Short Story 4. A Jaguar in Clonloum

A Jaguar in Clonloum

A story for children and other people who love animals and children

By Cal Ward

Trish and the big black cat eyed each other uneasily each seeing something familiar in the other.  She thought he resembled the big tomcat that hunted mice around the outbuildings on the farm while he remembered a girl who smelled like her before the Winter when he lived in an iron cage with wheels.  He blinked and sniffed, caught the odour of dog and trotted along the lane with his long tail seeming to glide past the ladythimble and cow parsnip.  The dog huffed nervously and the cat sprang over the low wall, his hind paws barely touching the lichen covered  capstone.  Trish ran to the gate and saw the long meadow grass part as though a shiny black fish were swimming through it and then he was gone.  When she arrived home from her walk her mother said the police had been visiting homes in Clonloum telling people not to approach or attempt to capture a Jaguar that had escaped from a circus in Ferbane. He was dangerous and the police would deal with the situation.  The big black tomcat that hunted mice in the hayshed couldn't be caught.  If anyone tried to handle him he greeted them with arched back and angry spitting.  Wild cats didn't like to be handled.

Out in the twenty acre meadow the cat stretched himself in the April sunshine and licked the dew from his paws.  He was hungry.  He was always hungry ever since he had pushed open a carelessly bolted door in his cage.  A man in blue overalls had seen him and shouted and three more had come running and, frightened now, he had run beneath a parked truck and through a hedge and into a field and another field and another until he reached the thick belt of furze that ringed the huge boora boglands.  He slowed then, breathless.  He had never run more than the circumference of the circus ring in his three years of life.  Now he instinctively plunged into the semidarkness beneath the yellow furze and followed the paths worn by the feet of foxes and badgers until the sounds of shouting behind him faded and he was alone with the unfamiliar sounds of insects.  A large white butterfly settled on his eyelash and he vigorously shook his head to dislodge it.  A woodpigeon dozing in a birch tree overhead woke with a clatter of wings and the cat, thoroughly panicked now, ran with his long tail raised until shortness of breath again forced him to slow.  When he finally halted, exhausted, he was in a little grove of birch trees that grew in the cutaway part of the bog.  The ground was wet and spongy and he searched until he found a little raised mound of peat that some turfcutter had left untouched because there was a huge fir tree embedded in it.  The tree had fallen and died in a Winter storm six thousand years before and the sphagnum moss had entombed it in the course of six millennia.  Now it was a home to badgers and ants and the occasional fox.  Burrows had been excavated through its roots and three thousand generations of mice and voles had lived in the hollow parts of its trunk and branches.  It lay above the level of the surrounding cutaway and had dried to a grey colour  like the backs of the skawl crows that inhabited the birches.  It's trunk was three feet thick and when it lived, the Giant Irish Elk, Cervus Giganteus, had sheltered beneath its branches and cave bears had honed their claws on its tough bark.  The earliest Irishmen had lived nearby on the shores of a primeval Lough Boora; had fished and gathered beech nuts and left their crude stone tools for archaeologists to find nine thousand years later.  The cat found a large cavity in the root mass and crept inside.  A fox had lain here and his musky smell lingered.  There were a few sheep bones scattered about and these reminded the cat of his hunger.  He had not eaten since being fed the previous evening after the circus performance.  He sniffed the whitish yellow bones that were beginning to grow moss and went to sleep.  His toes and cheek muscles twitched as he slept.  He was a South American Jaguar that had lived three years in captivity and was now lost in a midland Irish peat bog and he was very, very hungry.

