Savage (Daughters of the Jaguar) (7 page)

“Nice right?” Heather asked.

I forced a smile while nodding. Then I exhaled. I didn’t really care for this car. It meant nothing to me. To be polite, I checked it out and tried to sit in it. As I did something caught my attention. A sound in the air that grabbed me by the heart. It was laughter. It sounded like a child, like several children playing. The sound made me get out of the car and look in direction of the neighbor’s house, the big house next door. The house that seemed to be constantly humming or singing with a deep voice as if it was sad. In the yard I saw three girls running. They were wearing light summer dresses with skirts that fluttered in the wind. They all shared the same dark chestnut hair with untamable curls and perfectly sculptured faces. Even the oldest of the three, who seemed to be about my age, was playing and laughing, rolling in the grass letting her younger sisters jump on her like they hadn’t a single care in the world. It was so refreshing, haunting even, that it made me smile just watching them and hearing that childlike laughter, which sounded as clear as a bell.

“Aren’t you going to take it for a spin?” Heather asked.

“Not yet,” I said, still staring at the three girls whose wonderful simplicity drew me to them. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. The oldest girl was wearing a red fluttering dress that enhanced her tanned skin. She was jumping and throwing her younger sisters up in the air and catching them again as if they were light as air. Her long brown hair was moving in the wind like waves in the ocean. It was untamed and unpredictable. It had to be the most beautiful sight in the world.

“Don’t let them see that you are staring at them,” Heather corrected me. But I didn’t listen. At that same instant, my eyes met the eyes of the oldest of them and she smiled the most enchanting and charming smile I had ever seen in my life. It was both innocent and so incredibly pure. Her beauty was spellbinding. Inside of me rose a feeling, a desire I had never felt before. I wanted that girl. I wanted to have her. More than that. I wanted to own her.

“I think they look like gypsies, don’t you? Rumors around town have it that they made a pact with the devil, that he is living with them and that is why strange things happen in that house. People who have been in there tell stories of them practicing dark magic. You know, fortunetelling, casting spells and curses on people and so on. Don’t stare, I said! Heaven knows, they might cast a spell on you or something," Heather continued. “I tell you, Chris, they are strange people. You definitely don’t want anything to do with them.”

“A spell?” I asked with laughter while Maria called us from the house, telling us it was time to come in and eat. We started walking towards the front door. I opened the door for Heather as she walked inside. “For someone who has grown up in a scientific doctor’s home you sure believe in many superstitious things.”

“Maybe. But I do believe one thing. Those women in there are bad news for this neighborhood,” she said as we went into the kitchen where Maria had placed a plate of food for each of us on the counter. Each of them made to our own liking. With me she just guessed what I liked and she hit it right on the spot - a big homemade American cheeseburger with bacon. Just like I had dreamed off when I was still back in my country.

On the news that same night, they were still talking about the youngsters that had been attacked by wild animals in the swamps at night a week ago. They talked about earlier rare alligator attacks that happened mostly on people’s pets but never on human beings. They also discussed the big wild cat that the youngsters were certain was a jaguar, and had to still be there somewhere, even though nobody had seen any trace of it since that night. Hunters had been trying to track it for days but with no result. I thought of Jim. Heather had told me that he had been one of those who tirelessly had walked the area surrounding the swamps looking for the beast every night since the accident, but every morning had to return without having fired one single shot. The fact was, no one could find the animal. It was like it had vanished into thin air. If it hadn’t been for my friends, I would have begun thinking it had just been a product of my vivid imagination. But they were there. And they saw what I saw. Some people came forward on the screen saying they had seen the jaguar before in a neighborhood near the swamps stalking their children as if they were to be the beast’s next meal, but they couldn’t prove it was the same animal. Their description didn’t match mine. It could just as well have been a smaller cat like a bobcat or a cheetah, they experts said. Then they started arguing whether it had been a jaguar that had attacked the young man that night. Some said jaguars didn’t live in that part of the country others said they might, that there were stories and legends of jaguars in the area all the way back to when the Spanish came. But that was many years ago, another said. Jaguars had been extinct in these areas since the beginning of the twentieth century. But then there was the story of the big black jaguar that had been killed six years ago, shot dead in someone’s yard at night. But that had been a black panther some said and others said that it was in fact a black jaguar and then an expert said that it was the same animal. That a black panther was in fact just a melanistic color variant of any of several species of larger cat, and in these parts it could be a jaguar or a puma or a mountain lion that was black. But whoever had shot it had never found the body so no one knew if it had ever really been there or it was just another story.

Some neighbors then claimed they had heard it howl at night, but jaguars didn’t howl, the expert said. They roared.

Then they went on and showed pictures of a jaguar that was supposed to be one of the world’s biggest living in a Brazilian zoo and as I studied the fierce yet elegant creature walking along the glass wall in the zoo I was more certain than ever that my attacker—or savior—had definitely been a jaguar. Up until now I’d had my doubts, but seeing this beautiful animal, the way it moved, the way it behaved with pride and grace even in captivity, I had no doubt in my mind anymore. It had been a jaguar.

On TV they started talking about how the animal was similar to the other big cats, the tiger, the lion and the leopard. Those four were the only ones that roared. They were big. A male jaguar could weigh up to two hundred pounds while the female was smaller.

