The Jaguar—Untold Story Cyril Dabydeen (bio) It kept sniffing, and moved with stealth; it breathed hard and scratched the ground with a mind of its own. How true? The beast came and went from the hinterland but was really close, my father said as he rolled his eyes; and his cows lowed, the heifer especially. He talked about actually seeing the jaguar before: such a creature! Fiction . . . is it? He laughed, maybe amused that I'd come home after all these years. Imagine my being in an airplane in the far sky, and from the window I'd kept looking out far below . . . looking at him. I might have stretched out a hand to touch the clouds, and wanted to pull in some of the fluffy, cloudy stuff . . . closer to me. "Pill," my father cried, meaning it was false. His awkward glare; and once more his own jaguar story it would be. Then it was about his "other" son, Arno, who looked at me, seeing me as someone who'd been away far too long. All the while the jaguar kept coming or going, from the hinterland to the coastal ground: the beast sniffing, inhaling the ground, and the air. And the one special cow, a brindled heifer, sensed it coming too, my father muttered. Arno hummed something, also. "I knew it," my father said, like what Arno might have told him about in a dream, his actually seeing the jaguar, its physical size and form, appearing and disappearing at will. "That beast, it knew Arno also," my father said in a low voice—a secret he was sharing with me. "Not know me?" I hissed. "Ah, you were up there touching the clouds," he scoffed. I was afraid of the beast coming closer to the coastal belt, wasn't I? He shrugged, my father; and old he looked, but still kept raising a few head of cattle. And the heifer he cared for most of all, his favorite animal. But now everything appeared different: the animals, birds, insects; [End Page 149] and flora, the giant greenheart forming the massive canopy in the forest; the rum-rum and wallaba trees also. The harpy eagle soaring, which I'd looked out at from the plane as it zeroed in on its prey. Don't I know? Then the eagle spotted the jaguar far down below; the same beast with rosettes on its coat, yellow and black spots; and how it next went to the river to drink, and after it scattered water in the sunlight—the watery crystals sprinkling in the air. Shimmers, a prism of light. All the while the eagle circled in the air, high above. My father looked at me, wistfully, or painfully. Something about Arno's sleeplessness it seemed and how he'd dreamed about the jaguar. Maybe Arno wanted to leave here, to go north also. All the while I kept touching the clouds with the plane gliding in the air thousands of feet above. Did the jaguar look up at me just then? Aaaggh! The cows, the heifer especially, started lowing and making a funereal sound. All the while the jaguar kept tracking the heifer, a cow that was also Arno's favorite. I also imagined the beast really looking up . . . for me. Maybe the jaguar saw the startled expression on my face . . . mirrored in the stream in shimmering light. It did! Clouds swirled, cumulus and cirrus, in a close-up horizon: here in the Amazon. And he wasn't that old, my father, as I watched him in his ramshackle house. He'd become restless with the thought of my finally coming home. The entire world coming closer, suddenly, as he and Arno might have talked about in the long night in the savannah, then about life elsewhere—where I lived in the temperate zone. Words whispered. The jaguar with its rosette-ringed coat kept coming as it breathed in the heifer. Eyes locked in, the only way a beast could lock eyes onto its prey. What the other forest animals instinctively sensed; and the harpy eagle soared higher. Indeed, I'd kept looking out from the plane into the vast forest canopy...
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Nov 1, 2018
Tzu-Yang Wang + 3
Open Access