At first the sound of vibrating wheels didn't trouble the cat - he was accustomed to travelling in his cage on the back of the big circus truck.  Then he realised something strange was happening and he looked out from his hiding place at a strange sight.  A locomotive was trundling along iron tracks pulling ten huge wagons of milled peat on their way to the peat burning power station at Clonloum.  Interested now, because he associated wheel-sounds with people and people with food, he watched carefully the progress of the locomotive.  As it passed his hide something flew from the cab and landed by the track.  When it was safe to do so he investigated and found a carelessly wrapped bundle of food scraps - the remains of several meals eaten by the drivers who worked shifts and ate on the move.  There were bits and pieces of chicken, a few stale sandwiches, and orange peel.  He devoured anything edible which only served to intensify his hunger and looked along the track at the distant wagons.  He followed, keeping to the straggly line of furze that grew along the track.  There were some houses among the birches and Scots Pines in the cutaway and in one of these a small boy was sitting by the window.  He was Timmy Holohan and like his father Owen Holohan was a keen watcher of animals and especially wild animals.  "Look, Daddy, there's a big pussycat on the line".  Holohan knew that children often see things inconspicuous to adults and immediately looked up from the piece of leather he was stitching to where the boy was pointing.  The cat was enormous and Holohan had heard the rumour circulating among the bog workers that a Jaguar had escaped from the circus in Ferbane.  He thought; "If I know anything that animal is hungry or he wouldn't be showing himself on the line".  He took the boy by the hand and went to the shed where several rabbits were hanging and taking two of them walked along the track to where he had seen the cat.  There he hung the rabbits from the thorny branches of the furze bushes in a little clearing that could be seen from an upstairs attic window.  He retraced his steps to the house and lifted the boy up through the attic door.  "Now Timmy", he said, "You watch the pussycat and see does he come for the rabbits", giving him an old pair of binoculars.  The delighted child went to the attic window from which he often watched rabbits and foxes in the surrounding fields and cutaway.  Holohan made himself a cup of tea and went back to his leather.  Within half an hour the child's call alerted him and he hauled himself into the attic to watch.  The cat was eyeing the rabbits from beneath a furze bush and before long his hunger overcame his caution and he crossed the clearing in an instant and whipped the rabbits from the branch with a measured sweep of his shiny paw; picked both up in his jaws and just as quickly re-crossed the clearing  and disappeared into the bright yellow furze jungle so that Timmy wondered if he had really seen him at all.  He was hysterical with excitement and wanted to hang more rabbits in the furze for the cat immediately.  Holohan calmed him down and took him to the front room where the family's collection of books was kept.  The book on dogs gave an idea of the nutritional requirements of a 180 pound cat and Holohan estimated he had enough goat meat in the freezer to feed him for several weeks if he supplemented it with whatever was available in the form of leftovers and fresh rabbit.  No point in overfeeding him either or he would have no incentive to learn to hunt for himself.  Holohan had no doubt that an escaped captive had never learned to fend for itself.

So it was that Timmy prepared Jaguar meals daily in addition to feeding the horde of chickens, ducks, terriers, ferrets, tame jackdaws, geese, Boggy the pony and the solitary lame cock pheasant that lived in and around the Holohan family home in Clonloum. He took them in a small bucket to the clearing in the cutaway for the "big pussycat" which soon acquired the name "Ahmed-a-dó", or "Ahmed number two" in English, because the children said his black shiny coat reminded them of Dr. Ahmed who came to visit granny Holohan and often stayed for tea with the family or went hunting with daddy.  He had a fine head of dark wavy hair and he liked goat meat too.  Sometimes the cat would not appear for days but would show up  sooner of later to be fed.  The children delighted in confusing Granny by telling her that Ahmed had been to dinner and the old woman would ask "Which Ahmed?" and the children would shout "Ahmed-a-dó!"  Dr Ahmed and Holohan hunted the wild billygoats that lived in the forestry and brought home a hundred pounds of meat that kept both Ahmeds happy for weeks.  School started in September and inevitably the story spread of the big black cat that visited the clearing in the Holohan's cutaway several times a week.   There are few secrets in country places and soon everybody in Clonloum was on the lookout for the new pet.  Timmy, on Holohan's advice began gradually moving the food closer to the house and by Christmas the cat was seen occasionally in the whitethorn bushes at the bottom of the garden.  Sometimes he would be waiting for Timmy when he brought food.  The obstreperous pack of fox terriers viewed him with caution - he was a cat after all - but not the kind to be chased up the ancient  Scots Pines for a bit of diversion on a slow day.  His vicious teeth and claws saw to that nonsense.  One fine morning in March the children saw him in the backyard at breakfast time.  From then on he took up occasional residence in the haybarn beneath the bales of hay.  He remained aloof and slightly menacing but apart from the crows and jackdaws in the Scots pines that mobbed him on his journey across the cutaway, nothing seemed to fear him greatly. The terriers would sit up and growl if they thought he was around at night and Boggy the pony tolerated him, unaware that ponies often figured in the diet of his cousins at home in South America .  Mostly he liked to sleep on top of his six thousand year old tree-house if the weather were sunny, or inside when it rained.  That he hunted or scavenged was obvious from the occasional scraps of fur, wool, bone or feathers around his lair in the haybarn.    This concerned Holohan for he knew that foxes  were often blamed for the deaths of lambs that had died from cold, or eye-picking skawl crows or an inexperienced ewe or some birth defect when, in fact, they had merely scavenged the dead carcasses. Or perhaps the cat had learned to kill for himself for he was big enough to tackle anything slow enough to get caught.  The encyclopaedia in the front room mentioned instances of Jaguars killing farm animals with a single bite to the head.  Holohan kept his ears open for reports of sheep worrying by dogs and raids by foxes on chicken houses.  Several times he took action and offered his services to farmers who had reported losses and, being a hunter and marksman of considerable experience, had quickly killed the culprit fox, dog or mink with rifle and lamp thereby diverting suspicion from the Jaguar.

