How to Walk a Puma (8 page)

‘What else can you be?’ he asked simply.

Later that night the Minke and I wended our way along the path back to our rooms. ‘After that I really feel any complaints I have about my life are petty,’ the Minke said.

‘Me too,’ I agreed, and could add no more. I felt chastened when I remembered all the times I’d thought my life was hard, and flattered that Marcello shared such an insight. I was driven to protect animals because they mattered to me, but Marcello had a sense of ownership, kinship even, that I could only grasp at. Perhaps I needed to learn from Marcello. His life had dealt him more than I could probably have coped with, and he still held hope, and desire to do good. Borrowing some of his optimism, as the Minke and I reached the doors to our separate rooms I overcame my shyness, took her hand and pulled her close. She was a full head taller than me, but felt light, like bird wings. Then I reached up, and kissed her.

There's a Jaguar!

The next morning, foggy headed and with hyena breath from the caipirinhas, but not in such poor shape that we couldn't get up, the Minke and I met Marcello and a driver, and set out again by boat. This time we were joined by two Germans who might have wondered why I couldn't stop smiling.

We went well away from areas used by other tourists and casual fishermen. The Pantanal was again vibrant with birds, but mammals made an appearance as well—howler monkeys high in the treetops blended well with their surrounds, despite their shiny red fur, while capybaras lazed by the banks, looking remarkably content as the sun's first rays warmed them.

Eventually we stopped at an island formed by a myriad of intersecting channels, and set up there for the day. Marcello had seen a jaguar's tracks there a few days earlier, and felt that she might have come this way again. The two Germans were just as keen as I was to see a jaguar, so we eagerly set off on a trail, attempting to pick our path carefully but somehow managing to tread on every crackly leaf, every snapping twig, while Marcello's broad bare feet moved noiselessly over the forest floor.

I scanned the ground for tracks, seeing the hippo-like splayed-toe tracks of capybara; the pads and claw marks of some smaller predator that I couldn't identify, maybe a raccoon species; a fox's clear prints—
but no sign of a large cat. Marcello looked from side to side, up and down, as trackers do, but he also found nothing to indicate a jaguar had passed this way.

It was another bust, but the area was so idyllic that I couldn't feel too disappointed. The boatman had strung up hammocks while we walked, and we lazed in these under the shade of canopied trees while he cooked us a lunch of more fresh fish, the river flowing gently by mere metres away. After eating we returned to more lazing, and then I felt the need for some exercise, and decided to go for a swim.

I wandered upstream until I reached an open section of the bank, the muddy trail down to the water dense with capybara tracks. I waded in, feeling a current far stronger than the mellow surface had led me to believe. Lisa soon joined me, and in a sheltered,
slow-flowing
part of the river we splashed at each other, and I went to chase her. In a few long-limbed strokes she was so far ahead of me that pursuit was clearly futile. Like most Australians I am confident in the water, but the ease with which she outswam me stripped away some of my assurance and put a small dent in my ego. I recalled her once saying she'd represented Wales in swimming, so I shouldn't have been surprised, nor as concerned when she swam straight into the strongest part of the current and disappeared around a curve in the river.

‘Minke?' I called after her. ‘You okay?'

‘Fine,' she said casually, stroking easily back into view, a feat that would leave me panting and close to cardiac arrest if I tried it. Then she let the current take her again, and was lost to my sight once more.

But there was something else in the water with us. Close to the bank opposite me a dark head appeared, then another beside it. They were only ten metres from me but it took me some moments to
establish what I was seeing. Then two more heads appeared, and one looked directly at me, its sleek head swivelling on a submerged neck, dark brown eyes expressionless as they took me in.

‘Giant otters!' I shouted gleefully, forgetting all the times I'd berated tourists for speaking loudly around animals. But the otters ignored me. The largest of the otter family (as the name suggests), giant otters can weigh up to thirty-five kilograms, and while they look cute they're known to be aggressively territorial and vicious in defence of their young.

