How to Walk a Puma

While escaping a desk, hitting the road and collecting new experiences is fun to do, there are always treasured people you leave behind. In my case these are my wonderful sister Laurie—the only person I’ve known my whole life—and her two children, Riley and Molly, plus my oldest friends, Nick Goodwin (has it really been a quarter of a century?), Hayden Jones and Marc Butler. I love you all, despite the names I call you.

It’s all the labradors’ fault. I grew up with two of them, as well as a brave cat who brutalised the dogs, an outdoor goldfish pond regularly raided by a red-bellied black snake, and the odd sheep—our neighbour had one because it made the perfect lazy man’s lawnmower. My single mother frequently borrowed Bunty for the same
lawn-trimming
purpose, though the poor creature was often distracted from its hungry work by the attention lavished on it by my sister and me. In our otherwise normal Sydney suburb this animal seemed to us quite exotic.

But it was always the dogs I loved best, with their unswerving devotion and affection, and their endearing habit of accompanying me everywhere I went on my bicycle. My closeness to them taught me to pay attention to all the animals around me, not just those with a collar. Showing early signs of the wildlife nut I would become, I wanted a relationship with the possums and frogmouths in the yard at night as well as my dogs.

Then, when I was sixteen, I went to Japan for a year. During that time a series of near-biblical plagues overtook our city of Okayama, a couple of hours north-east of Hiroshima. First came praying mantises, which begat a plague of frogs that emerged en masse from the city’s open drains in pursuit of the bounty of insects. Close behind them came the snakes. For the town this was a nightmare, but I was
delighted. My host family’s cat was the only one to share my enthusiasm; she caught the snakes alive and dumped them proudly at the bare feet of whichever startled family member was at home. ‘Piitaa!’ would come the cry, and I would sally from my room, scoop up the snake and take it back outside. ‘Sayonara,’ I would farewell each snake. ‘Hiss,’ the snake would reply, if at all.

I always wanted to be around wild animals, but saw no practical way to do it. The path to law school that was expected of me by my parents was as personally appealing as the snakes had been to the residents of Okayama, so when I returned to Australia I dropped out of high school. I worked for a harbour cruise company for two years, then decided to travel for at least a year, to somewhere that had an abundance of wildlife. Maybe then I would go to law school.

I had two places in mind, both inspired by the nature documentaries I loved on television. Either Africa or South America would allow me to spend the time that I craved with animals. So in late 1993, a few days before my nineteenth birthday, I used the most rigorous and scientific method I could think of to decide between these destinations, and tossed a coin.

Africa came up heads that day, and the coin-flip changed my life. Within two weeks I was on a plane to Zimbabwe. I thought I would stay in Africa for a year, but my passion for wildlife shone through while I was visiting a safari camp, and I was offered a job behind the bar. Over the next seven years I worked my way up and became a safari guide, a camp manager, and ultimately a teacher of guides for one of the largest safari companies on the continent. In that time I had some of the best experiences with animals that anyone could wish for. I witnessed an elephant giving birth, was charged by lions, had a leopard walk into my tent, and made friends with a
family of cheetahs who would allow me to lie down beside them. In fact I had enough experiences that I was able to write two books about them.

Somehow through all of this I retained the nagging doubt that I was cheating at life and that at some point I would need to get a real job. The sort that grown-ups had.

‘You’re a fool,’ one of my colleagues told me when I said I was leaving to head back to the real world of nine to five.

‘You’re good at this,’ some of the kinder ones said.

But it was time to be a normal adult.

I have no idea why I thought I’d be good at that.

On my return to Sydney from Africa in late 2001 I felt too old for law school and applied for an array of different jobs instead, fielding interview questions such as: ‘And what skills do you think you can bring us?’ In truth I felt I had little to offer the mainstream office world. ‘Um, I can stare down a charging elephant,’ I’d joke on occasion. After a somewhat startled pause the inevitable response to this would be along the lines of, ‘Interesting, yes, but not something we value here at McDonald’s.’

After enduring countless rejections and dropping several rungs on the ladder of self-respect, I eventually got a job—which turned into a series of jobs—that at least paid the rent.

I also fell in love and felt certain enough about the relationship to get engaged. In the next few years we accumulated the things adults do, mainly furniture and debt. For the first time I owned more than I could carry on my back, and even if I didn’t like the sensation, I believed I was doing what I was supposed to.

I was on a work trip to the Philippines six years after meeting my fiancée when I realised that the life we had together didn’t feel right to me. One day I was walking down the street in Cebu and was hit with a sudden shot of wary adrenalin, as though if I wasn’t alert there could be trouble. It was invigorating. It felt like being back in Africa. It felt like being slapped awake from a long sleepwalk. It felt like coming home. Only then did I realise that I’d been turning grey from the inside out, and had become the cliché of the dissatisfied worker bee. I’d spent most of the last seven years waiting for five o’clock, hanging out for Friday, going on holiday only to stress out because I couldn’t relax fast enough. Perhaps some adults aren’t meant to be in one place. It is like being left-handed: no matter how good you become at using your right hand, your nature still insists you are something else. Nomads are the same.

While some people allow the hollowness of their lives to consume them until they are at zero, so blank they merely exist, others rebel. Some men find solace in sports. Some have affairs. Others dress as a woman and insist on being addressed as Gertrude. My way of breaking the shackles is to go looking for animals. As a teenager I had travelled to escape my life; now I wanted to do it to have one. ‘I think you’re being a fool,’ my fiancée said with more sadness than harshness when I told her I wanted to travel open-endedly again, with her this time, working part-time as a safari guide. ‘We’ve built a life here!’ She indicated the apartment we lived in, and our possessions within it.

‘I want experiences,’ I answered softly, ‘not stuff.’

‘Stuff? This isn’t stuff! It’s security!’

But what felt like security to her felt like a prison to me. She wouldn’t come with me and I couldn’t stay. It was the hardest decision
of my life, but we broke up and, taking little more than some clothes, I left.

Over the years I had often wondered what would have happened if the coin that sent me to Africa had landed tails-up that day. So in late 2009, sixteen years later and hopefully an equivalent number of years wiser, I made my way to Santiago, Chile, ready to seek out the continent’s best, weirdest and maddest wilderness experiences. This time around, though, I was no longer a teenager and was wary of further injuring my weakened knees and sorely abused back (almost ten years’ driving off road has compressed my spine; I’m sure I’m an inch shorter than I was before). But the continent holds challenges—dense rainforests, high mountains, waterless deserts, vast and lonely steppes, as well as dangerous animals like jaguars, pumas and bushmaster snakes—that I wanted to seek out.

Whereas Africa always appears brown in documentaries, every nature show I’d ever watched about South America has been in glorious technicolour. Evolution seems to have taken some strange, strong medicine before setting to work there, producing improbable, extraordinary creatures. In Africa I could be trampled by elephants or consumed by lions; the most dangerous animal in South America is a kaleidoscopic frog so toxic that just touching it can be lethal. There is a bird called the hoatzin which has evolved my favourite strategy for evading the attention of predators, a solution so simple that anything else seems a waste of energy—it is too smelly to eat. Then there are sloths, whose legendary slowness actually works for them, making them hard to pick out among the foliage in which they live—this, along with a groove in each of their hairs in which camouflaging algae grows, makes them almost invisible. I wanted to see all these animals and more; but above all, more than any bird,
fish or reptile, I wanted to fulfil an ambition born of all those nature documentaries I’d watched as a child: to see a wild jaguar.

But my plans are usually only good for one thing—laughing at in hindsight—so, armed with bad Spanish, coupled with dangerous levels of curiosity and a record of poor judgement, I set off to tackle whatever South America could throw at me.

Running with Roy

‘See a jaguar? Mwah ha ha! You’re more likely to fall pregnant to a llama,’ said my friend Marguerite Gomez as we drove from Santiago airport to her home.

Marguerite’s husband, Harris, gave me an apologetic look at his wife’s bluntness, but as she and I were old friends from Africa days I was far from offended. And I also knew she was right. Jaguars live in the jungle, a hard place to see anything that isn’t right in front of you, given the usually impenetrable foliage. Adding to the challenge, the jaguar is the master of stealth. If they don’t want to be seen, chances are they won’t be.

But if it was going to be easy, why would I bother?

‘I’m going to see one, along with everything else natural that I can,’ I countered.

‘Sure,’ said Marguerite, as you would to someone who’s just told you they have access to Nigeria’s hidden billions.

The birds of South America were another draw for me, as during my safari career I had picked up the hobby of birdwatching, a habit which to some people is as sexy as flatulence (at best when I admit to it I get a restrained smile that clearly indicates the listener wants to hear no more).

I stayed for a week with Marguerite, Harris and their two young daughters. Harris shared with me the delight of staggeringly good
Chilean wines while Marguerite mixed the best pisco sour on the continent. (The pisco sour is a wonderful cocktail that both Chile and Peru claim to have invented; at times this argument becomes so heated you wouldn’t be surprised if it led to military action—not as improbable as it sounds considering the countries once waged war over bird poo.)

When I arrived in Santiago I hadn’t expected to see many animals around the city of high rises and office blocks, but on only my second day Marguerite summoned me upstairs, insisting I bring binoculars with me. Through them I saw an enormous bird soaring over the not-so-distant, snow-frosted peaks of the Andes.

‘Condor?’ Marguerite asked, grinning, knowing how much I would enjoy it if it was.