Timmy was enthralled with his new friend and enjoyed enormous esteem in the classroom at Clonloum primary school where the children researched every aspect of Jaguar behaviour.  It fell to Timmy to describe how in his native rain forests in South America the Jaguar was master of all with no rivals and dined daily on Marsh deer, Brocket deer, down through various species of Peccary, larger rodents such as Capybara, Paca and Agouti, to reptiles, monkeys and fish.  The children photographed him in his favourite sleeping place with his tail draped over the roots of the "Bog oak".  Ahmed-a dó, it transpired, was a melanistic form of the normally brownish yellow Jaguar often confusingly labelled 'Black Panthers' and only 15,000 of them were left in South America.  He appeared to weigh about 180 pounds and so probably belonged to the smaller subspecies from the Amazon basin.  The circus was informed but any attempt by them to approach the wary cat provoked headlong flight into the extensive furze jungle and eventually they lost interest.  A cockney clown commented that looking for a black cat in a big black bog was something he preferred to leave to the mad Irish bogmen who knew more about these things.  The terriers peed symbolically on his truck tyres and he left, never to return.

When trouble came it was from an unexpected quarter.  Big Mickey Noone reported to the "Bog Barrow" public house in Clonloum one evening with the news that something had attacked the pen where the gun club reared pheasant poults prior to release and upwards of fifteen half grown pheasants were dead.  Clonloum was famous for its pheasant hunting and this was due in part to a rear and release effort by Mickey Noone and the gunclub.  This had happened before and was traced to a young bird dog which became over-excited by the flock of game birds and had attacked the net fence causing panic among the trapped occupants, many of which had died from sheer terror or necks broken in collision with the wire mesh.  Holohan was a member of the gunclub and volunteered to have a look.    He went alone lest his worst fears be confirmed.  The pawmarks around the fence were identical to those around his own haybarn and there really was no doubt that the cat had developed a taste for game birds.  He scuffed the evidence in the muddy ground in the vicinity of the pen and later that evening returned and deposited the carcass of a fox he had shot in Foley's place up on the hill.  The deception would give him time to think.

That night he called Dr. Ahmed and sought his advice.  Ahmed had experience of wild cats in his native Pakistan and knew that trapping one was a job for experts with specialised traps and nets.  His son was studying veterinary medicine and had helped out at the Zoo occasionally; perhaps he could help, he would ask.  A week later he arrived at the Holohan place with a small bottle.  It was, he understood, used to stupefy large animals and his son assured him it was sufficient to render a Jaguar docile.  By now the situation had worsened for there were definite signs in the vicinity of the haybarn that the cat had dragged home a sizeable lamb and had consumed most of it and had hidden the rest under the hay. Dr Ahmed injected the substance from the bottle into the remains of the lamb and they retired to the house to await the outcome.  That evening there was no raucous cawing from the crows as they harassed the returning cat and later in the night no terrier stood up from beside the fire in the living room amid the jumble of children and school books to cock his sharp little ears sideways to listen for cat noises.  In the morning the remains of the lamb were untouched.  At ten o'clock the Sergeant from Ferbane drove into the yard and asked to see Holohan.  The gunclub members had found cat prints by the rearing pen and the cat had been seen in the sheepwalk on the hill to the rear of the school and some parents and the sheep farmer were complaining about a dangerous wild animal loose in the district, frightening children and killing sheep.  Was it true that Holohan had encouraged the cat to stay around his place?  How big was he?  Was he dangerous to children? Would the gunclub members be able to hunt him with dogs and shotguns?  Holohan left  Concepta to explain things to the Sergeant.  A kindly man, who had children and kept animals himself, he didn't ask where Holohan and Dr Ahmed were off to.