“The jaguar is a big cat, a feline in the Panthera genus,” the expert said while they showed more pictures of the jaguar from Brazil. “And is the only Panthera species found in the Americas. The jaguar is the third largest feline after the tiger and the lion, and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. While dense rainforest is its preferred habitat, the jaguar will live in many other places as well -across a variety of forested and open terrains. It is strongly associated with the presence of water and is notable, along with the tiger, as a feline that enjoys swimming. So it would do well in the swamps of Florida," he concluded and continued. " The jaguar is an isolated animal, it likes to hunt alone. I like to call it an unscrupulous stalk-and-ambush predator at the top of the food chain - also known as an Apex predator. When it hunts it can go almost anywhere -which is one of the more fascinating thing about the jaguar. Whether it has to climb a three, crawl on the ground without making a sound or even dive under water to get its prey it is unstoppable. It has a short and stocky limb structure that makes it adapt for all of those things. It will hunt mostly at night but it may as well hunt during the day if necessary. The big cat will walk slowly down forest paths, listening for and stalking prey over far distances before ambushing. I also like to call it a cunning predator. It will attack from a cover and usually from the target's blind spot. Out of the blue and the prey will never know what hit it. It is something that has been fascinating to field researchers to study for years and years. It is considered peerless in the animal kingdom. There is simply no animal like this. The jaguar is one of a kind in so many interesting ways. But for me the most fascinating thing has always been its powerful bite. The jaguar has a robust head and an extremely powerful jaw. Actually it has the strongest bite of all the big cats. It is capable of biting down with two thousand pounds of force. That is a lot of power. Nothing you would like to try bite into your arm or your leg. It is twice the strength of a lion. It is a bite that allows the jaguar to pierce through something even as hard as turtle shells. It can drag an eight hundred pounds bull twenty-five feet in its jaws and it can pulverize bones with its bite. It is quite remarkable indeed."

"We have seen all these pictures of jaguars," the journalist interrupted. "But they can vary a lot in appearance I have been told. Could you elaborate a little on that subject?"

The expert leaned forward and cleared his throat. "Of course. The jaguar is a compact and well-muscled animal. The coat is generally tawny yellow, but can also range to reddish-brown and even black. It is covered in rosettes for camouflage but shape and size of the dots can vary as well." 

“Is it possible that a jaguar would drag a man out of the water and leave him wounded on the ground and not kill him?” the reporter asked the expert, who claimed he had worked with big cats and especially jaguars for more than twenty-five years.

I leaned over on the couch to hear the answer.

“Absolutely not. The jaguar is a predator and a wounded man is the easiest prey. Anyone injured would either be eaten right on the spot or hidden in a bush to become food later on. Normally on killing prey the jaguar will drag the carcass to a thicket or other secluded spot. It first eats the neck and chest, then moves on to the heart and lungs. I have to say that it is rare, though, that jaguars attack humans, mainly because it is too much work, I think. Sometimes, if scared or threatened, jaguars in captivity may lash out at zookeepers. But in a situation like this where the man wasn’t able to fight for his life it would surely eat him. It is in its nature.”

“So what’s your explanation to why it would leave this young man on the ground?”

The expert shrugged. “What can I say? Sometimes nature surprises us."

"So you don't have an explanation for it?"

"Well, it might have been scared away by something. That is my only explanation. Either that or it was a completely different kind of animal that the youngsters saw. As I have been told they had been drinking and smoking marijuana.”

Heather turned off the TV while my heart was pounding in my chest. To believe I had faced an animal like that, one that could drag an eight hundred-pound bull and could pulverize the heaviest bones with its bite, that was the strongest among the big cats, and lived to tell about it was beyond my comprehension. It was simply unbelievable, as Danielle had put it.

The next couple of days are really a blur to me. All I remember is I was a mess. I was tortured, I was in pain and agony. The voices in my head hadn't stopped and I was still seeing pictures before my eyes constantly. Pictures that made absolutely no sense to me. Images of people that I didn't know in places I had never been. Voices whispering or talking, telling me stuff I didn't know what to do with or even decipher. It all became one big mess in my head and I had no idea how to stop it again. At first I blamed it on the painkillers that I was still taking. People would say behind my back that I was depressed, that these feelings were normal when you had a trauma like that. It was expected. I just needed time.

Inside of me it was like being on an emotional rollercoaster. I slept in until after noon, I lay in bed all day indifferently watching shows on TV. One moment I would cry thinking about my mother and seeing her and wanting desperately to hear her voice again, wishing that I had died and could be with her, even sometimes wanting to die and go back to that peaceful place where I had seen her again.

And in the next moment I would laugh hysterically over nothing and be extremely grateful for the simplest things, like sugar in my coffee or the feeling of the wind in my hair when I went outside, basically just being happy that I was still alive. Then the feeling would change out of the blue and I would suddenly feel guilty for being alive, for surviving when so many people around the world died meaningless deaths every day of hunger or in natural disasters. I asked myself constantly why I had to be the one who was allowed to come back. Why did I get a second chance? Was there a meaning to it after all? Was there a purpose, did I have a purpose on this planet?

I had never believed in those things before, but for the first time since my mother’s death I felt doubt. I knew what I had seen. I knew it was true. There was something greater than us out there and I had seen it. I had been there and felt how wonderful a place it was. A place where I had felt no pain or sorrow.

I became almost obsessed with life after death. I wanted to read about it, I wanted to talk to everybody about what they believed in, what they thought happened to you when you died. I drove Maria nuts with all my questions that she had no time to answer with all her housework. When Heather came home from school I would move on to her and start bothering her about it. She had no patience with my newfound search for purpose, and soon I realized that I was alone with this. No one believed that I had actually seen my mother or those other people. It was all just in your brain, they said.

I didn’t care where it was. I wanted to figure everything out. I was looking for explanations. I knew I was rambling about this, but I just couldn’t help it.

Chapter 9