‘Wow,’ was my eloquent reply. That was all it could be; there was nothing else so huge in the skies that wasn’t man-made.

The condor was the bird I’d most wanted to see. The sighting was a great welcome to South America and more than I could have asked for—until I hit somewhere more wild I would have been content with the mockingbirds and hummingbirds that visited the Gomezes’ garden.

Santiago is a city occasionally reviled by travellers seeking the famed chaos and liveliness of South America, but I think this is unfair. While it may lack the exuberance of Buenos Aires and the sexiness of Rio, it has its charms, such as the fancy, brightly coloured buildings jammed beside cheap student bars with plastic chairs and umbrellas advertising beer, sharing a bonhomie until late into every night. Food is excellent in the city, and levels of service high. In short it was the perfect introduction to South America. While I was impressed with Santiago’s orderliness and cleanliness, I was now to
set off for Bolivia, a place that Harris said was so undeveloped not even Chileans visited.

‘Good,’ I replied cockily, to hide my own doubts about the decision I’d made in leaving Sydney. Was a nomadic life really feasible? Was I too old for this? Was I, perhaps, now too wise to have the sort of adventures that Africa had given me?

In a life peppered with moments of grand idiocy, the last thought was the most foolish so far.

In central Bolivia, in a patch of forest near the small town of Villa Tunari, lives a puma. His russet fur shows that he is a jungle puma (mountain pumas have grey coats), but he wasn’t born there. At the age of around six weeks he was confiscated by wildlife authorities from a marketplace. The wildlife authorities then delivered him to a group called Inti Wara Yassi who take in such animals, care for them as best they can and then release them if possible. This particular puma has noble features, is strongly muscled, and deserves a mighty name. But he is called Roy. And I was tied to him for a month.

I got to know Roy while I was volunteering at Parque Machia, a small reserve where hundreds of animals live and the first stop on my quest to learn about South America’s wilderness. After a flight from Santiago to crumbly old Santa Cruz de la Sierra, one of Bolivia’s larger towns, I’d hopped onto a surprisingly modern bus. Its passengers were mainly locals, with a smattering of backpackers. Among the locals were bowler hat– and poncho-wearing women, a sight that went from captivating to commonplace as we passed through a bewildering series of villages. After a day of travelling I
stumbled from the bus halfway between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba into the town of Villa Tunari.

The local mayor runs a small tourist attraction next to the Parque Machia reserve, where visitors—mainly Bolivians—come to see monkeys who are unusually relaxed around humans. The reserve also has bears, ocelots, coatis, macaws, eagles and pumas, but the tourists don’t get to see these unless they meet one as it crosses the trails with its handlers. For the animals’ wellbeing most of them see no one but their handlers.

While Bolivians founded and manage Parque Machia, most of the staff is made up of short-term volunteers from every corner of the globe. The group of volunteers while I was at Inti consisted of a close-knit cluster of Israelis, a handful of French, a few Americans, a disproportionately large number of Australians, one or two Italians and a lone Norwegian. (He was quite thrilled when two Danes arrived, since he could understand them.) We pieced together communication through intersecting languages, and the shared love of animals that had drawn us to this punishment.

Within hours of arriving at Parque Machia, I joined eight other new volunteers to listen to an Australian called Bondy give us a rundown on the park. This was to be our induction, we would learn what animals we would be working with during our time there. We had very different backgrounds and reasons for being there, but we were all excited about the work ahead. ‘My sort of people,’ I thought, and was pleased with my decision to come here, even though ensconced volunteers had already warned me that most days were filled with grimy work. ‘A monkey just spunked on me!’ one woman exclaimed moments after I introduced myself at a communal
table. ‘That’s after already being shat and pissed on this week!’ (It probably says a lot about me that I still found her quite attractive.)

What had drawn me to this place, and presumably the others too, was the philosophy of Inti Wara Yassi (which means ‘Sun, Earth, Moon’ in three local languages). Its founders and managers believe that no animal deserves to live its life in a cage, and so every single creature in its care has time in the jungle each day. Monkeys being vile was surely as bad as it could get, right? At the induction, Bondy talked to us about the different animals in the reserve: the monkeys and macaws, as well as less familiar creatures like tayra and coatis, and finally the cats.

‘You have to be fit to be a Roy Boy—that’s what we call the volunteers who work with Roy,’ said Bondy. ‘He covers a lot of ground each session, most of it at a run, over rough terrain that can snap an ankle or smash your knees. He nails the guys with him all the time so they have to stay on their toes. And when I say “nail” I mean that he grabs the back of your legs with his paws then bites you on the knee. So you have to be fit—fit and a little bit crazy.’

‘That,’ I thought, ‘sounds wildly irresponsible, dangerous, and maybe a bit stupid.’ ‘That,’ I said, raising my hand, ‘sounds like me.’

‘He gets a bit more unpredictable when there are new guys,’ Roy Boy Mick warned me the morning after the briefing, as I stumbled along behind him on the steep trail up to Roy’s enclosure, already feeling a burn in my thigh muscles.

Yet another Australian, Mick had been at Parque Machia for three months, well beyond the average length of stay for a volunteer. (Mick was an example to me of a theory I have that Australians often stay in places a long time in dread of the flight home.) He had already spent four weeks of his three months with Roy, and despite frequent
abuse at the paws and teeth of the puma (if a bun had been placed on either side of his knee it would have made a convincing hamburger) he was clearly in love with the big cat. With us was Adrian, the Norwegian, who had been training to work with Roy only a few days.

‘What do you mean by “unpredictable”?’ I asked.

‘Well, usually he’ll only run in certain places, downhill mainly, and he runs after he takes a dump,’ explained Mick. ‘But when there’s a new guy he might drag us around all morning. He also gets jumpier.’

‘Jumpy, like nervous?’

‘Nah, mate—jumpy like he jumps on you and bites your knee. It’ll happen to you, don’t worry.’

Don’t worry? The idea of a puma jumping on me seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to be concerned about.

Roy wasn’t a huge animal, about the size of a German shepherd, but beneath his red fur he was much more heavily muscled than any dog. His fur was smooth and horse-like in texture, and he had patches of an impossibly brilliant white around the nose and mouth, counterpointed by eye markings of deep ebony. His facial features were surprisingly delicate; most male cats have squared-off muzzles and a certain tightness around the eyes, but Roy had the softer, smoother features of a female.

It was a thrill to touch Roy the first time, and remained so every time after that. This was a puma! I watched Mick clip a ten-metre rope around his waist with a sturdy carabiner, before connecting the other end of the rope to Roy’s collar.

‘He usually runs a bit up this first slope,’ Mick warned over his shoulder, his eyes sticking resolutely to Roy’s muscular shoulders.

‘How far he runs gives you an idea what sort of morning you’ll have,’ added Adrian.

Known in the park as the ‘Nordic Giant’, Adrian had recently completed two years’ military service in the Norwegian army, and was used to marching, but he laughed at me when I suggested that his military service had probably prepared him for the trails we were about to use.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘The army had nothing like this.’

That morning Mick took the lead and Adrian was in the position called, without derogatory intent, ‘number two’. I was told that I had one task only—to keep up.

As soon as we set off Roy ran up the slope from his enclosure, but instead of pausing at the top he kept on running, racing through narrow gaps in jauntily flowered bushes with grabby thorns, then dashing along a creek bed over slimy mossy rocks before sprinting up yet another muddy bank, while I grasped at branches and ferns, trying to stay close behind them. After running for what felt like a very long time, I wanted to ask how normal this pace was and how long Roy could be expected to keep it up. Unfortunately, someone had let a swarm of scorpions loose in my lungs and I couldn’t speak, so I just grimly sprinted on, wondering if it would be considered rude to vomit.

By the end of the morning session I noticed Mick and Adrian shooting surreptitious glances at each other and began to suspect that Roy’s behaviour was even more extreme than what he usually put a new wrangler through. They probably didn’t want me to know this, and were seeing if I could tough it out.

At lunchtime, Adrian waited with Roy, who had the run of an exercise area during our break, while Mick and I staggered back to the main area. We sat side by side and ate a disappointingly vegetarian meal (my body was demanding protein after such abuse), no one
else apparently wanting to sit next to such conspicuously perspiring men. I had come to Parque Machia hoping to do some good and have some fun at the same time, but doubts filled my mind as I ate. I was still sure that I could do something positive here, but wondered if I would ever come to enjoy running with Roy.

That night I slept a bone-weary sleep in the rudimentary accommodation offered at the park, my exhaustion overpowering a disturbing ache in my right knee. One of the symptoms of my
ill-suitedness
for suburban life had been an aversion to refrigerator ownership (something as big as a fridge felt like too much of a shackle to one place and while I had eventually caved in and got one, I’d never really reconciled myself to its presence); that night, however, I yearned for the ice that would normally be found in such an appliance. Why, at thirty-four, would I choose to put myself through this? I wondered. Who the hell is afraid of a fridge but ties themselves to a puma? My safari years were far enough behind me that I had reverted to my natural state—weak-kneed, soft-handed and fearful. I loved the philosophy of Inti Wara Yassi, but wasn’t sure I had been very clever when I raised my hand to work with Roy. Then again, I’m a firm believer that the worst decisions often lead to the best adventures.

I got up at six am and dragged myself down the short stretch of road to the café where the volunteers gathered each morning before starting their day. Most of them were far younger than me, and bustled around with an energy I couldn’t hope to muster at that hour of the morning without snorting instant coffee (something that should never be tried, even for a dare).