How to Walk a Puma

by Peter Allison

  ‘That twig looks a bit like a snake,’ I thought. Just then the ‘twig’ flicked a forked tongue at my arm. I retracted the limb with such speed it may have made a sonic pop, and Dan arrived soon after to find me sprawled on the deck trying to get a closer look at what he quickly identified as a cat-eyed snake.

  ‘Mostly harmless,’ he said. ‘Lucky it wasn’t a fer-de-lance,’ he added, naming one of the region’s most venomous and aggressive snakes. If it had been a fer-de-lance (or a viper or bushmaster, two of South America’s other venomous snakes), I would have been at serious risk of losing a limb, if not my life.

  No matter how well I had hidden from the howlers, clearly I was not in possession of proper jungle skills. There and then I decided that not only was I ill-suited for a return to guiding, but that perhaps the jungle as a whole was not a great place for me to spend much more time. After Sacha, I was going to London to visit Lisa, and after a short stay there planned on coming straight back to South America. Perhaps the sensible thing would be to stay in the UK and give up my wanderings. Maybe I’d been right after all when I left the bush and went back to Australia.

  ‘Nah,’ I thought. ‘Time to go deeper.’ And with that idea began my most extreme journey so far.

  Meeting the People

  ‘Man, what happened to your face?’ Tom asked me in his usual jovial tone, his Southern accent pronounced even though he’d lived in Ecuador for more than twenty years. Beside him stood a man I knew must be Otobo. Little more than five foot tall but powerfully built, he greeted me warmly. We were in Coca, a small town close to Sacha; from here I would head further into the Amazon basin, where I would visit Otobo’s tribe, the Huaorani.

  ‘Muggers,’ I explained to Tom, a friend of friends. ‘Three of them. And I’d had enough to drink to think it was a good idea to fight back. Probably wasn’t,’ I finished, indicating my black eye and swollen lip, still prominent two days after the event.

  Tom translated this into Spanish for Otobo, no doubt being more than a little generous about my prowess. Otobo nodded at me, apparently impressed at my warrior spirit. Perhaps my misshapen nose (a product of genetics, not fighting) gave the impression that I fought a lot. And lost often.

  ‘All three ran from me,’ I carried on, encouraged, but then some fondness for honesty made me add, ‘Admittedly by then they had twenty dollars and a credit card.’ Tom again translated, but even with my limited Spanish I could tell he was once again speaking up my fighting abilities. It hadn’t been much of a brawl—my style was less martial arts and more crazed raccoon—but it had reminded me that not everyone I met on this trip would be friendly.

  That we were standing in the somewhat modern streets of Coca having this meeting at all was quite remarkable, as the Huaorani only became aware of the outside world—and the world of them—in the late 1950s. The tribe’s name means ‘the people’, as they consider outsiders of any ethnic group to be something else, usually cowode, a term that can be roughly translated as ‘cannibal’. Since their introduction to the outside world they have been the targets of missionaries and ruthless oil companies, the two groups sometimes working in cahoots to drive them from their land.

  Otobo had met Tom and his wife Mariela when they helped a neighbouring tribe, the Kichwa, set up an ecotourism operation. Even though some of his family had dabbled in working for the oil companies and others had strayed to cities, Otobo saw that perhaps the only way to preserve his culture would be to start his own tourist operation, and let outsiders see how and where the Huaorani live. I was to spend three weeks with him, three weeks of no telephones, internet, newspapers or modern distractions of any kind. With the Minke in London and no way to communicate with her I kept a diary for the first time in twenty years; as it turned out, my time with the Huaorani would be some of the most extraordinary weeks of my life.

  •

  Three English tourists met Tom, Otobo and myself and we set off from Coca on an open-backed truck with bench seats, driving along the Via Auca (literally ‘Road of Savages’, a name given by the oil companies who had the road built, and a label the Huaorani are none too keen on). Until its construction, most Huaorani had lived deep in the rainforest, usually far from major waterways, relying on the forest, not water, for their livelihood. These habits had allowed them to stay undetected for so long, but as more roads were proposed their isolation was under threat.