Surely they wouldn't see
me
as any sort of threat, I thought, and did an inelegant flop into deeper water, immediately feeling the tug of the flow. My plan had been to swim across to the other side where the otters were holding almost still, backstroking into the current with no visible effort. But angling into the current soon sapped my energy, and before I could reach them the otters casually flicked their tails and took off downstream, their heads bobbing lightly as if they were laughing at my feebleness. With no hope of catching up to them, I turned to go back, only to see the bank where I had entered the water rapidly disappearing as the current took me. I swam towards it nevertheless, but below me was a mess of tangled vegetation and I was wary of snags that could trap an ankle and pull me under.

There was no going back to my entry point; all I could do was follow the otters and Lisa downstream and try to get out where the boat was. A fast-moving object stroked my belly; most likely it was only a branch swept by the current, but travelling at speed it could cut me deeply, and that would surely excite nearby piranhas. Feeling foolish, and wondering once again why I always felt so compelled to get close to animals, I made cautious backwards strokes to slow
myself, but was still moving fast enough to hit our boat at ramming speed, generating a resonant
dong
from its hull.

‘
Tutto bong?
' the boatman asked me as I clutched the side of the boat, trying desperately to look calm and unflustered while gasping like a dying goldfish.

‘
Tutto bong
,' I replied, two of the only words I know in Portuguese, which mean ‘all okay'.

‘You just hit the boat, didn't you?' the Minke asked. She presumably had had far less difficulty in the current and getting out of it, and was already as relaxed as a cat in her repose.

‘Maybe,' I said sheepishly.

Despite this rather humbling experience, I decided to leave the others to their rest and dry off by going for a walk alone in the forest near our picnic site. Parrots squabbled in overhead branches, their green feathers a perfect match for the leaves, while green and orange rufous-tailed jacamars sallied forth from low perches to nab damselflies. An agouti, the smaller and daintier cousin of the capybara, picked its way delicately through some undergrowth nearby. Life was everywhere, but there was no sign of jaguars. Still, I felt relaxed in the forest in a way most people describe being while lying on a beach, and only reluctantly made my way back to the group, figuring we would push back into the current soon.

We had a lazy, wonderful afternoon puttering on the river, and as dusk set in we came to a place where Marcello said we might see jaguars. Once again, no matter how I resisted it anticipation took hold of me, my relaxed mood dispatched as swiftly as the sun had been.

We beached the boat on a muddy bank with tangled, looping vegetation, the gaps between branches just wide enough to squeeze through. Still barefoot, Marcello led us quietly along the bank, then
held up his hand for us to stop. My pulse ratcheted up at the sight before us, and I held my breath.

In the mud in front of us were the clear paw prints of a big cat, and a smoother patch of ground where the cat must have lain down. The edges of the prints were sharp and no insect tracks crossed them, which in this place teeming with life was a sure sign the marks were fresh. A jaguar had been here only moments before. I breathed out, puffing my cheeks, not wanting to get too excited.

‘Look there!' Marcello pointed urgently ahead of the tracks we were looking at, and my pulse shot up again. But it was only more tracks—this time, as well as the tracks of an adult there were two smaller sets as well. ‘She's got babies!' Marcello whispered to us.

I was initially excited, but then my heart sank. It gets dark suddenly in the tropics, as if a switch has been flicked, and following a jaguar in their prime hunting hours would be beyond dangerous. Add in the mother's natural protectiveness of her cubs, and as foolhardy as I have been in pursuit of animals in the past, even I would have vetoed the idea of trying to approach them on foot. Marcello clearly agreed, and with hand gestures indicated that we should back away until we reached the boat.

‘We cannot follow her,' he said. ‘Those tracks were so tiny! If we go too close to her babies, she will kill us.'

‘Is there a way around?' I asked, desperate hope in my voice.

Marcello pondered, then slowly shook his head. ‘Not here, not now. We can try further along in the car later tonight. Maybe they will come out.'

