The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat - Rilegato

Mahler, Richard

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 030012225X ISBN 13: 9780300122251

Casa editrice: Yale Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

<div><div><div><p><b>In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen&#8217;s <i>The Snow Leopard</i>, an intimate portrait of the endangered, exotic, and elusive jaguar</b><br><br> When the nature writer Richard Mahler discovers that wild jaguars are prowling a remote corner of his home state of New Mexico, he embarks on a determined quest to see in the flesh a big, beautiful cat that is the stuff of legend&#8212;yet verifiably real.</p><p>Mahler&#8217;s passion sets in motion a years-long adventure through trackless deserts, steamy jungles, and malarial swamps, as well as a confounding immersion in centuries-old debates over how we should properly regard these powerful predators: as varmints or as icons, trophies or gods? He is drawn from border badlands south to Panama&#8217;s rain forest along a route where the fate of nearly all wildlife now rests in human hands. Mahler&#8217;s odyssey introduces him to unrepentant poachers, pragmatic ranchers, midnight drug-runners, ardent conservationists, trance-induced shamans, hopeful biologists, stodgy bureaucrats, academic philosophers, macho hunters, and gentle Maya Indians. Along the way, he is forced to reconsider the true meaning of his search&#8212;and the enduring symbolism of the jaguar.</p></div></div></div>

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

<div><p>Richard Mahler is an award-winning writer, editor, and tour guide based in Silver City, New Mexico.&#160;He is the author or co-author of ten books, and his reporting on the environment, health, travel, arts, and culture also circulates via newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and public radio.</p></div>

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

The Jaguar's Shadow

Searching for a Mythic CatBy Richard Mahler

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2009 Richard Mahler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-12225-1

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................ixPreface........................................................................xiONE "God Almighty, That's a Jaguar!"..........................................1TWO "It Pays Us Again and Again"..............................................16THREE "Among All Big Cats, We Know Least About Them"..........................30FOUR "We All Felt Really Blessed".............................................49SIX "The Model for How to Live"...............................................87SEVEN "Jaguars Possess the Power of God"......................................102EIGHT "Blood of the Valiant"..................................................117NINE "He Believes He Is a Jaguar".............................................142TEN "There It Is; I'm Going to Shoot It"......................................160ELEVEN "Cows Are More Important Than Cats"....................................179TWELVE "We Just Stopped Seeing Them"..........................................198THIRTEEN "To Ensure Our Namesake Is Protected"................................210FOURTEEN "Siga el Pisto"......................................................224FIFTEEN "Living in the Same Place It Always Has"..............................236SIXTEEN "Pretty Well Hunted Out"..............................................248SEVENTEEN "These Animals Could Become Wonderful Teachers".....................262EIGHTEEN It's Good if It's Dead"..............................................280NINETEEN "A Flagship Species for Conservation"................................292TWENTY "The Mother Liquor from Which We Have Come"............................306TWENTY-ONE "To See One at All Is a Lifetime Experience".......................320Sources........................................................................327Saving and Studying Jaguars....................................................343Acknowledgments................................................................349Index..........................................................................351

Chapter One

"God Almighty, That's a Jaguar!"

SPRAWLED SPREAD-EAGLED on the ground, I am held captive by the citrine eyes of a cat that outweighs me by twenty pounds, thrives on raw flesh, and could-if so inclined-crack my cranium like an eggshell. This lithe carnivore is crouched less than a yard from my face, close enough for me to feel the damp breeze of his exhalation. My nose flares to receive a pungent odor that is decidedly feline: equal parts well-licked fur, rich body oils, and muscle-braided flesh. My peripheral vision registers a restless tail, as twitchy as an angry serpent. I admire the burnished gold of a satin coat, splotched with dark squiggles encircling flecks of coal. Daubs of cream-streaked with black coffee-adorn throat, chin, toes, and belly. I see paws as wide as oven mitts, canines the length of my index finger, and a boxy skull as formidable-looking as an infantry helmet.

The jaguar's scalloped ears are stenciled elegantly with ocher and charcoal. They swivel in my direction and dispassionate eyes lock onto mine: lids widen, apertures open. Round pupils fix on jittery hands. Do they perceive the minuscule vibrations wrought by a city-dweller's racing heart? I remain prone, navely clasping camera to chest like a soldier's shield. Just like my Canon, the chain-link fence that encloses the jaguar seems inadequate protection. I am convinced that anything could happen, including a breach of the thin barrier separating man and beast. I ride waves of adrenaline, primal fear mingling with awe. I am frozen in place, trapped between competing impulses to fight or to flee. The shutter clicks, and a shiver ices my spine.

