How to Walk a Puma (4 page)

‘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. Thre 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.

‘Exactly!’ was Freddy’s delighted reply. ‘Most of Argentina is desert—dry, horrible desert, barely worth farming. Only in the east and right at the south do you have mountains and snow. The south, Patagonia, that’s what a lot of people think Argentina is like. There
it is cold, with high mountains, condors soaring, day-long sun … but that is only in Patagonia.’

By this stage the scars on my knee had faded enough that it looked like I’d been attacked by nothing more savage than acne, and I was keen to have a new adventure. Freddy’s description made me determined to visit Patagonia, a region of southern Argentina and Chile.

In travellers’ circles and in some literature, Patagonia is famous for its stark landscapes, bleak winds, peaks capped with year-round snow, and the largest sheet of ice outside the polar regions. Few animals survive there, but I thought I might be able to find pumas (something I now had mixed feelings about), penguins, seals and orcas. (Orca is the new name for killer whales, though I doubt the recent name change has altered their temperament.)

Patagonia also seemed to have a reputation as being one of the destinations of choice for those looking to have their soul shaken, or to find out if they have one. In the early 1800s Charles Darwin visited the island of Tierra del Fuego and reported seeing no structures, just the fires after which the island was named. He said the people were barely human; the most primitive he had ever seen. While I thought his comments about the people were needlessly unkind (and ignored how advanced they must have had to be to survive in such a place), I hoped that in Patagonia I would feel the wildness for which it is famous.

As soon as Laurie returned to Australia, I headed south to the Chilean town of Puerto Montt to take a flight to the furthermost reaches of Patagonia. I’d settled on Ushuaia on the island of Tierra del Fuego as my first destination. Proudly proclaimed by its residents as the
world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia’s position in the south of Patagonia also made it a likely place to see condors close up.

My entrance into Ushuaia—flying in through a cleft in jagged,
white-capped
mountains—made me feel uncharacteristically
optimistic
. Nowhere I’d been in Africa looked remotely like this, and as an Australian I am easily impressed by mountains (the tallest peak in Australia requires a comparative stroll to reach its summit). The mountains around Ushuaia looked not just untrammelled, but untrammellable. Which is clearly not a real word, but was a very real feeling.

Walking through Ushuaia’s airport, I saw a tourist shop with a sign declaring it to be ‘The store at the end of the world at the airport at the end of the world’, something I thought a wee bit tacky. Then again, I long ago learnt the old adage ‘Never judge a place by its airport’.

By the time I got to San Martin, the main drag of Ushuaia, I was wondering if Charles Darwin would have been even harsher on the place if he’d visited today, since at least the locals he’d been so unkind about hadn’t tried to sell him anything. Hawkers squawked outside every bar and restaurant, trying to entice passers-by with dinner deals and happy-hour specials. I soon discovered that Ushuaia saw a lot of cruise passengers who stayed in town for only a few hours before heading on to Antarctica. The cruise-goers appeared in town soon after gangways were lowered, rolling down the street like a human tsunami dressed in yellow and red windproof parkas and tassled hats. There was a whiff of desperation in some of the stores, which flogged Argentinian soccer jerseys,
mate
(the local tea) and its associated tea-making paraphernalia, addictive local red wine, and miniature dolls dressed in the costumes of cultures either long gone or waning.

Two nights into my stay in Ushuaia, I was sitting in the common area of a backpackers’ hostel—the sort of accommodation I would
use throughout my South American journey, even though I would often be the oldest person there—talking to a young German called Friederike. I’d been expressing my dissatisfaction with Ushuaia when Friederike said, ‘Maybe you’ve travelled too much. Perhaps you are too hard to impress now. I worry the same will happen to me.’

‘Maybe she’s right,’ I thought, and wondered if I’d been as wise as her at twenty-one (I suspect not). Maybe I was just too old for this near-hobo existence, I reflected yet again. But I had not been very successful in any field except guiding, and even that I had given up.