That night we bundled into Marcello's four-wheel drive, and with flashlights pointing from each window and a spotlight mounted at the front, drove along the roads in the area. Capybaras glared at
us, moving off the road at the last possible moment, a crab-eating fox trotted gaily along beside us before scurrying into brush, and a raccoon with some small prey in its mouth crossed our beams, but sadly no jaguar emerged.

Even after returning to the campsite I was wired with suspense, and barely slept, excited and frustrated at having been so close to seeing a jaguar only to miss out.

The next day the Minke and I had to move on. We did so with a refreshed outlook on what it means to be lucky, after hearing Marcello's story. It was impossible to be disappointed by our time with him, and I remained optimistic that a jaguar waited for me somewhere down the dirt tracks of South America.

Things I Learnt After the Quake

Together, Parque Machia, Patagonia and the Pantanal had chewed through almost six months of my time in South America. I returned to visit Marguerite and Harris in Santiago, this time with the Minke in tow. As is so often the case when I’m travelling I was broke, and waiting for a royalty payment that was due, so we spent more than a week in Santiago. While we thought we were coming to Santiago for a respite from adventure, fate had other ideas in mind.

Lisa was also happy to have a brief break from life on the road, and we arrived in Santiago grateful for a safe place, a warm and homely base from which we planned to explore the tadpole tail of South America before moving back up into the bulge of Bolivia and Brazil. As previously, I did not expect much from nature in this orderly city. In fact, Chile was so civilised, so well organised, that I’d felt a tinge of selfish disappointment when we decided to return there. The whole reason I had come to South America was to be challenged, to escape the tame, but Santiago felt like Sydney with a Spanish accent. I had no idea it was the place where I would feel nature’s force at its greatest, nor a place that would compel me to change my opinions of humanity.

Staying at the Gomezes’ also gave Lisa and me some time in a more private setting to explore our new relationship—still in its early, awkward stages. I’d realised the inadvertent danger of sharing a
bathroom. I am thrilled that humans have overcome natural selection enough that a woman can find me attractive despite my myriad flaws, and wanted to maintain that honeymoon period for as long as possible.

So it was with some force that I prevented her from brushing her teeth soon after I had left the bathroom one evening. ‘Why can’t I go in?’ she asked. I had no reasonable answer so I said, ‘It’s haunted.’

‘What?’

Realising I’d backed myself into a corner I admitted, ‘Okay, not haunted, but it does smell like something died in there.’

‘You’re a fool,’ she replied, pushing past me, and I had an inkling it wouldn’t be the last time she said that.

One day during our stay, the Minke and I went to a local bar to watch her beloved Welsh rugby team play France. Wales lost. During the game the Minke revealed a side of her personality I had thus far not witnessed; while never demure, as she watched she became incensed, screaming at the screen, shaking her fist and generally scaring into cautious silence a small cluster of French fans seated nearby.

‘Holy crap. My girlfriend is a guy,’ I thought but didn’t dare say. To reinforce my suspicion, when the game was over she drowned her sorrows with copious volumes of liquor, an amount that even my steel-plated liver couldn’t keep pace with, so I didn’t try.

At 3.34 the next morning I woke, feeling disoriented and confused by a noise I’d never heard before and a world out of control. I grabbed the Minke and insisted she get out of bed.

‘I’ve been through worse,’ she insisted—a blatant lie—and rolled over, the mattress bouncing as she did so, not because of her movement but because the whole house was bucking like a bull with an unwanted rider on its back. Time spent in Japan and San Francisco meant that I was familiar with earth tremors, but this was unlike anything I’d experienced before. The windowpanes pulsed violently against their frames, and I could hear waves, a bizarre noise this far from the coast. Later I realised it was the swimming pool, which in daylight revealed itself to be half-f due to the force that had thrown its contents onto the surrounding lawn.

With Lisa reluctantly upright, we staggered towards the bathroom doorframe. A wall came out of nowhere and bounced us to the side, then the opposite wall jabbed us back again. Nothing is as perturbing as being beaten up by a house, but we only had a few paces to go.

