Urban Animals

State of Nature

Jaguar! At 3 o’clock! The guide yelled out under his binoculars, surprised. He signaled the boat captain to cut the motor and signaled us to cut the chatter. We drew closer. The boat tipped slightly starboard as we all leaned out to scrutinize the river’s edge. We were eight eco-tourists, the guide, the cook, the captain and the captain’s helper, navigating up the Manu River, deep into the Peruvian Amazon, days away from the nearest landing strip.

The rare sighting coincided with a break in the weather. The low gray sky that had rested stubbornly atop the crowns of the tallest trees was bursting at the seams, highlighting the green sheen of freshly wet leaves. Pairs of yellow, purple and red flashed in out and out of sight, squawking wildly. Impenetrable forest rustled on either side, shaking off its hazy coat. The river, swift and swollen from the morning’s heavy rain, bore through its circuitous path with replenished vigor. The animal had traveled to the boundary of its twenty-five square kilometer home, where it lives alone, to dry and warm itself under the sun.

Jaguar! We exchanged excited glances and spoke under our breath. The boat drifted slowly, at a respectful distance, by a large pile up of storm-blasted logs upon which the animal was perched. It straddled the weathered trunk with its head held high over the river. My first jaguar. A cheap association to the Sphinx of Giza was inescapable. A stately pose, I thought. What finesse!

He suddenly turned its head straight my way, breaking profile, a massive head that, my “Talking about Manu” guidebook later informed me, houses a powerful bite that can pierce armored crocodiles. How vulnerable I felt. With his attentive stare, he had made it indisputably clear to me that he was fully aware of my existence, and fully aware of his as a giant and intelligent feline met deep in its homeland. In that instance, I was integrated into the jungle economy, a society in which the jaguar was an astute and powerful predator (and a damn good swimmer) and I was a scantily clad Caucasian covered in black fly bites. No, I knew the jaguar would not care to join our motley crew – there are presumably no documented cases of a jaguar ever killing a human in South America – but if our captain held final authority on our small wooden vessel, this animal was certainly the king of all the rest.

...

Not the least big agitated in his movements, the giant cat slowly rose, exposing a heavy belly previously hidden when pressed flat in the sphinx pose. This cat was dining well. Jaguars are opportunistic, taking hoofed prey, fish, turtles, birds, fish, small mammals and even crocodiles. It should be no surprise then that introducing livestock to a jaguar is guaranteed to broaden its diet even further, an all too often fatal temptation for jaguars outside Manu National Park’s one million eight hundred thousand acres.

Large shoulder muscles came into view, on one side then the other, rising far above the line of its back as it crept up the log towards the river bank, low on its stocky legs, placing each paw down as one lays down tape. The clusters of black spots, bright against an orange backdrop, accentuated the slight swaying of its belly and the periodic clenching of its muscles under its fur, themselves moving up and down and to and fro with every steady but graceful step. The jaguar looked back at us one last time before disappearing through an opening in the forest, the shadows overtaking the orange tail till the black curled tip merged with darkness.

Several minutes passed before someone broke the silence with a deep, reflective sigh. The captain fired up the motor. I reached for my pencil and checked “Jaguar : Panthera onca” off our species sighted list. My first real jaguar.

Urban Dwellers

I grew up facing outwards. The window of my childhood opened to the garden, which reached out to me as the extended branches of a pear tree which came tapping against the single pane when the wind blew in winter. I would leave it open during the daytime in the spring, to let the white pink blossoms settle on my otherwise gray carpet. And in the fall, to secretly pick out the best pears before the birds could get to them. In the summer, heat would rise quickly up the stairwell and stagnate on the top floor; I would often leave the window open overnight. It is on one of these warm nights that my troubles began.

Quite abruptly, I woke up to an opossum in my bed. It was above the sheets, while I remained below, which guaranteed my safety according to children’s lore. Its four short legs dug awkwardly into my lower body as it tried to stay balanced and keep face. The moon glow from the open window highlighted the long hairs at the tip of its pointy pink nose, and shined off its marble black eyes. I must have opened my eyes immensely wide, as it shrieked and hissed and made a diving leap for the pear tree.

Following the visit, the window became a valve, a control point through which myself, and others, could pass. An arbitrary authority I deemed inappropriate and unjust for myself to command, and in the remaining months of summer, I left the window open, hoping for a repeat visit. Years later, in an apartment on the Eastern fringes of Paris, I would be the young boy scolding his mother as she took gratuitous swings at cockroaches.