Jocky Jones and Rhode Gun Club pheasant pen

From the hill above the sheepwalk Holohan scanned the fields and hedgerows and in the distance the yellow furze of the cutaway and beyond that the vast expanse of black sterile wilderness that was the production peat bog.  If the cat had developed a taste for lamb and had been seen in the sheepwalk he shouldn't have too long to wait.  Dr Ahmed sat with him, a rucksack on his back containing a pair of 12 volt alarm system batteries wired together and a powerful spotlamp in case the wait extended into the night.  Holohan had a heavy Mauser rifle he normally used for twilight deer hunting.  It was equipped with a bipod and a low magnification telescopic sight suitable also for night time use.  A friend had given him a few boxes of handloaded bullets.  They were not bullets normally used by hunters.  They were heavy, 160 grains with hollow points which caused them to expand with explosive effect and they were intended to kill or immobilise even if the marksman's aim was off and Holohan's aim was seldom off.  The sun sank low to the West and the wind dropped as twilight and dusk approached.  Skawl crows flapped awkwardly towards the birchwoods from their daytime beat along the drainage ditches of the peat bogs.  Woodcock made the rounds of their territory before going to roost and pheasants called their metallic screech from the tangle of ivy and holly where they spent the hours of darkness.  Foxes barked cold and clear on the dark hill and still nothing moved on the sheepwalk.  The wind rose from the West and Holohan instinctively scanned the hillside to the east knowing that if the cat were to stalk the sheep he would come from downwind.  An owl ghosted across the hillside.  An old ewe coughed and then suddenly a different sound; the terrified high-pitched "baaaaaa"! of a lamb that suddenly wanted to find his mother and the deeper throatier call of the ewe in return.  Dr Ahmed needed no prompting; he'd hunted deer from the Hindu Kush to Clonloum and his reactions were sharp; he swung the big lamp towards the sound and flicked the switch.  The Jaguar crouched two hundred and ten yards away on the open hillside grazed bare by a hundred sheep with no cover to hide in.  The old ewe stood at bay with the lamb between her forelegs, her head bobbing in a brave and futile attempt to butt her attacker.  The cat's yellow eyes blinked in the powerful beam and he turned his head and hesitated for a moment, unsure which direction to take to escape the light that all his instincts told him was danger.  It was long enough for Holohan.  He had hunted a lifetime on this hill; foxes, rabbits, the occasional deer and now sadly, a magnificent animal from Amazonia.  He allowed three inches for gravity; subtracted one for the slope and allowed a further inch to the right for the breeze from the West and squeezed the trigger. The Jaguar, already crouched, seemed to crouch further, his chin resting on the grass and then the sound of the heavy bullet striking muscle and bone.  He rolled sideways, tail twitching and lay there, the muscles of his face rippling as if in sleep.  There was no blood; the heavy hollow point bullet had entered through the collarbone and exploded in the spine above chest cavity leaving no exit wound. Eventually red droplets appeared in the delicate black nostrils the only evidence of the devastation within his body.  Even in the artificial light the beauty visibly faded from his magnificent shiny coat that had reminded the children of Dr. Ahmed's handsome dark head.  Holohan was incapable of speech and thought to himself "I hope Concepta thought of something to tell the children".  Dr Ahmed was shaking his head repeating "very, very sad" in his soft Pakistani voice that had been modified by twenty five years of living in the Irish Midlands to something like the accents of West Cork.  Lights flickered from the direction of the gate that led to the roadway.  The Sergeant and Foley arrived on a tractor and the four of them lifted the corpse on to the transport box on the back.  The sergeant said "Ye did a professional job, Holohan".  "What about the children, Sergeant; what'd ye tell them?" The tall policeman smiled, "Don't worry about that, Owen; the department of Justice is discrete in these matters.  I told them I was arresting the cat for eating lambs and he would have to go to the zoo and eat chicken as punishment.  Wasn't I up there myself last year with the children and haven't they a big black cat in a cage just like yours. Sure ye should bring them up there to visit him, shouldn't ye?"  Holohan slung his rifle and followed the tractor down the hillside.  He'd half suspected it would end like this but what could he do when a little boy's eyes danced with excitement and his imagination soared?  He'd call the zoo and maybe the teacher would arrange McCoy's minibus and they'd all go to visit the Sergeant's Jaguar in Dublin.