Savage (Daughters of the Jaguar) (6 page)

"Yes," she continued. "That's what the doctor told me. Almost to the bone, too, but luckily it didn't go that deep. And now it is already almost gone. You are just lucky that thing wasn’t hungry. It would surely have eaten you right there on the spot. That thing needs to be taken down.”

I felt sad that the jaguar had to be killed on account of me. It had saved my life, why should it pay for that with its own life? On the other hand, it was a wild animal and maybe it would have eaten me if it had been hungry or if it hadn’t been scared by all the humans surrounding it. I didn’t know, but I did know that I felt some sort of responsibility towards it. After all it was because of it that I was still alive.

“But I don’t want them to kill it,” I exclaimed.

“Nonsense,” she said. “We don’t want it to harm anyone else. One thing is the alligators but at least they stay near water. A big cat like that can run anywhere. Lord knows what the next victim might be. It might be a small child.”

I felt sick to my stomach. She talked about the jaguar like it had harmed me, how could I make people understand that it had in fact saved me? Why wouldn’t she listen? But then again, I thought, what if she was right? What if it was a coincidence that it hadn’t eaten me? Could it have been that? I had my doubts. I knew what I saw in those eyes. And it wasn't evil.

Later in the afternoon Dr. Kirk came to see me. He stood at the window when I woke from my nap. He was dressed impeccably as always, wearing a white shirt and tie. He didn’t turn and look at me as I said his name.

“I am very disappointed young man,” he said. “To bring my little girl to a place like that in the middle of the night. This is how you repay our trust?"

I sat up but felt dizzy and leaned back on my pillow again. “But sir …”

“I don’t want excuses, young man. You might do this sort of thing in Europe but over here we don’t go skinny dipping in a river of alligators in the middle of the night.” He breathed deeply. “Those animals could have killed both of you.”

I nodded quietly. Of course he was concerned about his daughter. And she wasn’t the one to tell him that it was all her and her friends' idea. That I had just followed along. But Dr. Kirk was right. I could have said no. I knew how a man like Dr. Kirk was thinking. I was the man and I had the responsibility.  The doctor turned and looked at me.

“Now I expect this is the last time we need to have a conversation like that. I expect you to behave like the fine young man that you can be from now on. I know your father. I know you have it in you somewhere. It is time to grow up, son.”

I nodded again. “Yes sir.”

 “You have suffered no internal damage to brain or any organs. You will have no permanent injury other than the scars from the alligator bites in your leg and arm. It is going to take you some weeks to recover from your wounds in your arms and legs and you won’t be able to attend the first month of your school, but I have talked to them and as long as you work hard and pass your exams they will let you start anyway. You think you could do that?”

“Yes sir.”

“The press is all over the story and wants to talk to you as soon as you are ready. You let them know when and if you are ready. You take control of them, not the other way around, alright?"

“Yes sir.”

“And stay away from the swamps.”

“Yes sir.”

“And keep your hands off my daughter.”

Chapter 7

 “Jim was the only one who was smart enough to run for the cars as soon as you were attacked,” Mike said.

A few long and eventless days had passed at the hospital when they all came for a visit. I was happy to see everybody, even Jim. I had been afraid that the incident would make them avoid me or even tear the group apart, but to my joy I realized it just made us all closer. I was one of them now. We shared history together.

Jim blushed. “Well, I thought that we couldn’t help you by just staring at you from the shore, so I ran to the car and drove out for help. I found a police car not far away. When I got back with the paramedics and the police you were lying lifeless on the ground. The others told me what had happened. I can’t believe that the jaguar didn’t kill you, man.”

“Oh, but it was about to,” Mike said. “It was bent all over you and licking its teeth. It was going to eat you.”

“But why didn’t it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mike said. He was sitting in the window-sill holding his arms around Danielle who stood in front of him. “It was weird. Just as the jaguar got you up on the shore and looked like it wanted to sink its teeth into your skull like it had done it to the alligators, it suddenly stopped. It stood still for a long time looking at you and then suddenly it was like it gave up. Like it had a change of heart. It turned around and ran as fast as anything I have ever seen towards the forest where it disappeared.”

Danielle nodded while Mike was speaking. “It was unbelievable,” she said.

“And you are sure it was a jaguar?” I asked. “It wasn’t a bobcat or a mountain lion or something like that?”

“It was definitely a jaguar,” Mike continued.

“It had those black rosettes on the back,” Regina said. “I looked it up this morning to be perfectly sure.”

“And it had that bite that only jaguars have,” Mike continued.

Regina took over. “According to the books jaguars have an exceptionally powerful bite, even relative to the other big cats.  It pierces the shells of armored reptile and bites directly through the skull of prey between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain.”

“That’s what it did to those alligators,” Mike said. “It was amazing, I tell you that. I have never seen anything like it. One bite and they were dead.”

“Plus they hunt in water,” Regina said. “It was definitively a jaguar.”

“But jaguars don’t live in these parts do they?” Jim asked. “I have never heard of any. Maybe it escaped from a zoo or something?”

“According to what I have read, they have largely been extinct from the United States, apart from a few seen in Arizona,” Regina said. “Most jaguars live in Central America.”

“But I have heard of them before in our area,” Heather said. She had been sitting in the chair next to my bed without speaking a word since she came. Something in her eyes had changed since that night. She looked tired. The young innocence in her face was gone. The terror of realizing that death is always only a few minutes or yards away from you had come upon her eyes and deprived her of her childlike innocence. “It is only rumors, but there is an old story that there have been jaguars living in the forests and swamps surrounding us. I have always thought it was nothing but old stories that people told their children. But someone did claim to have shot a black panther nearby a few years ago but they never found it.”

