Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

When I first saw the lodge I was surprised at its position by the lagoon, thinking it would be heaven for mosquitoes but hell for anyone with blood in their veins and skin to be punctured. However, Dan explained that the water from the swamps was rich in tannins leached from decaying leaves, and was thus too acidic for mosquitoes to lay their eggs in. As a result, the deck overlooking the lagoon was unspoiled.

Following my resolution to take up swimming, I stood in my swimmers on said deck eyeing the diving board mounted at its edge. Raised a mere two metres above the water’s surface, it was still high enough to trigger my fear of heights, and I started making excuses to myself not to use it, which were quickly countered by the voice of rationality. What if a stump was hidden underneath the water? (They had all been cleared long ago, doofus.) What if an enormous caiman had just moved in? (No enormous caimans have been seen here for years, you wimp.) What if I landed on an electric eel? (Eels are nocturnal; be a man and get on that board!)

That rational voice was a bastard, but his arguments were irrefutable, so I took a few swift steps up the ladder to the board and launched myself off the end, my body arched, my hands held out in front just as my swimming teacher had taught me many years before, breaking the surface tension with my fingers before the rest of me plunged through. My swimming teacher may have been happy with the dive had she seen it, but unlike me she didn’t have testicles; I was less impressed, as they somehow got slapped hard enough that I felt them in my throat. Clearly I should worry less about animals in the lagoon and concentrate more on my own poor form.

Once my testicles had recovered from the dive, I resolved to take full advantage of the lagoon and go for a swim each day. I planned on building slowly until I could swim to the other side and back, around four hundred metres all up. Not so great a challenge, but on my first attempt I wasn’t even halfway across when I felt my legs lagging, and my head sinking lower with each stroke. I was doing breaststroke, my bobbing dome unintentionally mimicking the monkeys that watched from the far shore, dipping their heads up and down as they tried to figure out what that strange and inelegant blob was in the lagoon.

Wisely deciding to avoid the embarrassment of needing rescue, I swam back to the swimming platform just as one of the guides, a perpetually upbeat chap called Gustavo, began setting up rods for his guests to go piranha fishing.

‘Are you crazy?’ one of them shouted at me in an American accent.

‘Nah, Australian,’ I replied.

To be honest I wasn’t sure how wise it was to be in the water at the same time as the bait (chunks of chicken that the wise piranhas were experts at nibbling off the hook without ever touching the metal), and hauled myself out rather nimbly.

The next day, in spite of the ever-present piranhas, I was determined to make it at least halfway across the lagoon before turning back. But just as I launched myself off the board (this time arching my back sharply like a cocked eyebrow to avoid the indignity I’d suffered the day before), I spotted a head bobbing up and down on the other side of the lagoon, not far from the grassy patch. It was the head of an elderly man staying at the lodge, and he had made it to the other side. Being ruled by testosterone is a pain in the arse sometimes: there was now no way I could only go halfway.

I began my slow breaststroke, feeling the fatigue almost immediately as my muscles complained at such abuse two days in a row. Relief followed as they warmed and momentarily stopped their whining; there was even some joy as I got further than the previous day’s capitulation point, but then a weary leadenness set in.

The water was surprisingly warm, the tropical sun maintaining it at a bath-like temperature. But only to a point: when tiredness made my limbs droop down to maybe a foot in depth the water suddenly became startlingly cold, jerking me back to proper form. This was a far better way of maintaining style than my old teacher’s method of hauling my backside up by the pants anytime I relaxed, giving me a wedgie in the process.

The old man swam past me, heading back towards the lodge, giving a merry ‘ Ciao! ’, my reply a gasped ‘Hoo!’—the only sound I could manage at that point.

Somehow I made it to the other side, where I trod water a while, then steeled myself to head back; as I set off the deck looked ridiculously far away, a moon landing of a swim. While I splashed and dog-paddled I distracted myself by listening to the birds around the lagoon’s edge, doves cooing, the rasped call of hoatzins interrupted by the odd clapping of wings as they lifted off inelegantly. Kingfishers dipped into the water for prey then beat their catch against branches before swallowing it, and from somewhere unseen came the maniacal, funky-rhythmed call of a wood-rail.

Gustavo (‘Call me Gus. Only my mother calls me Gustavo, and only then when I am in trouble’) was with new guests when I finally got back. Shooting an amused look at me as I hauled myself out, he said to his group, ‘I recommend swimming to you all, you can see it is safe, but maybe don’t go across to the other side. Just stay around the platform.’ I wondered if there was something I’d missed on my list of potential diving-board disasters. I meant to ask Gus later on why he had said to stay near the platform, but figured it was just because he didn’t want to have to canoe out to rescue them should they lose energy.

Within days I was doing the swim across the lagoon with relative ease, and was planning on building up to two laps. My only fear was of caimans. Two different species of caiman lived in the lagoon: the inoffensive spectacled caiman (never a problem even when it reached its maximum length of just over two metres), and the black caiman, a confirmed man-eater in some parts of South America, and the largest of its family, reaching six metres in some places.

‘There’s a large black caiman in there,’ Gus told me one day, conversationally.

‘Huge?’ I asked, echoing Marcello from the Pantanal.

‘Not huge. Just large. Maybe three metres. But it usually stays over the other side of the lagoon, near that channel the canoes use to bring guests in.’

‘Usually’ is not a comforting word when applied to wildlife, as animals are as changeable as the weather. ‘Three metres’ was even less so, as a caiman that size would be more than capable of dragging me down, pulling me apart, and snacking on me as needed while my bits decomposed. (I think about crocodilians a lot, so I know every grim step of the process.)

He scratched his chin thoughtfully, and added, ‘And that caiman under the deck; even though she’s just a spectacled she might get upset if she thought you were going for her babies…’

‘And how big is she?’

‘About two metres.’

Two metres wasn’t that comforting either. I’d known about the caiman under the deck, but was yet to see it and hadn’t realised it was quite so large. Suddenly the diving board seemed the least of my challenges as I tried to gather back the bravery that I’d lost at my desk job.

The same night as my conversation with Gus about the caimans, instead of eating at the main area of the lodge there was a barbecue dinner on the deck. Meat sizzled and delicious aromas drifted through the lodge, making stomachs gurgle hungrily.

I joined a small cluster of tourists and a guide making their way to the deck, following our noses, when a voice from the water called ‘Mom!’, and I was transported back to Parque Machia in Bolivia, and Sonko the overweight puma.

At Machia, when the volunteers walked towards the pumas’ cages they shouted out ‘ Hola! ’ so the puma knew who was walking towards them (since the animals are tied up or caged it would be stressful for them to hear only footsteps). Roy always answered with a hearty, snarling yowl. The plump, strange-voiced Sonko squeaked out something that sounded like a cigarette-smoking, sea-urchin-gargling baby American—‘Mom!’ he squeaked. ‘Mom! Mom!’ This sound was also very similar to the plaintive cry of a baby crocodilian.