How to Walk a Puma (15 page)

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.

‘There’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.

Now, hearing this sound coming from under the steps leading to the deck, I knew it was not some lost child, but a baby caiman. They can be quite cute, so I stepped off the deck for a closer look, walking down to the water’s edge. Rookie error, that move.

‘Mom!’ came the sound again, but unlike old Sonko, who was just saying hello, this baby caiman meant exactly what it said.

‘Bugger,’ I thought, just as a wave started coming towards me. I jumped backwards, then sideways, scrambling for the stairs. One of the other tourists staggered away with his hands over his eyes, sure I was about to be eaten, while another gave a strangled croak. Then the guide, who had stepped away for a moment, came back, took in the scene and laughed. He bent down and shone his torch under the deck.

Mom was only about a metre long.

Probably not worth the reaction then.

Based on Gus’s exaggeration of the deck caiman’s size I decided that the black caiman who apparently lived across the lagoon was most likely not the alleged three metres either, and decided to give it no more thought.

With my confidence renewed, the next day’s swim was a pleasure, and I started doing one and a half laps. Although I was no longer worried about the caiman, I felt a mild concern about candiru, a fish that makes you understand just how mean a streak evolution possesses. Small and narrow, like half a worm, it usually latches onto the gills of larger fish, lodging itself in with sharpened fins and feeding on the soft flesh inside. Somehow it has also developed a sideline hobby with swimming humans, homing in on the smell of urine before proceeding straight up the urinary tract—this applies to women as well as men. (However, the reputation it has of being able to swim straight up the urinary stream of anyone foolish enough to pee into the river is a myth.) Once inside the urinary tract, the candiru’s barbed fins come out and it eats away, driving the host mad with pain—rumours abound of men performing autopeotomies rather than live with it inside them.

I had been told that candiru were not in the lagoon for the same reason there were no mosquitoes—the water was too acidic. Nevertheless, I was glad for the mesh insert in my swimmers that would act as an extra barrier. I also, as a matter of course, did not pee in the lagoon, something that made me swim faster each time my feet dragged into the cold water below.

One day during my swim I noticed a clump of vegetation that must have broken away from the bank or come in on a channel, and had formed a floating island in the lagoon. About two metres in diameter, it drifted randomly, pushed by wind and what small currents there were in the water, until it came to rest right in the middle of my usual route. I would have to pass right by that, and it perturbed me. Such places are havens for fish, who use them to shelter from dive bombers like kingfishers, and trawlers like terns and skimmers.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t save them from predators that they share the water with; in fact, any enterprising caiman would investigate the island to see if it was snack time.

These were not good thoughts to be dwelling on as I approached it, and I swam even more slowly than usual, only spurred on when my feet hit the cold patches. For some reason I started to picture myself doing a similar swim in northern Australia, or back in Botswana, and how terrifying it would be if a scaly head appeared beside me. I couldn’t help imagining the terrifying feeling of jaws clamping on a limb. I started swimming faster, powering past the makeshift island, the urge to have a little pee stronger than ever before, the fear of candiru still sufficient to keep it in. My swimming technique is all enthusiasm, no style (I’m terrified of hearing that I am the same in bed), and now I was really churning the water, sure that something was stalking me, the mysterious black caiman somewhere behind me, closing in.

I began to plan what I would do if I was grabbed. ‘Crocodilians have sensitive skin between their toes,’ a guiding instructor once told me in all seriousness, ‘and a good pinch there might make them release you.’ I couldn’t imagine having the presence of mind to locate this particular patch of skin in such circumstances—in fact I thought it was far more likely I’d panic to death first. A friend of mine in South Africa once had a smallish croc take his arm clean off, not something I wished for but better than being grabbed by the torso and dragged down into the water and drowned. If I was fortunate enough to only lose a limb, my board shorts had a drawstring, and I could rip that out and make a tourniquet, swimming to whatever bank was nearest, making sure to compensate for my lopsidedness as I went.

There was a flaw in my plan though. ‘Bloody piranhas,’ I thought. With that much blood in the water there was no way they would stick with their mainly vegetarian ways.

None of these ideas was comforting in the least, and when I hit my turnaround point I didn’t even pause, just started back, taking a wider route around the sinister vegetation.

Suddenly some nostrils appeared beside me, and kept pace. I made a sobbing wail, a panicky flurry from my legs sending ripples over the animal’s nose and making it disappear, which was even worse than being able to see it.

My mind took a moment to process what I had seen, busy as it was reverting to childhood; then I realised that the nostrils had been tiny, and closely spaced—a reptile to be sure, but no caiman. The nostrils reappeared, then a whole head—that of a terrapin. (‘Tortoises live on land, and have little round feet like elephants,’ I have explained to many a tourist. ‘Turtles live in the ocean and have flippers. Terrapins live in fresh water and have webbed feet.’) ‘You bastard!’ I spluttered in relief. Once my heart rate had returned to normal, I began to enjoy the little reptile’s company alongside me (and I also thought it might act as bait for anything larger that might come along, distracting it from my flailing legs in the water). It tracked with me for a while, and keeping my focus on it rather than the boogey caiman, I was able to enjoy my swim once more, not even flinching too much or squealing when submerged vegetation brushed my leg.

Despite my fears I went back into the lagoon day after day, plunging off the board, swimming out and back, then out and back again, eventually building up to three times across—no great achievement, but after a year on the road it was refreshing to not feel like a piece of cheese.

In Africa I had met and become friends with two well-known wildlife photographers, Pete and Renee, who lived in Ecuador and had introduced me to Sacha’s owners, thus facilitating my stay. During my last few days at Sacha they came to visit the camp and get some photos for their portfolios. I pointed out to them a place where the pygmy marmosets crossed a path within the lodge grounds each day, one of them carrying a thumb-sized baby with an old-man face, then announced that I was off for my daily swim.

‘How far do you go?’ Pete asked.

‘Three times across and back,’ I answered proudly.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Pete said simply. Pete has lived in Ecuador for
twenty-five
years, and travels the world photographing animals, getting the very first images of certain species in the wild, so when it comes to wildlife he’s someone to listen to.

So I didn’t listen and went out to swim the last few days.

Pete and Renee stayed on at the lodge after I left, and emailed me a few days later. ‘Remember that story we told you about the Peruvian primate researcher?’ they wrote.

I did recall the story. The researcher had disappeared two years earlier while taking his regular swim somewhere in Peru’s Manú National Park. No trace had been found, not a scrap of flesh, not a piece of swimwear. If a caiman had grabbed him or if he had somehow been nabbed from the shore by a jaguar there would have been some grisly evidence, and if he had merely drowned it would have become evident over time when his body appeared. There was only one reasonable suspect.

‘Well, the day after you left,’ the email continued, ‘an anaconda was seen coiled right at the place you used to turn around. We
couldn’t see how long it was because it was piled up, but one section was as thick as a thigh. That could easily take a man.’

‘Bugger,’ I thought. ‘An anaconda. Didn’t think of that one.’

A Month of Monkeys

Another of my adventures at Sacha occurred in the jungle.

It was all the monkeys’ fault.

And the birds’.

Or maybe mine.

Not only was there a staggering six hundred bird species around Sacha Lodge, there were also eight species of monkey. This amazed me—the whole southern African region holds only two species of monkey, and Sacha is an island of just a few hectares, surrounded by oil interests and illegal forestry and poaching. Yet squirrel monkeys, black-mantled tamarins, rare night monkeys, and the incredibly cute pygmy marmosets could be seen around the lodge, with other, shyer, species staying further out in the jungle.

In the month I spent at Sacha I set myself the challenge of seeing all eight species of monkey. In three weeks, with some effort, I’d seen seven of them. So I was unusually delighted when a fig hit me while I was out on a trail one day and the fruit flinger turned out to be the eighth monkey species, a dusky titi.

Soon after the dusky titi and its family had scampered off I became distracted by a mixed flock of birds moving through the jungle undergrowth. Next thing I knew I was starting to tick off species from my bird list as well. My progress on the trail was slow, but only because I was so enthralled by its bounty. Meanwhile the animals
were distracting me from something I should have been paying attention to: the time.

By now I was allowed to walk the trails by myself, far from the madding tourists. I had somehow mastered the art of seeing monkeys, discriminating between branches shaken by a breeze and those that were moving due to the weight of an animal. But the real trick is to see the monkeys without them seeing you. So after the titis had moved on and the birds had dispersed, I was very proud when I saw some howler monkeys coming my way and managed to hide against a tree trunk before they spotted me.

I’d imagined the jungle in Sacha would be a place of impenetrable growth, a thick green barrier filled with snakes and hairy tarantulas, with plenty of cover to make it easy for me to view wildlife. Real rainforest, if left undisturbed, has such a closed canopy that less than ten per cent of sunlight gets through; as a result, not much grows in the understorey at all, and there are few snakes or spiders to be seen. Howlers would normally only be found in primary forest, but even at Sacha that was rare and this family was moving through a relatively open area. It was remarkable that the howler monkeys didn’t see me (and pleasing, as I didn’t want to disturb their natural behaviour) but they soon settled in a tree above me, getting ready for the night. I stayed motionless for a while, and I was just beginning to wonder if I was jungle-savvy enough to sneak away without disturbing them when the male made a noise like an engine starting.

Soon the whole family (of whom I counted five) joined in the howling, and I was subjected to an ear-rattling cacophony. Looking through binoculars, I focused on the male’s throat pouch, which was ballooning with each long breath. The little ones did their best to imitate their dad, their cheeks stretching close to bursting. After a
wild lion’s roar up close it was the second best thing I’d ever heard, and I was transfixed—so transfixed in fact that I didn’t realise that the monkeys were shouting at the dusk, and it was about to get dark. Day length is constant at the equator, and there was no excuse for me to be surprised at sunset occurring at six, just as it did every night.

‘Bugger,’ I thought, far later than I should have. Despite the relatively light cover compared with rainforest, it was already very dark at tree level. I needed to decide whether to backtrack as quickly as possible along the path I was familiar with or carry on ahead in the direction I was pretty sure would take me to the lodge. Many of the forest trails at Sacha are like orgying anacondas, twisting and crossing each other with no discernible pattern, which made doubling back the sensible thing to do. So I didn’t.

Instead, plunging ahead I found that the trail looped away from where I wanted it to go, and became harder to make out. Sadly, my survival skills didn’t extend to making a flashlight out of available resources, which at that point were mainly decaying leaves—and mosquitoes. Lots of them. Fallen leaves in the jungle acted as cups for rainwater and made perfect breeding grounds for bloodsuckers. So I ploughed on in the gathering darkness, breathing harder, inhaling a mosquito or six at one point and coughing, enough to make me panic a little. Or maybe the panic was just because I knew I’d been stupid. If it was Africa all I could do at that point was climb a tree and hope I was found by people before a leopard noticed me, but here I knew that I didn’t really have cats to worry about, since pumas—though ubiquitous in many parts of South America—had not been recorded at Sacha. (And as Marguerite had pointed out I was more likely to be impregnated by a llama than get lucky and see a jaguar.) The sensible thing to do was sit tight, wait, and see if anyone
noticed my absence, though even if they did they’d have no idea where to begin looking for me. Covering myself with my poncho and some insect repellent to slow the loss of blood to the insects, then waiting for morning and backtracking was another sensible option.

So I didn’t do that either.

As the darkness deepened I became very aware of the smells of decaying leaves, the screeching of insects, and the low throb of some unknown toad or frog. Then after a while I realised the low throb was actually the sound of the lodge’s generator, and began to hope that maybe it wasn’t so far away. Unfortunately, just as the canopy swallows light, forest absorbs sound.

By this stage it was so dark in the forest I could barely see, but I was still on some sort of trail, and I tried to follow it. My wonky hearing often has me heading in the wrong direction—but this did not appear to be the case now because the sound of the generator seemed to be getting louder. I didn’t know if the trail would continue in the right direction. And if it diverted I wasn’t sure whether I should ignore the sensible option (again) and go cross country towards the sound. Stumbling on blindly in the dark relying on my unreliable hearing would be an act of grand tomfoolery, even by my standards.

Then I lost the option of choosing to be an idiot and had it thrust upon me. The villain was a dastardly root which wrapped itself around my boot and tripped me. I swivelled in the air, landing on my back, arched over my pack, instinctively clutching my binoculars high and safe. I scrambled up again quickly, worried about army ants and any other thing that might want to crawl on me and bite, then realised I’d lost any sense of direction I might previously have had. Shaking damp leaves from my hair, I looked around for the trail but
couldn’t even see my feet. I was now immersed in a darkness so complete it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

Cursing myself for not replacing the blown bulb in my Maglite, I slowly and cautiously made my way forward, hands outstretched, breath so ragged it sometimes drowned out the noise I was trying to follow.

Then I saw a light. It was red and pulsed as I moved, as if trying to signal me through the foliage. Convinced it was the lodge, obscured by swaying branches, I slid my feet in its direction, but it was now to my left, so I changed course, and it did too, baffling me momentarily until it winked at me then zoomed up into the air. Red fireflies? I wondered, only familiar with the green ones the rest of the world possesses. The Amazon is a one upper when it comes to insects, which are all brighter, bigger and/or louder than their equivalents in other parts of the world, or just so strange they appear to be the result of some bizarre experiment.

I pushed ahead again, my palms forward, my legs moving in a blind zombie shuffle. After a while, my hands brushed something soft and furry. I flinched back, stumbling again, and bounced off a tree. Suddenly I felt claws clutching me from all sides, and flailed, terrified. Something was biting me, tearing at me.

Despite my fear, I forced myself to stay still and think rationally. The furry thing I’d felt was most likely balsa fluff—drifting cotton from a kapok tree—though in my head I was sure it was a big ugly tarantula, hairy and mobile, like a Russian’s knuckles going for a walk. Luckily the claws turned out to be nothing more than thorny vines, which I picked my way out of. Incapable of stopping now, I blundered on, the generator noise definitely louder, the path definitely gone.

‘Go to the light!’ friends of faith have implored me over the years. And I finally did. Ahead of me a light pulsed; at first I thought it was just another firefly flaunting its freedom, but it came again, not blinking, just strobing in and out of my vision as the angle between it and the foliage changed. I made a beeline towards it, stumbling forward, finally tripping on a raised walkway, then sprawling once more, my hands in front of me balled into fists in case of spiders.

Next thing I knew I smashed into hard timber, falling down. I got up, too thrilled to feel much pain, felt my way to the entrance, and shuffled into the lodge feeling jubilant. I had no idea what time it was, and just hoped a search party hadn’t formed.

I short-cutted through the back of the lodge and dashed into my room without passing any staff. It was 7.45 pm. I had been lost for less than two hours, and was only a few minutes late for dinner.

During the meal there was an announcement that Dan would be leading a night walk; thinking it would probably be good to get straight back on the tarantula, so to speak, I arrived before anyone else at the designated meeting place for the walk. A halogen lamp illuminated the spot, and bugs of hallucinogenic diversity dipped and dived at it, some bouncing off, stunned, into the grass below. When a lurid green cicada with bright red eyes did just this, I reached down to grab it and take a closer look. The shadow my arm cast swelled and lengthened, as if a giant were probing the earth, and the shadow of a twig made a dark stripe on the lawn close beside it.

‘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.