooting an amused look at me as I hauled myself out, he said to his group, ‘I recommend swimming to you all, you can see it is safe, but maybe don’t go across to the other side. Just stay around the platform.’ I wondered if there was something I’d missed on my list of potential diving-board disasters. I meant to ask Gus later on why he had said to stay near the platform, but figured it was just because he didn’t want to have to canoe out to rescue them should they lose energy.

  •

  Within days I was doing the swim across the lagoon with relative ease, and was planning on building up to two laps. My only fear was of caimans. Two different species of caiman lived in the lagoon: the inoffensive spectacled caiman (never a problem even when it reached its maximum length of just over two metres), and the black caiman, a confirmed man-eater in some parts of South America, and the largest of its family, reaching six metres in some places.

  ‘T
here’s a large black caiman in there,’ Gus told me one day, conversationally.

  ‘Huge?’ I asked, echoing Marcello from the Pantanal.

  ‘Not huge. Just large. Maybe three metres. But it usually stays over the other side of the lagoon, near that channel the canoes use to bring guests in.’

  ‘Usually’ is not a comforting word when applied to wildlife, as animals are as changeable as the weather. ‘Three metres’ was even less so, as a caiman that size would be more than capable of dragging me down, pulling me apart, and snacking on me as needed while my bits decomposed. (I think about crocodilians a lot, so I know every grim step of the process.)

  He scratched his chin thoughtfully, and added, ‘And that caiman under the deck; even though she’s just a spectacled she might get upset if she thought you were going for her babies…’

  ‘And how big is she?’

  ‘About two metres.’

  Two metres wasn’t that comforting either. I’d known about the caiman under the deck, but was yet to see it and hadn’t realised it was quite so large. Suddenly the diving board seemed the least of my challenges as I tried to gather back the bravery that I’d lost at my desk job.

  The same night as my conversation with Gus about the caimans, instead of eating at the main area of the lodge there was a barbecue dinner on the deck. Meat sizzled and delicious aromas drifted through the lodge, making stomachs gurgle hungrily.

  I joined a small cluster of tourists and a guide making their way to the deck, following our noses, when a voice from the water called ‘Mom!’, and I was transported back to Parque Machia in Bolivia, and Sonko the overweight puma.

  At Machia, when the volunteers walked towards the pumas’ cages they shouted out ‘Hola!’ so the puma knew who was walking towards them (since the animals are tied up or caged it would be stressful for them to hear only footsteps). Roy always answered with a hearty, snarling yowl. The plump, strange-voiced Sonko squeaked out something that sounded like a cigarette-smoking, sea-urchin-gargling baby American—‘Mom!’ he squeaked. ‘Mom! Mom!’ This sound was also very similar to the plaintive cry of a baby crocodilian.