  Along the way several other Huaorani people that Otobo knew flagged us down and jumped on board. After several hours on a road well cared for by the oil companies we came to a checkpoint that marked the entry to Yasuni National Park, where military officials checked our health papers and stamped us in, as if we were leaving Ecuador and entering a whole new country. In the minds of the Huaorani, of course, we were. This was their land.

  After the checkpoint we transferred to motorised canoe, travelling for several more long hours down the Cononaco River. Otobo was very proud of his vessel, a long river craft made of fibreglass; its modern appearance became increasingly out of place the further we went into the park, seeing fewer and fewer signs of development, then no sign of humanity at all.

  We camped in dome tents by the river that night, and Otobo’s travelling companions introduced themselves to us, some in Spanish that Tom translated, others in their native language of Huao (which is pronounced as a quite lovely ‘Wow’). Everyone’s introductions were brief, except for one guy’s, who rambled on forever about which village he was born in, where he grew up, and innumerable other details. ‘I don’t like flies,’ he even said at one point. Tom just let him go on, afterwards explaining that he had a reputation for aggression.

  Then we four newcomers were given Huaorani names, a process that the five or so of them all meditated and consulted over. Mine was Ayare, because I reminded them of someone of that name, who was tall. (Most Huaorani are barely above five foot, so I am tall in their part of the world.) He was also known as a flirt, I was told, good with the ladies, and I’m sure that with my black eye I must have seemed a real catch.

  An owl called throughout the night, a mournful and sleep-defying cry. The next day Otobo described it to us as: ‘A really big one. Bigger than an eagle. Bigger than a man even.’ Later we found the owl in question. It was maybe a foot or so in size, but of course from the ground it did look huge. So therefore to the Huaorani it was.

  Setting off in the canoe I soon learnt why the Huaorani traditionally don’t wear clothes. It rains here furiously, at least once a day—and I was there in the dry season. In the wet season it rains twice a day. Clothes get soaked and there’s no time to dry them before the next drenching, creating a perfect environment for fungi and parasites. It is only in the open spaces directly over the river that any light can penetrate, so after our day’s drenching Otobo steered the boat down the middle of the river, swerving only for stumps and the occasional river dolphin. We camped another night, and spent another full day puttering downriver before finally reaching Otobo’s village, a threebuilding affair named Boanamo which is home to Otobo, his wife and their three children, plus any one of his three brothers who might pass through. Only a few hundred metres away was another high-arched thatched building, which housed Otobo’s parents, their pet macaw, several dogs and a spider monkey who hissed his bitey intent at any approach. I was introduced to Otobo’s father, Omagewe, a diminutive but muscular man in his sixties. He spoke no Spanish, only Huao, so smiled and laughed in greeting.

  The English tourists whose trip I had piggybacked in on were keen bird watchers, and that suited me pefectly. I knew from my time in Africa that bird watchers usually spot more animals than anyone else as they are attuned to picking up the smallest movements, the slightest differences in colour, and know how to sit patiently and quietly to see what appears. So it was that we spent our first full day off the canoe at a salt lick, watching rainbow-coloured streams of parrots flutter down to eat the nutrient-rich clay that counters various toxins in their food.

  ‘So, you going to g
et naked?’ Tom asked me. One of the guides at Sacha who had had some dealings with the Huaorani had told me that they would never trust anyone in clothes; only if you’re naked can they be sure you’re not hiding anything.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But they’re all in their seventies,’ I indicated the English, ‘so I don’t imagine they want to see me nude, nor me them.’

  ‘The reason I asked is that Omagewe,’ Tom indicated Otobo’s father, ‘was laughing earlier and saying you should take your pants off.’

  ‘Really? I had no idea we’d become so close already.’

  Tom just laughed, and I sat watching the birds and my fellow travellers: Quiet Chris, a softly spoken, well-travelled and pleasant man, who was a friend of the other two, a married couple—Mute Elizabeth, whom I never formed an opinion of because she never spoke, and her husband Stinky Fred, who had plenty of personality, unfortunately not all good. He belonged to a generation who believe it’s okay to be racist and misogynistic as long as you wink at the end of each statement to show it’s all good fun. And he smelled. We’d been asked not to use the insect repellent DEET, or even deodorant, as it would frighten off animals, but he took this to rule out bathing altogether. It was hard not to retch when downwind of him, but on the plus side he did attract lots of intriguing insects.