But now the cat's unwavering stare softens as his interest fades. He seems to have accepted me as merely another in the daily parade of anonymous spectators, neither friend nor foe. A moment later the jaguar stands up, tendons tight beneath luxuriant fur. I get a final once-over before this feline issues a low cough, flicks his ears, and walks away. I ascribe an attitude of nonchalance to the animal as he glides behind a tree.

* * *

Something shifts inside our brains and guts when we face an animal that has the power to kill almost anything at its whim. This was true during my Central America photography assignment despite my prior knowledge that jaguar attacks on people are virtually unknown. Although other great cats on occasion attack humans, the jaguar expert Alan Rabinowitz has declared, "there have been no verified records of man-eating jaguars, and relatively few records of jaguars killing people." The Costa Rican authority Eduardo Carrillo goes a step further: "A jaguar could eat any animal that crosses its path.... There are no records, however, that jaguars have ever attacked people in the wild."

Stories about fierce, aggressive jaguars killing people are the stuff of folklore. Nonetheless, a parfait of powerful biochemical compounds had done a number on my limbic system. My higher cortex-which knew I was facing a docile jaguar in a well-run zoo-was bypassed entirely.

But I now knew firsthand the pulse-pounding emotional storm a jaguar could spawn. Honed fangs, crouched posture, intense watchfulness, and razor-sharp claws awaken in us primal, visceral synapses unconsciously accorded an ancient foe. The dormant hunter-gatherer recognizes physical attributes designed for stalking, dispatching, and shredding prey. Even a casual confrontation with a top-of-the-food-chain predator clearly stirs our submerged animal nature. The cat elicits our intense curiosity, clearly, but its capacity to mortally wound us also ignites our impulse to survive. When we see a jaguar as opposed to, say, a dolphin or a zebra, a complicated relationship kicks in. It's one we may go a lifetime without experiencing.

The face-off submerged me in a soup of conflicted feelings. I was simultaneously emboldened, bewitched, and repelled. No big surprise here. Jaguars, like other cats, are alluring animals that we modern humans tend to romanticize. (Perhaps we should blame Walt Disney.) Worse yet, we tend to sentimentalize all felines in an anthropomorphic way, attributing people like emotions or motives to their behavior. But jaguars are not like us. I would spend the next five years learning how very different they are.

* * *

My story begins in a brutal, unfriendly landscape for which I have always felt a curious and tender affection. The arid regions of the southwestern United States are inhospitable to most fair-weather creatures, including people. Between southeast Arizona's comparatively moist Chiricahua and Santa Rita mountains-among the region's biggest "sky islands"-lie some of the harshest corners of the Lower Forty-eight. The Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts extend fingers of sand and stone north from the adjacent Mexican states that lend these badlands their names. The heat-baked expanse is home to plants and animals adapted ingeniously to a unique environment. Life, implausible as we generally know it, manages to flourish here.

As an example, one of my favorite denizens is Couch's spadefoot toad, an oddball amphibian that buries itself with shovel-like hind legs beneath gravel-rich soils, surfacing to feed and frolic only after it feels the low-frequency drumming of steady rain above its head. It takes several days of precipitation to convince the palm-size critters that the desert is wet enough for browsing and carousing. Somehow, they find each other. A few weeks later, when the toads' tadpoles are old enough, they climb from shallow pools and dig into their own deep burrows. All surface moisture soon disappears, replaced by white-hot days and blue-cold nights. The toads, ensconced safely underground, slip into a kind of suspended animation that may persist for two years or more.

These tortilla-flat valleys and machete-sharp peaks astound me with such improbable miracles. The deserts also beckon with their promise of profound alone-time, otherwise almost unattainable in this age of "24/7" connectivity. I feel soothed by the land's dense mantle of silence and deep solitude. Higher elevations, dotted with evergreen oaks, sturdy mesquites, and feathery acacias, remind me more of outback Greece and Andalusian Spain, particularly after summer's drenching monsoons spawn muted, serpentine greenery. I find these redoubts starkly beautiful, though they can be deadly to the unwary. Washes and ridges of jigsaw-puzzle terrain are threaded with miles of indistinct trails known only to wild animals, furtive smugglers, and lifelong cowboys. On March 7, 1996, one such cowboy, mounted on a sturdy mule named Snowy River, was following a pack of baying hounds hot on a fresh scent.

