El Chapare, Bolivia – Sitting, watching the angry sun quieten into orange over the jungle canopy, I am awestruck to find myself being licked gently behind the ears by a small brown monkey. Perhaps Hector knows this is the therapy I need after a long day at the animal refuge. Or perhaps he's just trying to get hold of my sunglasses. Either way, I am so lost in communion with nature that it takes me a moment to realize that the warm feeling is also caused by Hector peeing down my neck.
This is part of the deal as a volunteer at Inti Wara Yassi refuge. When you're trying to help animals who have been abused by humans for most of their lives, you know you're going to get dumped on at some point. If you're lucky they won't actually fling it at you. Even if they do, it's worth it to see them running free in a jungle habitat, to win their trust as fellow creatures, not pets.
Hector, I remind myself as the yellow patch spreads across my T-shirt, was skinny and balding like a simian Woody Allen when he was discovered in the luggage hold of a bus bound for servitude in Argentina. For deeply ingrained reasons he still has a neurotic fear of 12- to 14-year-old children with crew cuts, but otherwise he's back to picking tourist's pockets like any healthy monkey.
The two of us lope companionably down to the clearing where, in an interesting role reversal, several volunteers are sitting in a monkey-proof cage peeling vegetables, watched from outside by a line of derelict-looking parrots. Even Sama the Jaguar doesn't have a cage here, despite his disconcerting inclination to sink his teeth into volunteers.
"His mother was killed by hunters when he was still at the suckling stage, so he still likes to chew on clothes," explains Christel, his understanding and slightly nutty Dutch keeper, whose trousers are shredded in a way reminiscent of the Incredible Hulk circa 1980. Christel was backpacking her way to Peru when she first set eyes on the wildest and most beautiful animal in the refuge.
Two months later she's still here. But even Christel doesn't stick around at feeding time. She lobs him a dead chicken as if handling a live hand grenade, and we retreat to the sound of territorial roaring.
Up by the wooden footbridge, Nena the warden is sitting worriedly picking fleas from a spider-monkey as the night closes in. Six hours ago she sent two Swiss volunteers into the jungle with Gato the Puma for his daily walk, and they haven't been seen since.
"Somebody must go and look for them," says Nena, wearing a strange toupee which on closer inspection turns out to be some kind of baby sloth. "If Gato has gone outside his normal territory he might be refusing to come back."
The other possibility which nobody dares to voice, is that the volunteers have so successfully trained him for the wild that they have become his first live prey. In fact, Gato has every reason to hate humans.
As a former circus inmate, his back legs were deformed from beatings by trainers trying to force him to jump through a ring of fire. Luckily, just as we are mustering flashlights ready for a search party, there is a call from the dark foliage and Gato emerges sleek and debonair, with Lukas and Adrian trotting along on the lead behind him.
If Gato was human, I reflect, he would be wearing a velvet smoking jacket, and accompanied by butlers.
He certainly wouldn't stoop to eating them.
Saving People by Saving Animals
August 1998 Journal Home Page