“You’d think that the Florida Wildlife Federation or some of all the wildlife organizations would know if there were jaguars in the swamps, right? They should know what kind of animals was living out there,” Jim said while the rest of the group nodded. “What about the wildlife commission or the people running the parks and recreation areas? They should at least know and alert people. Now it is all over the news and in the papers that they are surprised to know that an animal like that is on the loose. I mean people go biking in those trails. What if they meet the jaguar on one of those rides and it turns out to be hungry this time?”

 “That’s why they’ve put a prize on the beast’s head,” Mike said. “Anyone who shoots it gets a five thousand dollar reward.”

Jim whistled. “I’d like to shoot it just to kill it.”

“I know what you mean,” Mike said while signaling that he was shooting something imaginary in front of him. “Just put a bullet right between its eyes.” Then he pretended to fire the shot.

“What no one seems to be asking is why the beast dragged me out of the water if it didn’t intend to kill me?" I said. They all stared at me like I had gone mad. “Why help me if I wasn’t food?” I continued. They all went quiet for a while.

 “Maybe it just wanted some piece of the action,” Mike said with a grin. “It saw the alligators caught something and wanted it for itself. When it got you up on shore it realized you were too big and it had just eaten a deer some time ago so it wasn’t that hungry. Maybe it even left you there so it could come back for you later and have a midnight snack.”

“Very funny,” Regina said. “Or maybe it saw all of us standing in the distance and just decided that it was outnumbered. Maybe we scared it away.”

“Why do you even care?” Heather asked me. “You’re alive and it is a miracle. It is not like the beast has feelings for you or anything or felt mercy for you. It is not like it saved your life on purpose because it felt bad for you.”

The boys laughed.

“I don’t believe in miracles,” I said.

I began to feel pain in my wounds and called for the nurse to kill it with more drugs. As my friends left I felt a sadness inside of me that soon was replaced with anger. I needed an explanation to why this had happened to me. And none of what anyone said had gotten me closer to one. I desperately needed a logical explanation, preferably a scientific one that could ease that feeling inside and remove the thought that I had had some sort of supernatural encounter out in those dark forsaken swamps.

I had prayed desperately to God for a miracle back when my mother was sick, but didn’t get it. I had then decided that there could be no God, no creator of the universe, no higher purpose to life. Because if there was a God, he would be evil. He would deliberately have overheard my pleading, have overheard the prayers of a young innocent child, and no one could be that cruel. Not even God. So therefore, he couldn’t exist. Right now I needed confirmation that I was still right in my conclusion. I needed some sort of proof, some sort of science that could explain what had happened to me. Some answers to all of my many questions. But it failed to appear. No matter how hard I tried to find it, it just wasn’t there. No one could explain this to me. Not the police who came to get my statement for their report, not the doctors who talked to me daily about how incredibly lucky I had been. And when there was no other explanation, that was usually when people started calling things miracles. But as I said, I didn’t believe in them.

Heather and her friends came to visit me every day I was in the hospital. When they finally came to take me back home to the mansion I had made up my mind. As soon as I had recovered completely I wanted to find the jaguar myself and stand face-to-face with it one last time. I wanted to look into his glowing eyes and make sure I didn’t see anything in them. And then I was going to shoot it.

Chapter 8

Standing in the mansion’s driveway again left me with a strange feeling inside. It had only been a week since I was last there, but it felt like an eternity; Like I was a completely different guy coming back. As I got out of Mike’s car, I froze and stared at the house for a long time. I took in a deep breath of the fresh air from the water behind it and felt completely renewed. For the first time, I felt like I really saw the place, saw its colors and its grandeur. Having almost died did that to me for a while. It made me look at my surroundings differently. It wasn’t until I was back from the hospital that it really hit me that I actually almost died. That me standing there looking at the enormous building in front of me was something extraordinary. It was special.

Some people say that having a near-death experience changed them, and I agree. It does change a man. It changed me. A lot. Nothing was ever completely the same again. It wasn't something that happened suddenly, but it came sort of slowly creeping in the following days and weeks of my life. It was a process that began with the accident and later developed gradually inside of me, beginning with me appreciating being alive in a completely different way.

I had one goal at that point and that was to enjoy my life from now on, enjoy all the little things. I wanted to swim in the pool and surf on the new windsurfer that Dr. Kirk bought me and that was now waiting for me at the dock as promised. Heather brought me around the house to the dock and showed it to me on the day I got back from the hospital. It was stunning, but unfortunately I also knew it had to wait. My arm and leg were still in bandages so I had to stay out of the water at least two weeks, until they removed the stitches.

Then Heather showed me something else. She brought me to the other side of the house where a car was parked. A small white Chevrolet Corvette Stingray with T-top that could be removed. It was brand new.

“That’s your new car,” she said.

“What?”

Heather smiled. “With compliments from the doctor,” she said and dangled the keys in front of my eyes.

I walked towards it and stroked it on the side. It was truly a beauty. And had I received it before the accident I would definitely have been thrilled. But somehow it didn’t give me the joy that it was supposed to. Somehow looking at it made me feel empty inside, like it didn’t really matter, like materialistic things didn’t matter. Not the car, not even the surfer.