Breaking Point

“You know how bears are a big problem in Yosemite? Peanuts. They burn down homes in Whistler!”

Anyone who has lived in Whistler for longer than thirty years will proudly proclaim that Whistler came to them. This is has been particularly true of a particular couple, Marcel and Joan Richoz, who live 110 steps up on a forested hill in a log cabin in the outskirts of town.

Bears first began descending from the Garibaldi range into Whistler valley in the last twenty years when garbage dumps hit critical mass, both those left by the city and those left on the porches of big party houses filled with young ski bums getting by on tight living conditions to hit the sweet pow’. It was only a matter of time before some brown bears found the rewards high enough and the risks low enough to venture further; locked doors were no challenge if the will was there.

Finding the new placement of the screen door rather odd upon returning from work one evening, Joan cautiously stepped inside. Apples and bananas and gruyère cheese and salads and dressing and spices from the cupboards…lay piled haphazardly across the kitchen and living room floor. A large and pulsating mound of food stuffs, at the very center of which, seated atop the oven: a bear, its muzzle deep into the pan that had earlier housed her peach pie. Loud expletives later, the bear boosted itself onto all fours and lunged forward out the door, barely missing Joan.

It was a carnage, and that was lucky. House sitting bears, not knowing any better, knock open the cupboards and empty them out onto the oven. A well smothered electric range and the clumsy pawing of a novelty sized knob is all that is needed to set the house ablaze.

On Exhibit

A young woman, acting in the best interest of the infant she pushed in her baby carriage one warm Thursday, wedged herself politely into the arc that always forms around a large predator display. Some shuffling later, the plastic wheels bumped to a stop against the glass.

“Look at the big kitty,” the mother proposed enthusiastically, boosting her girl to the edge of her seat. Then with those disproportionately large eyes opened even larger, the child leaned forward, arms splayed out, until the tiny hands came pressing against the void.

The jaguar lay just a few feet from the glass, curled into a crescent moon on the faux-rocks. “Junior,” the male jaguar of Woodland Park Zoo. His coat trembled with every breath, his whiskers shivered, hairs rustled across the prized fur like wind over a field of golden wheat. A heavy, almost oversized head, dominated by a wide and powerful jaw, rested on his front paws and folded into his deep chest, facing us, eyes pressed shut. His short and rounded ears were tucked back and flush against his thick neck, as if under the wind pressure one might experience when traveling at remarkable speeds. The small black spots of his face crowded around the tightly sealed slits, seemed to disappear, pulled inward by a strong force from within.

“He’s sleeping,” reassured mom. I wasn’t convinced (those eyes were closed with conviction, not sleep, I thought – we were being squeezed out). Neither was the girl, who proceeded to tap the glass several times with her open palms, adding her greasy hand prints to those left by two young boys who were now nervously fidgeting with some sticks in the back of the crowd, but just earlier had been struggling to stimulate a response from the feline force by roaring loudly until a zoo attendant materialized from the jaguar research tent nearby to counsel otherwise. Still nothing. Not the slightest sound, not the slightest predatory gaze was to be directed at the human audience between 2:47 and 3:12 p.m. on April 5th, 2007. Only the slow, rhythmic rise-and-fall of a live animal.

...

The child paused, peeled her hands off the window and sank slowly back into the rear quarters of her carriage, into the shade. Her eyelids sagged, her interest waned. A slight uneasiness took the crowd. Something was missing. Would she understand? The jaguar seemed stiller than ever in its naturalistic shelter, a flowing stream, a sandy beach, abundant plants, where a waterfall fell into a pool containing live fish, containing the fallen portion of a kapok tree. Black poke-a-dots gathered in great numbers at the back end of the jaguar and dripped down the gentle curve of his back to his tail, collecting at the tip like ink on a quill.

I focused again on the greasy hand prints. The jaguar blurred. The mock limestone blurred. A great reflective canvas came into sharp focus before me. Incident photons who had failed to transmit through the barrier were to provide us with a view of ourselves, our peers and the expansive foliage of trees rising above our heads. A clumsy optical imperfection of the security measures implemented in modern zoos that scrambles the theatre sets. While behind the glass I had found no gaze to meet mine, on the glass itself, in a jungle of silhouetted leaves, I met with a crowd of them, all wandering from the bright and spotted coat to shyly inspect their kind, and darting back – only momentarily – whenever their secret game was discovered.