margay examining rat suspended on bungie cord
margay pulling on bungie
margay hanging by hind feet to reach rat
triumphant margay ascending branch
margay, king of the jungle
WILD WE

by Rosa Jordan

Women's Voices, April 2002

We aren't alike, Jona and I. She is artistic, spiritual, and scientific. I am literary, athletic, and political. We were together that year in Mexico only because we were what we were: mother and daughter, both impatient for independence. We had scarcely arrived as women, I recently escaped from an oppressive marriage, Jona just reaching her fifteenth birthday. We had no idea where our womanhoods, once emerged, would take us, how our then-entwined lives would separate and, decades later, braid together again. Nor did we know that the third strand of the braid would be our shared passion for one small exotic animal of a species we had never known existed.

Testing Jona's independence and mine, I traveled to the Yucatan, leaving her in San Miguel de Allende, studying art and Spanish. I returned with a baby wildcat, bought with snorkeling equipment and all my tears, from the hunter who had killed its mother. I handed the ball of spitting fluff to my daughter and, to tease and horrify her, said it was the "fur coat" which every "lady" should have. What was this black-and-gold creature, too tiny to be a jaguar or even an ocelot? It was, we later learned, something even rarer: a margay. Margays are nocturnal and live in the rainforest canopy. They are capable of extraordinary acrobatic feats; with their reversible feet, can climb headfirst down vertical surfaces (trees, screen doors, drapes). This one lived in the canopy of our home for a year, moving in great leaps from shelves to table tops to refrigerator to the tops of open doors. It could open doors, too; hanging on the knob and swinging its body until the door cracked open to let it into wherever it wanted to go.

And then she was gone, our magical wild creature, running free, running, dead. Killed by a passing car. My daughter went her way then, and I mine. Life took her to university, to Africa, and into a career as veterinarian which, if not selected, was at least suggested by the little margay.

I also responded to the margay's silent call. I became a writer with a penchant for traveling in tropical countries. It was in those countries, seeing too many margays in cruel cell-like cages, too many margay pelts pinned on walls, that I understood how this exquisitely beautiful creature had become yet another endangered species. It didn't matter how deep in the rainforest they lived. The truth was - is - that for wild things, there are hardly any safe places left.

For decades Jona and I did not discuss this slaughter, because, it seemed, there was nothing we could do about it. Didn't one have to be Greenpeace or a millionaire to make a difference? Ah, but what if? If only we could create a rainforest sanctuary for margays!

We called our dream "Touch the Jungle." It started as a fantasy. It became a trip. Then more trips: Guyana, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Brazil, and finally, Ecuador. To a remote rainforest community which needed us as much as we needed it. Fifty-two families, descended from slaves brought there 500 years ago to pan for gold. They killed their slavemaster and remained, living free as hunter-gatherers, protected by their isolation until the 1990s when, downriver, one could hear chainsaws, and the sound of forests falling.

The community managed to get title to 25,000 acres of ancestral forests. But a forest which once extended all the way to the Pacific now only went to their boundary. How could they go on living off the land?

Maybe it was the Jaguar God who piloted our dugout canoe up Rio Santiago. With our uncertain Spanish and outrageous idea, what else could have caused the people of Playa de Oro to trust us? With their dark hunter-gatherer eyes and ancient fear of tigres y leons (jaguars and pumas), how did we know they could be trusted?

We proposed a reserve. They took a year to think about it, and decided, yes. Their 25,000 acres of rainforest would become the Playa de Oro Reserva de Tigrillos, a sanctuary for all species of indigenous wildcats: jaguars, pumas, ocelots, margays, oncillas, and jaguarundi. The margay, which they call tigrillo (little tiger) is the reserve's flagship species.

Mostly it's about habitat protection, a safe place where exotic wildcats can live in peace, find mates, and replenish their dwindling numbers. But it's also about a community that has shared the jungle with them these centuries past, about native hunters willing to leave off killing cats and other endangered species to ensure protection of a rainforest and river which they need as much as the wild things do. Do-it-yourself-conservation-on-a-shoestring isn't easy or quick. It took us ten years to find a place, and five more to get it established, with a lodge for visitors whose eco-dollars will sustain the sanctuary and make it, someday, self-sufficient. The dream lives. Now our work is gathering funds to keep it alive. It's also visiting the reserve, seeing margay tracks around the lodge, and hearing their cries outside our window at night. It's learning to love the villagers who look after our little cats (their little cats) for wages of a mere $4 a day.

It's about encouraging people to do more than give money; to give themselves the gift of time to go there. Call it proselytizing, call it passion, call it a love of wildness. We call it connection, for that is what it is: the interconnectedness of our margay memories, of our mother/daughter selves, of ourselves with the rainforest, and with a people we never knew existed, who are now as connected to us and the exquisite little margays as we are to them.

Jona Jordan and Rosa Jordan
Jona and Rosa
Photo by Barbara Nelson
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