Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

But of course it couldn’t last.

There was a section of Roy’s trail I’d long dreaded, for two reasons. At that point the trail split, and Roy could choose to take a long detour, extending the punishment of our daily routine by several kilometres. There was also a sharp drop in the trail at this point, which required perfect timing and great balance for a human to negotiate, two things genetics sadly withheld from me. To handle the drop I had to make sure I was right behind Roy, because he managed it with ease and then tended to take off at a sprint as soon as he touched the ground. If the rope pulled tight while I was in mid-air I was likely to be pasted onto a tree—again. Failing that, I would often launch off the drop weak-limbed, landing floppily, and miss the tree a metre or so down the path that could be used as an anchor.

While missing this tree usually just led to some mad skating, uncoordinated cartwheeling of legs, and inelegant flailing at imaginary handholds until I collided with the next tree on the path, on this day my feet shot forward from under me and I landed heavily on my backside. The ground was muddy and slippery from the previous evening’s rain, and I soon began an uncontrolled slide down the trail. Sometime during this slide, my shorts split at the seam. Roy had stopped his initial sprint and settled into a fast walk when he saw movement beside him. It was me, sliding right past him—a scene way too tempting for any puma to ignore.

‘Hi Roy!’ I said in as even a tone as I could muster with my shorts torn open, mud filling my underpants, and a puma eyeing me in delight. Naturally, he jumped on me.

Roy’s teeth on my leg stopped my slide, but due to my prone position he hit me higher than usual, the thigh rather than the knee. I quickly realised how much more painful a tooth into muscle is than a tooth into bone. Usually when he bit me I would maintain a calm voice, so as not to excite him further. But unable to manage such self-control, I shouted out something that is rude in most languages, and shoved at Roy’s head; however, with my leg flat to the ground I was unable to remove his paws.

Adrian rushed up and grabbed the lead, allowing me to stand up and remove Roy’s paws. As he did so often after jumping, Roy sprinted, and only then did I see that there was barely a metre of free cord between Roy and me, the rest having somehow coiled itself around Roy’s body. Yanked out of Adrian’s hand the rope pulled tight, but I was already running. Roy turned, frustrated at my slow pace, and jumped me again. Thunder cracked overhead, drowning out my curses (by now I’d completely forgotten about remaining calm). This time he hit me low, pushing me over, which sent us both into a spin during which one of his claws dragged down my calf, taking my boot off with it.

Adrian caught up to us in record time, and grabbed at Roy’s cord, managing to free one loop that had formed around his body. The other loops pulled tight though and I found myself being dragged by a half-crazed puma once again. Soon, frustrated at the shortness of the cord, Roy turned to jump on me again, but this time I nabbed his collar and dragged him along the path, loosening the coils of rope from the various places they were wrapped around him.

My three-quarter-length shorts had started the day in no way mistakable for couture, but by now they were shredded, the seat flapping, the section below the left knee hanging by threads. It was one of the few times that Roy had drawn blood, and I could see a small bloom of red through the remaining fabric.

‘Roy didn’t like me falling over. He seems to blame my leg,’ I said, as thunder rumbled again.

A breeze kicked up and Adrian and I both checked the glimpses of sky through the canopy while keeping pace with our perturbed puma. Black clouds had gathered overhead, and an ominous swirling of foliage made it impossible to ignore that a drenching was on its way. We’d been rained on before—only natural in a rainforest—but the heaviest rains of the year were due to start soon, and this was setting out to be a potent warm-up act. Roy’s fur stood on end as if electrified, and with the next crash of thunder he glanced back at us with an expression that suggested he thought the sound was our fault. Specifically, my knee’s.

As the first fat splats of rain hit the canopy above, then burst through in a torrent, it became obvious that as far as Roy was concerned, yes, the rain was my knee’s fault. After nearly three days of casual and pleasant trails I had been jumped three times in half an hour, and was starting to feel my existing wounds tugged in uncomfortable directions. The pelting rain made the trail slippery even for four-legged Roy, a plus, but for the first time on one of our trails I felt cold.

Then I saw Roy shiver. He curtailed it as quickly as he could, but the shiver made him seem a little vulnerable. While I wouldn’t have dared admit to it outside the small circle of Roy Boys, at that moment his attempt at bravado was just a tiny bit cute.

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘he’s just bitten me three times but I think I’m starting to like him even more!’ The temporary break from violence had allowed me to feel closer to him, and somehow the return of his abusive behaviour didn’t change that. Since I’d stopped focusing on my own pain and stopped blaming Roy for it, I could see that Roy jumped merely because he was excitable. He loved these walks, and had no way of expressing himself other than by being a puma. He was more trapped between worlds than I had ever been, and could not be blamed for behaving wildly.

The rain dissipated within a day, leaving behind treacherously slippery trails that even Roy took slowly. By now Adrian and I were exhausted, battered, and plagued with the strange rashes that come from being constantly wet. Our feet emerged from their boots each day prune-like and peeling, a ghastly white and sore to the touch. We were near the end of our month at Parque Machia, and both of us were keen to move on to somewhere else. We needed trainees, new Roy Boys.

By a happy quirk of fate, within two days two new potential candidates arrived; following a trend, they were both Australians.

‘So do you guys pat him?’ asked Courtney, one of the new trainees.

‘Not so much,’ Adrian answered.

‘Hmmph,’ said Courtney, and I knew that just like me a month earlier, he was imagining that by the end of his stint he would have Roy on a string, and that they would have become great buddies. The truth is that I did pat Roy, but not often, and only when we were in the safest areas. Affection usually generated excitement, and excitement led to jumping, so love was limited between us, even with the new respect and fonder feelings I had for Roy.

‘Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.’

It only took Courtney one turn on lead to shake his confidence. Roy’s crazy face was unsettling enough, but just like me, Courtney wasn’t prepared for the shock of actually being bitten by a puma. And Roy went after him, jumping him often and with a degree of venom I didn’t recall experiencing during my own training, only a month before.

‘You know what,’ said Courtney after a few days. ‘I’m not interested in being his buddy anymore. I just want to make it through the month.’

I grinned broadly at this. Courtney looked at me questioningly, so I explained that I’d experienced exactly what he was going through, and presumably so had any number of Roy Boys through the seven years Roy had been at Machia.

I left Machia just as the rains arrived, coming down with a fury as they had on the day when everything was my knee’s fault. I was glad to get out before the rains hit too hard, making the trails unmanageable, but I also felt wistful to be leaving when I’d only just begun to have fun with Roy. I had started to respect as well as like him: he was a real puma.