  For my part I was bathing, in the chocolate milk–coloured waters of the Cononaco River, but cautiously. There were candirus here, and caiman, stingrays and hidden stumps. I also had a sizable gash on the back of my head, due to one of my assailants breaking a beer bottle over it during the mugging. Occasional slivers of glass still emerged from the swollen wound that I was treating with nothing but pawpaw ointment. I was vaguely concerned that this might attract piranhas, but not so much that I would take Stinky Fred’s route and not bathe at all.

  •

  December twenty-fifth 2010 was a day of good and bad news. Christmas was never a big deal in my household so means little to me, and even less to the Huaorani, although they did make an effort to honour the strange ritual of the cowode by prepping a smoked chicken for us. With no refrigeration it would be the last store-bought meat of our stay, and any other protein would come straight from the jungle.

  The day itself involved more birdwatching, some pleasant poking around in the jungle, and a bit of a paddle on the river in a borrowed canoe, Omagewe laughing from the bank at my steering issues (mine was the only canoe tacking like a yacht; for some reason I could not make the bloody thing go straight). Later, Omagewe told us he had found a nest nearby belonging to a harpy eagle, one of the world’s most powerful birds and something I was very eager to see. As I was somewhat more nimble than the English I agreed to go ahead and check out the hunting trails leading to the nest. The good news was that it wasn’t too strenuous a walk, but the bad news was that it wasn’t a harpy eagle, rather an ornate hawk eagle—still impressive and beautiful, but like seeing an ocelot when looking for a jaguar.

  That night, though, disaster struck as I made my way into my small tent. A searing pain hit my hand as I undid the zip, and I turned ashen-faced to Otobo’s brother Bartolo who was standing nearby.

  ‘Mariela! Tom!’ Bartolo shouted. ‘Peter’s been bitten by a snake!’

  The good news was that he was wrong. It was a Konga ant. The bad news was that these are the size of a bullet and pack as much ill intent. Some people bitten by it have fevers that last for days. I took some painkillers, writhed a while, and eventually fell asleep.

  No fever eventuated, and the next day was my birthday. This concept is also alien to Huaorani, who have no real idea when they were born; to them it simply does not matter. Any day can be special in the jungle, whether it brings food, a new baby, or a pleasant reunion with family.

  That day I saw several new species of bird, and was treated by Mariela and the kind but bemused Huaorani to a birthday cake made from two pancakes on top of each other held together and slathered on top with Nutella. The real treat though was meeting Otobo’s father-in-law, a smiling older fellow, around five foot one, with an impressive mullet. Together with Omagewe, he chanted a history to us. It basically listed all the people the men had killed—Otobo’s father-in-law had managed five in a ‘war’ with petroleros (oil workers) back in the seventies.

  Later that evening I saw a spectacular hummingbird, large for the family at the size of a starling, with tail streamers that curved and crossed each other, covered in iridescent red plumage. Called the fiery topaz, this bird was very high on my wish list, and seeing it made up for some earlier disappointment when Bartolo spotted a tapir ahead of a canoe we were in, but I just missed it, seeing only the bushes rustling as it scampered away. Still, the sighting filled me with a certain optimism. Everything felt like it was getting closer. A jaguar must be nearby. The Huaorani were right—any day could be a special one in the jungle.

  The next day we spent four hours in the canoe, travelling downriver to a village called Bameno. In the seventies, this place had been an oil exploration camp, but the Huaorani drove the petroleros out (with spears) and took over the property to stop them returning, thus inheriting a gravel airstrip that they have maintained in rough form to this day.

  The village, with maybe fifty inhabitants, was far busier than Otobo’s little spot upriver (which bears the confusingly similar name of Boanamo), and normally had only five or six inhabitants, swelling to ten if his wife arrived with their three children. (Otobo and his wife have two girls and a newborn son. ‘He has six fingers on each hand!’ Otobo told me proudly, ‘and six toes too!’ The toes, I might add, are on his feet where they should be.)

