THE JAGUAR'S SHADOW:

Searching for a Mythic Cat

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, naïvely clasping camera to chest like a soldier’s shield. 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 entire 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 thathas 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 have on occasion attacked 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 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 stirs 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, males and females find one another. 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 chilly 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, are reminiscent of outback Greece and Andalusian Spain, particularly after summer’s drenching monsoons spawn muted, serpentine greenery. I find these redoubts starkly beautiful, though theyc an be deadly to the unwary. Washes and ridges of jigsaw-puzzle terrain are threaded with miles of indistinct trails known only to wily 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 shading a perpetual squint and sun-carved wrinkles, was leading a hunt through the Peloncillo Mountains. This sawtooth 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 base at the nearby Malpai Ranch. Their goal was to track, bay, and shoot a trophy mountain lion. (Mountain lions are referred by variety 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 “tom” (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 was not 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.

[Text continues in published book.]

Other chapters explore...

· Little-known facts about jaguars

· Comparisons with other felines

· The cat's key role in native New World cultures

· Jaguars and shamanism

· The Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary of Belize

· Big cat hunting and the fur trade

· Community-based conservation strategies

· Jaguars and the U.S.-Mexico border fence

· A history of the Jaguar automobile

· Connecting crucial habitat corridors

· The jaguars of Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil

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