* * *

"The dogs had headed toward Red Mountain," Warner Glenn recalled a few months after the fact. "I was desperately trying to stay within hailing distance. I could hear [my hounds] climbing up the thick, brushy, steep northerly slope. The last I heard they were going over the top."

It was a calm morning in late winter. Lean, silver-haired Warner, his Stetson hat shading a perpetual squint and sun-carved wrinkles, was leading a hunt through the Peloncillo Mountains. This saw tooth range marks the western boundary of "the Boot Heel," a rectangular wedge of nearly uninhabited land that pushes a forgotten corner of New Mexico into old Mexico's Chihuahua. It is a tiny, lonely territory, acquired by the United States as a bonus to the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, which secured a railroad route farther north. Searing summer heat, unpredictable rainfall, jagged escarpments, and thorny cacti shield stoic creatures eking out a challenging existence.

The sixty-year-old guide and fourth-generation rancher fronted a mounted team following a cadre of carefully trained dogs. A Marlboro man look-alike whose six-foot-six frame towers over any animal he rides, Warner was escorting client Al Kriedeman on the fourth morning of a ten-day hunt. The party was driving to the base of the Peloncillos each dawn from Warner's headquarters at the nearby Malpai Ranch. The goal was to track, bay, and shoot a trophy mountain lion.

(Mountain lions are referred to by various names throughout their geographic range, including puma, cougar, panther, catamount, painter, American lion, mountain screamer, swamp cat, and plains, gray, or silver lion. All are one and the same species, known to science as Puma concolor.)

Warner's daughter, Kelly Kimbro, and wrangler Aaron Prudler completed the team that scoured the rock-strewn slopes of the Peloncillos, which march along the poorly marked New Mexico-Arizona state line before dissolving into Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental. Over nearly four hours and twice as many miles, the mules struggled to keep up with the pack as it pursued what was assumed to be a large "torn" (male) lion.

"I rode out on top of the rim, and below me were some large bluffs," Warner told an interviewer. "I could hear the welcome sound of the hounds about a half-mile below me, and I could see what I thought was a lion." Then came an unfamiliar snarl. The noise was definitely feline, but sounded like neither a mountain lion nor a bobcat.

"I got Snowy River within 50 yards," Warner wrote in his book about the incident, Eyes of Fire. Dismounting, "I walked around some thick trees and brush. Looking out, I said aloud to myself, 'God almighty, that's a jaguar!'"

Although he knew the borderlands as well as anyone, this was Warner's first encounter with what he labeled "the most beautiful creature I had ever seen." Standing in full sun was an animal long presumed to be locally extinct. Its presence hadn't been confirmed in the United States in nearly a decade, and not in New Mexico for much longer. It wasn't supposed to be here-indeed, the Rorschach pattern dappling its buff coat seemed camouflage better suited to tropical forest than desert scrub-but there a jaguar stood.

Warner raced back to his mule, yanked a point-and-shoot camera from a saddlehorn pouch, and began snapping pictures. The angry cat eyed its pursuers warily, eager for a chance to escape. When an opening occurred it sprinted a half-mile down canyon before holing up in a cluster of boulders. Cornered by the hounds a few minutes later, the jaguar-a mature male-lashed out.

Warner, eager to fully document the occasion with his camera, had gotten too close. He jerked away in the moment the jaguar charged.

"Maple and Cheyenne met him head-on as I jumped backward," the hunting guide recalled. "[These dogs] saved me from having my lap full of clawing, biting jaguar. I saw him go around the ledge and jump out of sight. Later, I saw the cat heading south at a long trot."

Within half an hour the animal may have slunk into Mexico through the few strands of barbed wire that marked the border. Tracks were found in the Peloncillos over the next eight months, though the cat itself was not seen again north of the frontier. But it already had made history. For only the third time since the 19308, a free-ranging jaguar's presence had been confirmed in New Mexico. The hound called Maple nursed a broken leg, and two other dogs suffered minor claw wounds. For his losses, the rancher had seventeen photos, the first known pictures ever taken of a live wild jaguar in the United States. (Numerous photos of dead U.S. jaguars exist, most showing a proud sportsman alongside a carcass.)

As the lion hunters headed home, a still-marveling Warner "silently gave thanks, then wondered how long it would be before [a jaguar] returned" to the Southwest.