  Everyone was related in some way, which might account for the occasional surfeit of fingers and toes, and the Huaorani as an ethnic group only number about two thousand individuals, as they have done for hundreds, even thousands, of years. This meant that if you made one enemy you made many, and as I am constantly making faux pas in my own culture I was quite nervous about offending someone here by accidentally making a gesture that signified: ‘Why yes, sir, I would very much like to have congress with your chicken!’ Fortunately the villagers of Bameno were nothing but friendly, and curious.

  At the airstrip we said farewell to Quiet Chris, Mute Elizabeth and Stinky Fred, and hello to two new arrivals. Then we got naked.

  Or at least three of us did, including me. In full Huaorani regalia—that is, nothing but a string, which I plan on wearing until it drops off (at the time of writing it still resolutely circles my waist)—we met the whole village, before making our way to the house of Omagewe’s father-in-law Quempere, the jaguar shaman. Among the Huaorani he is considered one of the most powerful spiritual leaders, and is believed to have access to spiritual realms and an ability to change into a jaguar at will. ‘I’d love to see that,’ I said to Otobo.

  ‘It doesn’t happen every day now like it used to,’ he explained.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He looks after his grandkids a lot now, and they piss on him.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, not really sure what else to say.

  Otobo sensed my confusion. ‘The jaguar spirit doesn’t like the smell, so stays away.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again, and left it at that.

  Despite his inability to shape shift, Quempere did give me the heartening news that he would send the spirit of a jaguar to the river’s edge, or somewhere in the forest where I would see it.

  Then, being me, I dived into the Cononaco River which flows past the village, and swam about a kilometre. There was no real reason why I did it, but public nakedness had fostered a certain delirium, making me forget what I was offering as bait in waters that hold caiman, piranhas and the dreaded candiru.

  That night we camped downstream, accompanied by several of the village elders. The new tourists included American Allan, an aspiring television presenter, and his cameraman Fernando, who delighted in the playful nature of the Huaorani men, particularly Otobo’s father. I had begun to think of the old man as the Amazing Omagewe. D
espite his age he climbed trees as if they were ladders, laughing all the way, while I watched in admiration below, wanting to join in but fearing abrasions on areas that were already sensitive due to being sunburnt for the very first time.

  That night we took a cruise in the canoe to look for caiman. I sat in the bow with a hefty Maglite, and eventually I made out a reasonable-sized caiman on a bank (Marcello would have undoubtedly called it ‘huge!’). On the way back I continued to shine the torch on the banks, and not far from our camp I hit eyeshine.

  ‘Tigre!’ shouted Otobo.

  When the Spanish arrived in South America they decided that the large spotted cat they encountered was somehow the same as the huge striped one in Asia, so they called it ‘tigre’, though of course it wasn’t a tiger. So confusingly in South America tigre means jaguar. At Otobo’s shout I almost fell out of the canoe in excitement, peering with eye-straining intensity down the flashlight’s beam.

  But this was not a jaguar. It was an ocelot. Roughly twice the size of a housecat with an intricately patterned coat and large eyes suited to nocturnal hunting, it blinked briefly at us then melted into the undergrowth. I felt momentarily deflated, before the optimism I’d learnt in the Pantanal with Marcello came straight back. It was a thrill to see the ocelot as it was the first truly wild cat I’d seen in South America. More would come, surely.

  Even Huaorani Fear Someone

  I had a fitful night after seeing the ocelot, a fever plaguing my sleep, making me shake under the thin sheet I used as a cover. Tom had suffered dengue fever the year before and said my symptoms were consistent with that disease, something that would require an evacuation, as the Huaorani had no facilities to care for me. I did not want to leave, and in the morning I felt well enough to go out with a group of Huaorani, including the Amazing Omagewe. Probably the happiest man I had ever met, he never stopped laughing or smiling, even when his more aged father-in-law, the jaguar shaman, wandered off into the forest that afternoon after a vision. Tom had explained to me that Quempere was showing signs of senility, so finding him was a priority.