‘Now you
want
me to go to the bathroom!’ the Minke grumbled.

When we reached the doorway I bullied the still-complaining Minke against the frame, and stood panting from the effort and adrenalin. We were on the second floor of the house, and I could see no way of us surviving if the house collapsed, which began to seem increasingly inevitable as the quake continued.

Later I would learn that the quake had lasted just over forty seconds, but at the time it felt like an aeon. I believed that standing in the doorway was our safest option, and slyly figured that any falling objects would land on the Minke before me anyway. (However, after the quake I heard of some controversial research that indicates standing in a doorway or getting under a table may not be the best strategy, as rescuers often find survivors in a ‘triangle of life’ when they have fallen
beside
a bed or table and a collapsed ceiling hit the
bed first; even if the bed breaks, the person beside it is safe as it tends to angle over them.)

‘I’m going out to check on the others,’ I said once the shaking had subsided.

Lisa, who was either still drunk or suicidally forlorn over her rugby team’s loss, said, ‘I’m going back to bed.’ And she did,
maintaining
a far straighter line to it than before.

I heard voices in the hallway and found the entire family Gomez—Harris, Marguerite and their two daughters—gathered in various states of pyjamery outside the cluster of bedrooms that made up the house’s upper floor.

‘Why is the house driving?’ the five-year-old asked, a beautiful description of the grinding pulses we had just felt. Marguerite had tears in her eyes and was still shaking visibly. Harris asked after Lisa, and I explained she was back in bed.

‘She’s tough,’ said Harris, eyebrows raised in admiration.

‘Drunk actually, but how are all of you?’ I replied.

Once we’d ascertained that everyone was fine, Harris and I went off to check if there was any damage to the house. The electricity was out, and when we turned to look out the window the view stunned us both. The house was built on the side of a dormant volcano, and overlooked a valley that stretched into central Santiago. Usually the city winked and sparkled at night; now there was nothing but the occasional red flare of an emergency light. There was nothing to tell us whether a city of seven million people still stood. In the gloom around us all that was clear was that a neighbour’s house remained upright, but it was impossible to know what had happened beyond that.

Sirens started, one by one, and far below us some headlights wended their way in a serpentine fashion that made me think they
must be avoiding rubble. Later I learnt that many of the lights I saw were people hastily making their way home to loved ones—it was a Friday night after all, and Latinos start partying late and finish even later.

‘What do you think is going on out there?’ Harris asked.

‘No idea,’ I said, wishing there was more light but suspecting from the sheer force of the shake that we would be without electricity for some time. The quake was the most powerful sensation I had ever experienced, and while the shaking continued I had felt more impotent than ever before. But it occurred to me now that I should go out and see if there was a way I could be of help to anyone. There would be death out there, I knew, but how much? The quake that had rocked Haiti around a month earlier had claimed over one hundred thousand lives. Images from that disaster also made me worry about looters. The Gomezes’ house is beautiful, and perhaps only the well-built homes of the wealthy would now remain standing. While I wouldn’t begrudge anyone searching for food or shelter I knew that a disaster could bring out the very worst in human nature. As Harris and I trudged back to the second floor I privately decided that the top of the stairs would be our best line of defence should anyone break in.

There wasn’t much I could do until sunrise, but I lay awake for several hours after I went back to bed. Just before dawn, there was a sound like an angry ocean, and a second later the house began to shake again. Once again, the windows flexed far more than I thought glass could, and the bed bounced as if a giant was jumping on it (though the Minke was asleep).

‘I felt that one,’ she said, waking as I got up.

‘Hard not to,’ I replied, finally agreeing with Harris that Lisa was tough, as she was clearly more stoic than I and determined to sleep through this event. I kissed her cheek and again went out into the hall and joined the family.

‘Not as big as the first,’ said Harris.

‘Nope. Don’t think so,’ I agreed.

‘How many more will there be?’ Marguerite asked.

