Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

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).

Some of the volunteers tended to capuchins, spider monkeys and squirrel monkeys that had been rehabilitated and released into the reserve but still needed some care and observation. Others looked after the monkeys that had only recently arrived and still required time in quarantine.

Some of the volunteers sitting around the breakfast table shouted like artillerymen, deafened perhaps by the parrots in their care. Then there were those who worked with the innocuous-sounding ‘small animals’, which included coatis, a relative of the raccoon with a short prehensile snout, and a badger-sized relative of the weasel called a tayra. While both these species are capable of displaying great affection to their carers, they are just as well known for turning savage and using their sharp teeth to inflict painful injuries.

By volunteering to spend time with Roy, I’d joined the last group at the table, the cat people. Oddly enough, my compatriots were openly envious of some of the wounds sported by the ‘small animals’ group: while no one was keen on pain, a scar did seem a great souvenir of this experience. The cats rarely bit hard enough to draw blood—not even Roy, who was the wildest of the four pumas at Machia. Mick’s knee may have looked awful but his wounds were superficial and he had never needed a needle and thread to patch them up.