Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

‘The bus is not fixed,’ said our driver, which I thought was quite a clever spin on the situation.

Herded back off the bus we waited and watched the driver and a local mechanic’s legs for half an hour. They moved little from their position jutting out from under the bus until a voice shouted ‘Bravo!’ and they emerged with greasy triumphant grins.

We clambered back on and for the first time I noticed that the tall blonde woman was on the same bus, in the seat immediately behind mine. I mustn’t have rubbed the sleep out of my eyes hard enough.

‘Bloody hell, if we don’t move soon we’ll never get there,’ said an Australian accent behind me. It wasn’t the tall woman (who I’d begun to think of as ‘the good-looking tall woman without a French boyfriend’), but the woman in the seat next to her.

Never one to miss an opportunity, I swapped names with the Australian (hers was Ange) and we soon figured out we were both from Sydney. The blonde looked out the window, occasionally flicking her eyes towards Ange and me as we chatted. I presumed she was from somewhere Nordic and was bound to have that enviable European ability of casually speaking half a dozen languages. (If you ever express admiration for their learning they seem astonished. ‘You don’t?’ is the implication in their reply.)

Back to taking in the view outside, at one point I shouted ‘Armadillo!’, startling those around me, except the now frustratingly impassive tall blonde sans French boyfriend, who continued staring out the window. The animal I had seen had dashed away from our looming tyres and dived into a culvert, so I was left in the awkward position of explaining that I had indeed seen an armadillo, but that it was now gone. I glanced at the blonde, wondering why she was so aloof, then saw the telltale trail of headphone cords in her hair.

Doofus! I said to myself. Still, I had to admire her method of blocking out the reggaeton.

In any case, we didn’t get far before the bus began a series of hopping lurches. The driver managed to coax it on a few more kilometres to a service station, where we were instructed simply to get off the bus and ‘wait’.

It could have been frustrating, but years in Africa had taught me that impatience only gives you wrinkles, so it’s best to make the most of such situations. At least we were liberated from the confines of bus seats that were as wide as toothpicks and about as comfortable to put your buttocks on.

Still intrigued by the tall blonde I sidled closer to her, keen to impress but with little to offer in the way of witty banter. I decided instead to stick to the one subject I can talk confidently about, and fortunately and animal soon approached. I watched it a moment until it began behaviour I recognised, which I interpreted for her benefit: ‘Oh look! That cat’s about to puke!’

‘Um, thanks for showing me that,’ she said, blinking in disbelief.

‘You’re English?’ I asked, startled not to hear a Nordic lilt.

‘Welsh actually,’ she said.

I mentally kicked myself. I should have spotted the difference.

‘But both my parents are English,’ she added, ‘so my accent is a bit mixed up.’

This little piece of self-deprecation made my small but burgeoning crush crank up a notch. It ratcheted up further as our conversation continued and she mentioned she was a fan of rugby. ‘And Wales is the best team in the world,’ she announced.

‘Ranked about sixth officially though, aren’t they?’ I said.

The withering look she gave me made it clear I’d blundered again. It had been some years since I’d simultaneously been single and spoken with an attractive woman. I was clearly still not good at it.

I really wanted whatever I said next to be at least correct, if not impressive, so I thrust out my hand as if in a business meeting and said, ‘My name’s Peter.’

‘Lisa,’ she replied, shaking my hand with a slight smirk, presumably at my awkwardness.

‘Nice name,’ I said, then felt foolish. ‘But I think I will call you the Minke,’ I added impulsively.

I couldn’t believe it. Had I just nicknamed her after a whale ? What self-destructive urge had taken over my tongue?

‘Why?’ she asked.

At this point a smarter person would have backtracked, issued a blanket denial or pleaded a brain injury. I said, weakly, ‘Because you’re from Wales.’ Apparently unable to stop myself, I continued, ‘And because you’re big.’

I gulped, tasting the feet I had just placed firmly in my mouth.

Unbelievably, the Minke smiled. ‘That’s pretty odd,’ she said, ‘but I like it!’

‘Wow,’ I thought, genuinely impressed. I hadn’t meant the name as an insult (to me no animal name is an insult) but most women would not be so gracious about being compared to an animal weighing several tonnes. At least I hadn’t called her Humpback. My little crush grew like a plankton bloom, and I resolved to be cool and not make any more references to sea creatures.

So it was that I spent the next hour hanging around the Minke, and when we were finally allowed back on the bus I soon developed a neck strain from constantly turning around to talk to her.

The neck injury grew worse when, with a squeal of brakes and a spray of gravel, the bus came to a juddering halt. Our driver leapt from the vehicle as if it were in flames, and ran onto the gravel area at the side of the bus. Something scuttled ahead of him, jinking as he jagged, but with nowhere to hide in the featureless landscape.

‘Armadillo!’ I shouted again, delighted to see another one, though I immediately became concerned about how it would be treated. The armadillo’s frantic movement finally ceased as the driver pinned the animal with his foot, which probably wasn’t as uncomfortable as it looked given all the armour armadillos carry. Armadillos are the only animal apart from humans susceptible to leprosy, and I thought about telling the driver this so he would let it go, but lacked the Spanish words to say, ‘Keep touching that and parts may well begin to drop off you.’

I got off the bus with a few others, including the Minke, to get a better look, the omnipresent wind sandblasting skin already tender from weeks of rough weather. I looked at the little creature being pinned to the ground and wondered how far I would go to set it free.

To my relief, the driver did not take the animal for the cooking pot but let it go, and it scooted off into the eternal horizon, puffs of dust spurting from its tiny feet as it went. We all got back on the bus, and the Minke told me she was delighted to have seen it. ‘Armadillo!’ she said. ‘Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside!’ Seeing my hesitant grin she added, ‘You don’t get the reference, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘Why don’t you explain it over dinner if we all go out tomorrow?’ suggested Ange (now a fully fledged Angel in my mind) and I could have kissed her but felt it might send a mixed signal.

Some hours later there was a dramatic shift in scenery, and after a small dip in the road that didn’t seem to signify anything of great note, pine trees appeared outside, along with many other forms of vegetation I’d never seen before. The light through the windows waned; soon after, clusters of lights in the distance announced our arrival on the outskirts of Bariloche.

For some reason a pensive mood overtook me after leaving the bus. Patagonia had not been what I’d expected. Admittedly I’d only seen a small patch of it but it had only been on the glacier that I’d felt the sense of isolation for which Patagonia was famous. Somehow, the armadillo incident seemed to sum up the Patagonia I’d seen—once wild, but now held down and subdued. Instead of experiencing an untamed Patagonia, I had been yet another pair of human feet domesticating it.