Despite such misgivings, I did have someone to look up who— thankfully—had no interest in hawking me a boat cruise, rental bicycle, or ‘end of the world’ snow dome. Freddy’s wife had a zoologist niece called Marcella who was in Ushuaia studying the breeding habits of Chilean swallows. Marcella took me on some of the many daytrips I made from Ushuaia in search of the overwhelming sense of isolation and wildness that the guidebooks described. She didn’t seem to mind me squelching along behind her as she checked the nests of Chilean swallows, which always seemed to be in a bog. Marcella was there to collect breeding data. This was as far south as any species of swallow went, so for them at least this really was the end of the world.

Walking in the bogs one day, I asked Marcella what the main source of employment for Ushuaians was. I’d learnt Ushuaia had a population of roughly twenty thousand people, not all of whom could possibly be in the trinket business, even if it felt that way.

‘Construction,’ Marcella replied, expertly plucking a newly hatched Chilean swallow from its nesting box. Unlike the adult plumage of muted grey underneath and dark blue above, this hatchling was pink and naked. Marcella blew on it to keep it warm, before dropping it into a small plastic bag, weighing it, marking a
claw with nail polish, and returning it to its feathered sanctuary before repeating the process with one of its nestmates.

‘Oh,’ I said, a little perplexed. ‘Constructing what?’

‘Hotels mainly.’ We tramped through the bog to the next nest box she was monitoring. Mud splashed high up her rubber boots, and straight over the low tops of mine and into my socks, a reminder that I was maybe not quite prepared for this place. ‘And shops for the tourists,’ she added after she was done with the next batch of chicks.

‘But the tourists come on boats and usually stay on board. What do they need hotels for?’ I asked, making a futile attempt to shake mud from my boot and spattering my other leg in the process.

There was a pause as Marcella inspected another nest. ‘Southern house wren,’ she said, and I thought she was being cryptic until I realised she was waiting for me to jot that down on a sheet next to the corresponding nest-box number.

‘The hotels are for the tourists the council hopes will come,’ Marcella carried on. ‘They need jobs for all the people now that the television factory has shut down.’

It seemed incomprehensibly odd to me that there had ever been a television-making industry in this far-flung place, an entire continent away from regular shipping routes since the Panama Canal had been built (which had happened well before television, I was pretty sure) and in a country not otherwise known for its electronics. But there it was, the television factory had supported Ushuaia from the 1960s to the late 1990s. I found myself imagining the industry as a cover for the sort of villain who appears in James Bond films; perhaps one of the nearby mountains had concealed their underground lairs at the end of the world. Then again, those villains liked their comforts. This place was just too cold.

Incredibly, despite the bitter winds sending a chill through me whenever I ventured outside, this was summer. And not just summer, but high summer. Yet snow still topped the mountains and no sensible person would contemplate going outside without many layers of clothes. Even though the temperature was often generous enough to rise above freezing, the ceaseless wind negated that gift, terrorising those who hadn’t fattened up on the beef and king crab on sale in the local restaurants (one of which, not surprisingly, proclaimed itself to be ‘The restaurant at the end of the world!’).

Although Ushuaia has a pleasant local national park and a much-touted glacier (even if it turned out to be little bigger than an ice cube), and in spite of the fact that I’d got to see several species of bird new to me, and watched a single and illegal boat flare (illegal because of the wind— any fireworks could set the town alight) usher in a new year and decade, it just wasn’t life-changing in the way I’d hoped my first stop in Patagonia would be. Unfortunately, just as I came to this realisation I found out there were no available seats on buses out of the place for over a week, so the only way I could depart was by plane once again.

The flight out of Ushuaia was as beautiful and exciting as the one in, mountains clutching at the plane’s wingtips as it climbed, climbed, climbed above the snow, before dipping almost immediately.

I was on my way to the small town of El Calafate, still in Patagonia but further north, and not as obsessed with its location as Ushuaia is. There, I hoped, I would find the wildness, find everything that made Patagonia famous. Luckily I had no idea of the disaster I was setting myself up for.