* * *

On a sun-bleached day in 1996, a brief newspaper article about the Peloncillo jaguar sighting derailed the smooth trajectory of my comfortable life. At the time these big cats seemed as far away as the Belize Zoo, where I'd first confronted them face-to-face, clutching my camera and staring into their intimidating faces. The animals thrived, I always had assumed, only in warm, moist places like the Amazon jungle and rain forest parks of Central America. But as a journalist, I knew that the most common assumptions are often the most incorrect. I also had learned from covering news events that life can change in an instant. From one moment to the next, an object or incident that previously held only cursory interest can derail a career-or spark a burning passion. So it was in my case, when the newspaper's inconspicuous Associated Press story lit a fire that ultimately incinerated my bank account, tested my sanity, and jeopardized my health in places so remote that should I have died, no trace of my remains probably would have been found for months-if ever.

I embarked on a quest that proved more enduring than fantasy, stronger than ego, and impossible to grasp in all its dimensions. I cannot say exactly when or how I reached a point of no return, nor does that seem important in retrospect. I simply was moved to take a journey like no other. A switch was flipped. I needed to act.

Such obsession is as universal as it is irrational. Ambrose Bierce defined the obsessed man in his Devil's Dictionary as a person who is "vexed by an evil spirit" that is always "walking in his shadow." And while that force may not be uniformly malevolent, it is predictably compelling and invariably unfathomable. Who knows precisely what pushes someone to row alone across an ocean in a tiny boat, to climb a continent's highest peak, or to descend into the maw of an unexplored cave? Ordinary citizens take on challenges like these all the time. Their decisions often appear foolhardy to others, but unavoidable to those making them. "Why not?" asks the adventurer as he or she treks off to peer inside the bubbling crater of a quivering volcano. "I may never get another chance!"

High-risk behaviors always raise unanswerable questions. Who really knows why so many have walked, jogged, bicycled, ballooned, wheelchaired, and even driven lawnmowers across all or large parts of the United States? What prompts someone to scale a sheer cliff clinging only by fingertips, to soar on a hang glider buffeted by fickle winds, or to surf a bone-crushing winter breaker of Oahu's north shore? The impulse to face death-defying adversity may be supremely illogical, but many are changed irrevocably by the experience. So when I decided in my sedentary midlife-seven years after a different sort of adventure had sent me alone into an alpine winter-that I wanted to search for a wild jaguar, my goal seemed no less plausible than many pursued by others.

* * *

Several days after Warner Glenn's jaguar sighting, the Santa Fe New Mexican published a color photo of the cat on the front of an inside section. The article outlined what had happened, enlivened by the rancher's pithy quotes and phenomenal picture. The image was of a cornered and slightly crouched jaguar, eyes wide and ears taut. Clad in a gold coat splashed with ebony, the exotic creature looked out of place among pinon pines and prickly pear cacti.

My first thoughts were no doubt like those of many readers: "What art jaguars doing in New Mexico? Don't they live in the tropics? Did this one escape from a zoo or private reserve?"

Such questions betrayed my ignorance of jaguar basics. I did not know, for starters, that these are the New World's largest felids (a word derived from Felidae, the classification biologists use for members of the cat family). Up to twice the size of its distant cousin, the leaner and more streamlined mountain lion, a jaguar is noted for its large head, stocky frame, short legs, vise-grip jaws, and oversize paws. One zoologist has said the animal is built like a cross between a Sherman tank and a fire hydrant. But its distinctive multihued pelage is a work of art that recalls the abstract designs of fur coats adorning leopards, tigers, and cheetahs. Toward the end of the New Mexican story I was surprised to learn that this big cat somehow had persisted-albeit in small numbers-in the southwestern United States for tens of thousands of years, adapting itself successfully to hunt scarce prey in a parched landscape.

I read on, checking scattered references on my bookshelf and computer. The key facts were surprising. An encyclopedia advised that jaguars seldom wear the all-black coats generally assigned to them by Hollywood. Only an estimated 6 percent have "dark phase" pelt coloring, caused by a protein-related gene mutation that affects the cat's hair color. The coats of such jaguars still have the rosettes and spots characteristic of their species, but the jigsaw shapes can only be seen at certain angles of light. Some scientists believe this melanistic mutation actually may be of benefit because it offers excellent camouflage at night.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Jaguar's Shadowby Richard Mahler Copyright © 2009 by Richard Mahler. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Yale Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 030012225X
• ISBN 13: 9780300122251
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 359
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile