Reminders for Humans is a monthly series that explores a natural phenomena, and how I’m applying its wisdom to my own human life. I’m a scientist by training, and a gushy poet by nature. Expect both.
This is Chapter 5 of an ongoing series about my time volunteering at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. Read from the beginning: Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4.
Reminders for Humans:
One way of feeding yourself is to hunt for something giant, something that will sustain your appetite for longer. At times, vast and irrational experiences provide us more nourishment than the consistent and predictable.
Some of the most fearsome, successful creatures on Earth are masters of disappearing. Fading into the periphery can bring reprieve; knowing when to become invisible is a discipline and a skill.
A blue picnic basket in front of me, I’m crouched in a yogi’s squat and ready to make bear lunch. Just as soon as we can find Chogna.
Three rangers stand nearby, their hands on hips, staring into the congruence of green on the ridge. Waiting for hints of movement.
Safely underneath the chain link tunnel, I rise from my haunches and join them, looking through silver diamonds towards the lush of the forest on the other side, which climbs upwards quickly from the flat riverbank we’re on, up and up and into somewhere else. Into the whole rest of the jungle, I guess. Directly adjacent to us is the feeding area for one of the bears - Chogna. It’s only a tiny fraction of the amount of space in her full area, which includes this mountain ridge spotted with countless trees whose tops I can’t see. While this feeding section is fenced off, with movable gates to keep the bears in (or out, while we’re cleaning) the rest of the several square kilometers of space in her larger area is defined by an eight foot tall fence, and a thin wire coursing with electric current to keep her from escaping. Though it seems at every mealtime, she has already disappeared.
We’re covered in the canopy, shaded from the sun but not the hot breath of the trees, the green family of cousins and second cousins that covers nearly every inch of the surrounding forest. Swallowing carbon dioxide, gasping out oxygen. Vibrating with moisture. Carlos walks past me and I get a whiff of him. Sweat and musk. We can’t wear perfume or strong deodorants when we work with the animals - their noses and olfactory senses are far too sensitive. It would make us a target to every animal nearby, like a red moving splotch in heat-sensing binoculars.
He and another ranger walk towards the gate and enter her enclosure- typically a terrible idea, but in this case it seems, a calculated risk given how long she’s been missing. They call for her and walk up the steep hillside, eyes skyward, trying to get her from whatever tree she’s climbed into and back down for lunch.
“Choooohh-nyaaaaaa” they both call out in a prolonged sing-song, cupping their hands at the sides of their mouths for effect. The long syllables clang together like a church bell. I move around the third ranger, who has stayed here as a lookout from this angle. I smile with teeth at this fantastic scene. Three grown men, singing into the forest for an angsty teenage bear to come eat lunch. Feeling ineffective, I put my pinky fingers at the edge of my lips, curl them in to rest on my teeth, and whistle. Tweeeeee-EET! Like I’m calling my dog.
The ranger looks over to me, surprised. Silbar? he asks, almost impressed. Si, I say. I keep whistling.
I ask a bad version of: Does she always disappear like this?
The ranger answers and says, to what my translation can gather: Yes, she’s young. He points to the other bears. When the others were young, they did the same - climbing trees all day long. It’s how they learn.
Carlos and Julian call and call for Chogna, navigating the hill of trees and tree roots and nettles and ivy. I widen my field of vision and look higher - further up into the canopy of the trees, where the only color is green. I blur my focus and take in the monochromatic mass of leaves moving in the wind. Then, I see it: a different movement - a bigger, blacker type of movement. Refocusing, I see Chogna, probably fifty feet up, standing happily in the crook of a branch just a few paces away from the enclosure itself. Carlos and Julian had walked right under her. Her shaggy black fur now distinct against the rough of bark, the silk of leaves.
Ah! I exclaim. Aqui! I point to her. Ella es aqui, ariba!
My Spanish still wasn’t great, but I managed to pick up a few more words each day, and if I was lucky - they would surface when summoned.
Here - she is here, above!
Si? He asks, walking over to align his vision to my pointing finger. Ah, si! Buena vista!
He unhooks the walkie-talkie from his blue jeans and speaks to the rangers, whose pockets echo with his words in synchrony. They look at him and follow his point in her direction, then retreat back to the safety of the chain link tunnel.
I feel proud. A little more like I am part of this team and actually contributing, besides just carrying stuff. And I chuckle to think that this is maybe the only time in my life someone has ever complimented my vision - which without lenses of some kind, is close to legally blind.
Chogna, realizing she has been caught, finally obliges and starts to navigate herself down the fifty feet of trunk and back to the ground for lunch.
Bear Milk
It really is funny, how much animals can be like us. Chogna is the youngest Spectacled Bear here, and it shows. She’s adolescent in the sense that she seems to relish in doing the exact opposite of what everyone wants her to do. Pushing boundaries. Acting out.
Mealtime? Which is the same today as it is every single day? She’s busy. Up a tree somewhere. To the dismay and annoyance of her rangers, Chogna remains firmly on her own schedule. I remember my own childhood behavior at mealtimes, when mom would open a window and call to us on the trampoline outside-
“Dinner’s ready!”
“That’s okay, we’re not hungry.”
Not an acceptable answer.
“Girls? Come inside and eat, please.”
“Okay, fine. Be there in a sec.”
As Chogna made her meticulous descent, grasping firmly to the bark with her claws, I crouched down again to the basket of food. I grabbed her dented, silver food bowl, which was still dripping of river water from its scrub clean a few minutes before. I placed it down next to the basket and lifted the hatch.
First, one raw egg (un huevo). Next, a sandwich of stale hamburger buns, coated with honey and garlic powder (pan con miel y ajo) plopped on top of the wet egg. Two handfuls of quinoa-puffed granola. Last, half a bottle of formula poured on top of it all, which in my growing vocabulary excitement, I had incorrectly called leche de oso - which made the rangers laugh. I thought I said milk for the bear. It came out as bear milk.
I walked through the gate that Carlos held open for me, navigating the uneven floor of tree roots and rocks to avoid spilling this long-awaited lunch, and placed it on the wooden platform that stood a foot off the ground - where Chogna would haul her two-hundred pound body up to eat. The four other Spectacled Bears here were all officially adults and weighed nearly double. Maybe for this reason, among others, they spent much less time up trees. They liked to sleep in their caves, to swim and lay in the river that ran through their enclosures, and to - seriously - rub their backs against the trees. Like a real-life cartoon.
I wiped milk dribbles off the sides of the bowl and onto my pants, turned back, walked through the gate and heard Carlos dislodge the rock that held it open. Chogna waited patiently outside her steel gate. Julian grabbed the handlebars of a steel pole and pulled down with effort, the lever raising the XL dog-door with steel cables, just long enough for Chogna to tumble in and up to her leche de oso.
Movement overhead caught my eye. The spider monkeys walked on all fours atop the tunnel and sat themselves down for a front row seat, watching Chogna messily slurp up her lunch, remnants of it on the sleek fur of her face. They stared blankly at her meal, then each other. One jumped into the enclosure. Little shit. They were nothing if not opportunistic. Chogna looked up and, unbothered, went back to eating. If she wanted to, she could swipe one of those monkeys clear into next week.
We always saved Chogna for last, her feeding consistently the most time-intensive. By the time she finally made her way down the tree, the other bears had usually finished their lunch. Our work now finished, I packed up the blue basket, swung the rope attached to it over my head and shoulder so it hung along my back. Patted my pockets to make sure I had the keys. Onto the next task.
Far and away, Osos y Felinos (Bears and Cats) was the most laborious area I’d worked in yet. From start to finish, I was moving. Moving and sweaty. There was just a lot to do, and only so many hours of daylight. There were five Spectacled Bears, one spotted Paca, three toucans, three Andean Mountain cats (gatto de montana), one Geoffrey’s cat, two ocelots, two pumas, and five jaguars. From beginning to end, the path to each enclosure spanned close to 5 miles. To reach some of the cats, we had to hike up the side of the mountain ridge. Once on the way to them, we were attacked by two spider monkeys that wanted the food in our basket.
The bears ate four times a day. The cats, toucans, and paca twice. After each meal, we needed to clean every feeding area with lemon-lime dish soap, hand scrubbers, and buckets of river water. In between those tasks, we cleaned the swimming pools in each big cat’s enclosure. We went back and forth to the prep room where the food was kept to gather meals: for the bears and toucans and paca, mostly fruits and vegetables.
For the cats, raw eggs and hunks of fresh meat - brusquely cleaved into the correct weight by a ranger and giant butcher knife each morning. Ocelots - cats the size of a cocker spaniel- got a few pounds of meat, a raw egg, and sometimes a live mouse every day. The jaguars and pumas got closer to five pounds of raw flesh: usually a shoulder or a flank plopped onto their feeding platforms.
We carried the wet slabs of meat in a bucket up the long path, each wrapped in one of the many plastic bags that were reused over and over and over. Frugality was tantamount. One dreaded task was to fill a sink with soapy water, then wash thirty or forty of the used plastic bags inside and out, til they were clean of blood. It took me three hours to do it.
No wheelbarrows, no hoses, no pressure-washers. Bodies were the wheelbarrows. Elbow grease was the pressure washer. A bucket was filled over and over with mas agua from the river, a few minutes walk away.
Maybe that was why it was easier to sense the essence of the animals. Tired and worked, the top layer of cognition sloughed away, my body lacked the electrical charge it usually carried while humming along in contemplation. The static that normally made sensing and listening difficult, that carried the flavor of my nervous system like perfume in the wind, was nearly gone most days.
I had noticed something during my time here that I couldn’t quite put into a container of clear explanation. Each animal I’d encountered had a very specific personality, a unique energy, which - to be clear - was not wafting off of them like my own nerves did. But something that required time, exposure, quiet calm and perception to absorb.
This lived somewhere between two extremes, of how I knew animals to be recorded, storied: either devoid completely of consciousness, or fully anthropomorphized.
On one end of the spectrum was the sterility that science treats anything and everything it studies, particularly the natural world: completely and totally neutral - the same charge of essence across all living things. A cheetah, a marmoset, a lizard, a rock - all the same. No specific disposition, persona, temperament. All of nature, painted the same shade of blue. All of nature, an apathetic data point to track.
Yet anyone who has spent time in the company of different species of animals, even those more domestic and common- chihuahuas, pitbulls, tabby cats, songbirds- can tell you how wrong this is. How different the essence of each creature is.
And on the opposite side of the spectrum then, is the Disney-fication of the natural world. Giving them our human range of emotions, our same set of motivations and goals. A complete alteration: humans dressed in slippery fish skin or soft bunny fur. Giving them our best and worst traits, treating them like us, assuming their insides must match the chaos of our own.
Neither of these options were really accurate.
To truthfully describe them meant avoiding both sides of this spectrum and landing somewhere in the middle - somewhere with respect for the natural world as deeply alive in a way data cannot be, without projecting my human nature onto them. And yet, it had become clear that after time in their presence, each species really did have their own, unique essence, personality. And I couldn’t deny that some of the Disney characters, the cartoons which brought animals to life on our screens, were pretty spot on.
The tapir, a goofball. Marsh deer, silky and nervous. Armadillos, curious and twitchy. The tortoises, industrious and fragile. Monkeys, capricious. Very capricious.
Andean Bears were jovial, playful, calm, sleepy. Also called Spectacled Bears, a namesake born from the light markings around their eyes that contrast against dark fur, giving the appearance of eyeglasses. I watched them sit upright on their butts in the middle of the stream, the water rushing around them as they stared out in the distance, seemingly pondering. Grabbing an ear of corn as closely as one could grab anything with massive furry paws; holding it down on the ground and using teeth to tear back and rip away the sheaths of leaves covering its insides - then shaking them like a dog with a toy. Lifting themselves up on their hind legs, standing close to 6 feet tall with front legs tucked into their chest, to get a whiff of the scent coming downwind. Sneezing extravagantly. Scratching tree bark in loud, considered swipes. Lumbering. Rarely moving any faster than totally necessary, but if you managed to catch them in a jog or fast-walk, you could see the heft of them moving with each step. Giant muscle packs on their shoulders moved with their gait, rolls of thick skin rotating back and forth behind their ears like a necklace, a pack of flesh hanging off their chests.
They were powerful in their size, dangerous in their as-needed sprints, their claws long as fingers. But the energy surrounding them was quite peaceful, quite jolly, a little bit dopey, a little bit like Baloo. Under the right circumstances, you really could imagine a world where one of them finds a little boy named Mowgli and takes him under a huge, furry arm.
A Jaguar’s Apprentice
Speaking of the Jungle Book, it’s important yet embarrassing to admit that I had come on this trip, almost entirely, because of jaguars. I told this to no one, and barely admitted it to myself.
Since childhood I have revered certain animals in a way that borders on obsessive, jaguars being one of them- particularly, a melanistic variant (black panthers, and in particular- Bagheera.) I was pretty sure that if I watched enough Animal Planet, and mastered running and jumping on all fours, I’d get the jaguar-equivalent of a Hogwarts letter in the mail inviting me to join their ranks.
This fantasy eventually faded, but my fixation did not. Their power, their secrecy, their beauty, their mysticism. Seeing them in person has been the unbreakable stitch holding together the quilt of a life I could really dream about. The way you can fantasize about some things throughout all the seasons of your life: a wedding day, catching the big wave, getting signed to the pros, having a baby. Elusive, all-encompassing, easy to slip into during trying times. My version is sitting with a jaguar, standing alongside an elephant, swimming next to a blue whale. Like meeting a celebrity.
This trip was a pilgrimage of sorts then, and Osos y Felinos was Mecca. Probably this was what kept me from leaving a week before, when I arrived to find myself fully in over my own head. Puking in the taxi through the Cloud Forest. Cleaning shit, cold showers, risking my bodily safety, being bitten by all kinds of new teeth. Shredding my self-confidence into ribbons. All to crouch by the jaguar enclosures for a few minutes while I caught my breath.
It was worth it.
I wanted to be near jaguars the way a disciple seeks a guru. A protege works at the beck and call of the artist. To share the same air. To witness them firsthand and become changed by it. Daniel San and Mr. Miyagi. A jaguar’s apprentice, you could say.
And here I was, finally. In their presence, I had reached my personal Mecca.
Mecca smelled like cat piss.
Like- the world’s strongest cat piss, which upon reflection, it actually might have been. Jaguars are highly-sensitive to territory, organizing their borders and boundaries so as to not overlap one another’s - and the primary methodology for border-making is pissing and marking. In the portions of the sanctuary grounds where their feeding areas were within thirty feet of one another, the scent was overwhelming.
When we did see them, usually during feeding times, it was obvious where the term Big Cat comes from. They were big cats. Rubbing their cheekbones against the chain link, tips of tails flicking left to right, stretching extravagantly, rolling on their backs with legs splayed, clawing the trees like scratching posts, licking their paws clean of blood. At one point I was organizing my gear a few feet away from a cage, when I heard something atypical to the standard jungle soundtrack- like a rhythmic scraping of sandpaper on stone. Looking around I found the source: the oldest jaguar Kubai, licking the flesh from a pork shoulder bone.
The word jaguar comes from the Tupi and Guarani native languages of South America - from their word yaguareté, meaning “true, fierce beast” and “he who kills in one leap.”1
As apex predators, their presence holds the food chain below them in a healthy balance, preventing overpopulation. The oblong, varied black spots and splotches on their fur (called rosettes) mimic the forest understory; dappled in spots of light and shadow from foliage above. Tail to nose, fully-grown males measure between 6.5 - 9ft (1.7 - 2.7 meters) long and between 200 - 350 pounds (100 - 160 kgs), and females are only 10- 20% smaller. They’re pure muscle, pure force. They’re the largest big cats in the Americas, their historical territory once extended up to modern-day Texas. They don’t run much, instead their attacks are launched from shadowy riverbanks or out of trees; sometimes sprinting, sometimes jumping Superman-style to land on prey several feet below, clinching the kill with a bite so strong it punctures skulls. Their bite is the strongest of all big cats, at 1,500 psi, twice the strength of tiger’s despite being only half the size. (For context: a human bite force is 160 psi, a Rottweiler’s is 325.) Since they hunt and primarily live alone, this kill-shot strength helps them down prey quickly and efficiently on their own.
Prowling at dusk and dawn, they are classic ambush predators and take prey by surprise with sneak attacks. They are the top predator in a land filled with predators. Their diet consists of giant, insane meals up to four-times their size: caiman (crocodile cousins), marsh deer, peccary, capybara, and when their habitats are encroached upon by ranching and expansion - cattle. They shoot for the moon. They don’t land it every time, but their success rates are still high enough to keep themselves and their cubs fed - landing a 300lb meal allows them to feed for days, weeks.2 Reddit has called them the “bodybuilder” of big cats, an apt description for their sheer mass- but only accurate if that bodybuilder could also effortlessly scramble up trees.
It’s no wonder why Latin American cultures have considered them important religious and spiritual symbols, as icons of uncontested ferocity.3 In her memoir “We Will Be Jaguars”, Nemonte Nenquimo tells her story, and the stories of her people: the Waorani, indigenous to the Amazon jungles of Ecuador.4 This book is the first ever written documentation of the stories and legends of this culture from a first-person perspective. Its title being one of them: the ancient belief that their people become jaguars when they die. Thus, any encounter with the animal - whether in dreams or reality - is taken as a message from ancestors. Often, to follow the jaguar’s example: protecting the forest.
The Waorani are not alone in these beliefs. Other Mesoamerican cultures and indigenous peoples, the A’i Cofán and Siekopai nations particularly, also hold the jaguar in an otherworldly, shamanistic regard: able to move between the physical and spiritual world; lead followers into rebirth and healing; return us to lost parts of our understanding.5
Incredibly, across oceans and continents, ancient African folklore also developed a shamanistic reverence for a look-alike species: leopards.6
My secret hope, tainted with remnants of childhood wonder, was for their mystical powers to work on me, too.
Where the bears elicited joy, I hoped the jaguars would be like a cleansing: a spiritual gate to step through. A divide between past and present, a threshold. That their essence alone would be enough to get my life back on track.
Witnessing them was magical and harrowing.
Magical. Their eyes a blue-grey-green I’d seen nowhere before or since. They were stunning, quiet, observant, terrifying, and deeply comfortable in their own skin.
This must be why weak humans across time have so often wanted to remove it and wear it themselves, to feel what it’s like to be undeniably commanding.
Harrowing. None of them would have been at this sanctuary if they hadn’t already been so irreversibly exposed to humans, specifically human harm. This kept me in a loop of feeling both beholden to them and fiercely guilty. They would never be capable of surviving in the wild, of being released into freedom. Five fantastic beasts whose wildness had been stolen from them. Their origin stories, told to me over three days and through patchy bilingual sentences, were each a different flavor of cruel.
Many of them had been only cubs when they were stolen from their mothers-orphaned by her poaching. Most had been sold into the exotic pet trade: one of the youngest we cared for- a two-year old female named Lala- was posted for sale on Facebook Marketplace. The people who bought her treated her like a pet, raising her alongside dogs until her nature won out and she attacked. She was luckily found and confiscated by undercover officials, then brought to the sanctuary.
But many aren’t as lucky. Many are killed by the people who poached, trafficked, and imprisoned them for their very ferocity in the first place. Many are released into cities when they become too dangerous, where they then become public enemy number one- encouraged to be shot on sight. Many are killed once their bodies have grown just large enough to be covered by an otherworldly coat of silk to sell on the black market, along with their teeth, their claws, their organs.
The illegal jaguar trade is unfortunately still thriving.7 Sellers claim jaguar organs to be a highly-potent natural supplement, boosting male libido. This claim holds next to zero scientific credibility.
Some, like Kubai, were used as an income stream: tortured to roar on command for the entertainment of paying customers and the recording of videos. When he refused, his captors sold him to the first of many different zoos he would live in, of various levels of legitimacy. The last one was in the inner city of a Bolivian town, his enclosure 500 square feet and entirely concrete. Now he was here. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t see him much. He preferred lofting in the hidden spaces of his leafy enclosure. After a life like that, who could blame him?
It was deeply unjust, the way their lives had been stolen from them. They were sought after for their strength and beauty, then killed for it. Yanked from the shadows and into constant spotlights. Loved and hated in equal measure. It’s no wonder they preferred the shadows.
Though I wanted more than anything to sit buddha-style, cross-legged in meditation outside their pearly (chain-link) gates and observe everything I possibly could - actually doing so felt like another kind of theft. So much had already been taken from them. I felt suddenly ashamed for even wishing to share the same air. I found myself watching instead of taking pictures, preferring silence to conversation, walking around their enclosures like a guest in a lavish home.
It became devotional then. Cleaning their spaces, bringing them food, making sure their water was fresh and clean. There was so little I could do - actually, nothing - that could ever make up for the harm they’d already been subjected to. For the unjust hand of cards they’d been dealt.
But I could wash away the ants gathering round leftover bits of bloody flesh on the ground. I could collect feathers for them to play with. I could scrub clean the slats of their wooden feeding platform - watching the soapy foam turn from scarlet to pink to white. I would not be able to say thank you and I love you and I’m sorry, but I could do this for them.
And when they made themselves seen, I could absorb the moments like a sponge.
Lala liked to pounce dramatically into her swimming pool and onto the giant rubber ball that floated around it lazily.
Khan would jump off a perch and stride down to the fence section closest to the trail, pacing from left to right as we walked by, watching intently with giant canines shining through his open, panting mouth.
A pair of sisters shared an enclosure, and every morning we crested the ridge of the path to their gates, they were busy bickering about who would get through the feeding gate first. Sometimes half-hearted swiping, growling, and quarreling with one another outside the steel door while we prepared breakfast - a red-eyed squeaking mouse and a raw egg for each- which we tossed through the fence strategically to avoid losing any fingers.
I’d take breaks to catch my breath mid-cleaning, and peer into the endless green and brown of the enclosures beyond the feeding areas where I stood, hoping for a glimpse of its inhabitant. More than once, by the time I spotted a tail or hind leg I’d look up to find its owner already staring directly at me.
Eye contact with a jaguar is jolting every time. Usually, because you’re late to the party.
One day I was entranced in a spell of silent scrubbing - pushing the broken bristle-broom across cement. The head of the broom would come unscrewed from the pole roughly every 6 sweeps, which I could avoid by putting my body weight behind each push and leaning to the right, to reinforce the components’ integration.
I’d turned my back to the fence for a better angle on the broom, when a hulking shadow figure appeared in a flash of movement in my peripheral. I shrieked and jumped instinctively.
Khan, the largest male, stood upright on the other side of the fence a foot away from me. I hadn’t noticed him stalking me before his sneak attack jump-scare. His body, leaning against the double-walled fence, stretched at least a foot above me, his claws so extended I could see their pink connective tissue.
He looked pleased with himself.
I whipped my head around for Carlos and found him leaning against his broom smirking, clearly having watched the entire scene unfold. “Le gusta” he said.
I forced the air from my lungs and into a laugh, mumbled something sarcastic, then switched my angle for visibility and started scrubbing again. Khan retreated back into the underbrush. My heart rate eventually settled out of my ears.
Vanishing Acts
Before I left for South America, the days seemed to bleed together into a consistent, boring blur. On one of such countless nights, I wrote myself this note:
“Once upon a time I felt a kind of conviction for my existence. This has waned. So I am going away to remember. I am leaving for a month and I hope to meet myself again at the end of it.”
I am the kind of person who needs to disappear every now and then in order to stay alive. It’s a silky, devious kind of joy to become furtive and invisible. To Irish Goodbye a version of yourself, the character you’ve created. To back up, step by slow step, until you’re no longer in the scene. Until you can run away unnoticed, disappear and be witnessed by no one. Only reappearing strategically, allowing yourself to be observed on special occasion.
The trip to another continent and particularly, to a remote place three hours into the rainforest, was the ultimate vanishing act. The whole of the experience, in hindsight, something I needed more than I could have known.
I had wanted to learn some striking thing from the jaguars; to gain some novel and undeniable insight to carry home with me. I hoped their presence would tell me what to do. That seeing them would flip on a light switch I had misplaced between my years of childhood worship and now; would illuminate some corner with a forgotten map hung up on the wall. That this dream come true would hand me the conviction for my life.
I hoped to find the answer to my existential angst like the eyes of a jaguar: slowly, then all at once. Staring me in the face all along.
Of course, this did not happen. Three days in their presence didn’t deliver the next clue in my scavenger hunt, a direction from above, a recovered memory like the last missing puzzle piece.
But it did deliver a new vantage point to gaze from; theirs.
I imagined the perspective of a jaguar mid-canopy, watching the world exist without its interaction. Hidden in the patterns of light and content with simply watching, soaking in the reprieve of shadows.
Waiting and waiting until the time is right to risk exposure again. Waiting and waiting until something comes along that’s worth jumping for.
The month of Normal Life that I had begged, hand-wringing and apologetically, to scoop out of my calendar was not just a pathetic, last-ditch, runaway effort - the latest example of my dissidence. It was also a strategy. In fact, it was the same strategy as the jaguar’s.
From this lens, I could feel respect for it. A legitimacy.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt proud of myself for disappearing. For recognizing the need to be unseen for a while. For seeking what only the shadows could make visible.
There have been many times that I’ve found myself, like Joseph Campbell describes, in the dark of the woods. Having lost the path, not sure which way is up, not sure how to find my way out. Most of these times have been circumstantial and decidedly not my choice. But this time was different. I had sought the lostness out myself. I had put myself into the darkness.
It was no small thing that I was still alive and well on this trip, despite the odds. But what I held like a trophy was feeling content at the start and end of each day. Even happy. In this patch of the universe I was a complete stranger to others and sometimes myself, an ant in a field, a speck in the galaxy, a single heartbeat in a rainforest. Shitty at speaking and good at silence. I was nowhere and doing nothing of first-worldly value, eating the plainest of food and drinking black instant coffee, wiping sweat off my face and letting it pool everywhere else, watching bears be teenagers and jaguars watch me.
I didn’t have a conviction for why I was alive. But I had a conviction that I was alive.
I was alive and I was an animal of this jungle like all the others. I existed here. That, I was convinced of. Sure, it wasn’t a conviction of purpose or reason - but wasn’t a conviction of aliveness worth something?
The sun was starting to set and the air was pink.
Carlos slowed his pace and peered over his shoulder at me. We were making our way back to the prep room, our day finished. My last day here, finished. Tomorrow he’d continue like any other day, but without me.
“Sarah?” he asked “Te gustan los osos y felinos?”
I smiled. “Si.” A few more moments of quiet consideration, a few more clunking steps in my too-big rubber boots. “Mucho, mucho.” I dramatically motioned my hands wide. I meant it.
“Bien,” he said with a wide grin, then turned back around and kept walking. Leading us back to home base.
I was beginning to see this trip like it was a peccary. Or a deer, or a caiman. Like a meal I had been stalking.
The four-times-bigger-than-me, irrational audacity I had leapt for, pounced on, and landed.
It would feed me for months.
“Top Ten Facts About Jaguars“, World Wildlife Fund
“Kill rates and predation patterns of jaguars (Panthera onca) in the southern Pantanal, Brazil”, Journal of Mammology (2021)
"Jaguar Experts Answer Your Questions", Panthera (2021)
“We Will Be Jaguars” by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson
“Jaguars: Stories from the territories”, Amazon Frontlines