Again, I had no idea. I knew that earthquakes were caused by tectonic plates pushing against each other until the build-up forced one to slip over, under, or alongside the other, and that Santiago sat right on the junction between two such plates. In 1960 it had experienced the most powerful earthquake since records began, at 9.5 on the Richter scale, so devastating that most of the city had had to be rebuilt. What I learnt after our earthquake was that Chile had subsequently instituted one of the world’s strictest building codes, and actually adhered to it. But looking over the darkened valley it was impossible to know how successful they had been. Only dawn would tell.

Tremors came through the last dark hours, and through the morning, triggering howls from every neighbourhood dog except the Gomezes’ loafing cocker spaniel, who for no reason apart from probable stupidity just ignored the entire affair.

With light came the discovery that the only apparent damage to the house was a gas bottle that had torn loose from some flimsy mounts and would be easily fixed. A walk through the neighbourhood showed our reprieve was no one-off miracle; apart from broken glass and zigzagging cracks in roads there was no significant damage. Only later would we find out that some of the few buildings that had
survived the 1960 quake had been damaged or destroyed fifty years later, unable to take a second blow.

Within six hours of the initial quake the electricity was back on. The internet took only twelve hours to be reconnected. The local supermarket stayed shut for a day as the staff put everything that had fallen off the shelves back on (I imagined them watching forlornly each time aftershocks toppled everything off again), and the ATMs all ran out of money as people made panic withdrawals. Nevertheless, by Monday it was all systems go—stores open, banks operating, food available. I had faced greater inconveniences in Africa without any natural disasters involved.

The media was painting a different picture, however. While what we could see from our windows seemed secure enough, it was hard to get reliable information about other places the quake might have hit. We gathered around the television as soon as the power was back on and were surprised to learn that Santiago was in flames, the city destroyed; as bad as that sounded, Concepción to the south was even worse, reporters claimed.

‘They’re pretty much saying we’re dead,’ I said. ‘I feel fine though.’

It was the worst sort of sensationalist reporting. Concepción, it was true, was far worse hit than the capital, but Santiago got a black eye, and was never knocked down. Oft-repeated footage showed the army beating a looter, but close observation showed he was stealing a television, and a woman behind him taking bread from a supermarket was given free passage. Within days I began to see a national spirit that I had never encountered anywhere else before. Chileans rallied to help their fellow countrymen, in ways small and large. Cars were painted with the slogan ‘
Fuerza
, Chile!’ (Strength, Chile!), and teens—who I usually (and cynically) believe are only good for pimple-milking
for oil—volunteered inside supermarkets, asking customers if they would buy items such as milk formula or tinned food that could be donated outside for distribution to people in need. Normally if there is any animal that I would claim to dislike it is my own species, but in Santiago after the quake I found myself with a permanent lump in my throat at the solidarity being shown.

Two weeks later Lisa’s parents, at her urging, came to visit. We all felt the best way we could help was to put money into the economy and let others know that Chile was dealing with the problem better than an outsider might imagine. We drove the Minke’s parents along the Pan-American Highway, Chile’s major artery, and saw sights that staggered her father, an engineer, who was able to fully appreciate how well roads and buildings had withstood the violence, and how quickly infrastructure was being tended to.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Papa Minke said one day as we drove along. ‘I’ve never seen that in the UK!’

I scanned around for things I imagined would be unfamiliar to UKsians, such as a shower or winning sports team, but saw none.

‘There were four guys standing in a hole back there, and instead of just one guy working and three “supervising”, all four had shovels and were hard at it!’ he explained.

In the wrecked town of Linares we witnessed the greatest destruction wrought by the earthquake. Adobe houses had tumbled to the ground, and the church’s steeple was far from plumb. Incredibly no deaths had been reported in Linares itself, but the greater Maule region it is a part of had experienced the highest toll from the quake. Despite this there was no wailing, just hard work going on. There was
nowhere to stay in Linares, so we bought some supplies there and drove on until we reached Chillán. It took some searching, but we found a small hostel that was open, where the apologetic owner explained that the water service was unreliable, but offered us a discounted rate for the rooms.